Léon Blum

On 13 February 1936, he was assaulted by members of ‘Camelots du Roi’, which was the youth wing of Royalist Action French Integralist movement. He was pulled out of his car and almost beaten to death. Following this attack, the group was dissolved by the government.

Following the German occupation of France, his younger brother René Blum, the founder of Ballet de l'Opéra at Monte Carlo was arrested in 1941 and killed a year later.

Léon Blum was born on 9 April 1872, at Paris, France, to Jewish parents Abraham ‘Auguste’ Blum and Sophie ‘Marie’ Parchenevsky.

He completed his school education from the reputed Lycée Henri-IV School and thereafter studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure at Paris. He dropped out of studies in the middle and took up work on writing an experimental literary review titled ‘La Revue Blanche’.

After its publication, he went on study law at the Sorbonne. He graduated in 1894 with the highest honors. He also made a name for himself as a fabulous literary and dramatic critic.

After his graduation, Léon Blum worked as a government lawyer, along with pursuing the side job of being a literary critic. He did not have keen interest in politics; however, the ‘Dreyfus affair’ of 1894 heavily influenced him..

Dreyfus affair was a political scandal in which a young French artillery officer—Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was of Alsatian and Jewish descent—was convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. Later on it came to light that he was wrongly framed. The incident divided France.

As part of his efforts to support Alfred Dreyfus, he got acquainted with Jean Jaures, who the leader of the Socialist Party and eventually became part of the SFIO in 1904. In the beginning he wrote for the party’s daily newspaper L’Humanite, but in course of time became the principle theoretician.

With the assassination of Jean Jaures in 1914, he got more involved in leading and managing the SFIO. He got elected into the Chamber of Deputies in 1919 and was appointed as the head of the executive committee of the Socialist Party.

However, the following year witnessed a party crisis and his primary duty involved reconstructing the Socialist Party after its split. The party made a quick comeback under his leadership and he retained his position as head in the 1920s and 1930s. Léon Blum founded a journal titled ‘Le Populaire’.

Léon Blum was a socialist politician and three times Prime Minister of France. As part of his duties, he had taken a number of steps to reform the French economy. They include higher wages for labourers, standard working hours of 40 hours a week, compulsory, lending loans to small industries, nationalization of the armament industry.

He also brought about social reforms like compulsory school education up to 14 years and establishment of National Grain House to maintain and keep a check on the prices of agricultural produce.