Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist by Pierre Birnbaum (review)

In her 1939 essay, “The Art of Biography,” Virginia Woolf said biographers “stimulate the imagination” and reveal the essence of character “by telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline.” This is what Pierre Birnbaum attempts in his brief biography of Leon Blum published as a part of Yale University’s “Jewish Lives” series of interpretive biographies. To reveal the essence of Blum’s character, Birnbaum seems to have used the distinction made by Archilochus, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” which was brilliantly employed in Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) to explore Leo Tolstoy’s concept of history in War and Peace. Birnbaum sought to make Blum a hedgehog, pursuing, in the words of Berlin, “a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate,” as opposed to “those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” (3). The “one big thing,” the focus of Blum’s life and the essence of his character as a secular Jew, arose from his experience during the profoundly antisemitic period of the Dreyfus Affair, which deeply influenced Blum, diverted him from literary pursuits, and ultimately convinced him to be a Juif d’ Etat, a “state Jew,” secularly maintaining a life-long commitment to the heart of the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and employing the social justice of his mentor, Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist Party, to expand justice for all French citizens.

Birnbaum’s charming, interesting, and, on the whole, thoughtful book on Blum introduces an important historical figure about whom most Americans know little, if anything. For this reason, Yale’s publication of Leon Blum adds much to the portrayal of significant “Jewish Lives” and to a greater understanding of Blum. Birnbaum, a distinguished French historian, provides an important analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antisemitism and the struggle between the advocates and opponents of the Enlightenment that resulted in the tragedy of the Dreyfus Affair. More recently Birnbaum has been assessing modern French antisemitism. Blum’s life, the story of a Jew granted equal rights as a consequence of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, illustrated the late nineteenth-century outcome of justice for Jews. So enamored was Blum with the importance of justice, even for women, that in 1907 he published an extremely controversial book, Du marriage, in which he argued that women, like men, should be permitted to sow their wild oats prior to marriage. Blum’s sense of justice also led him to head the French Zionist Union which endeared him neither to French Jews and to non-Jews of the period.

For Birnbaum, Blum, in seeking to extend justice, believed that “the origin of French antisemitism “is not in the lower classes, but in high society,” and “he laid plans to revolutionize French society,” enhancing justice through socialism (27–29). Thus, becoming a “state Jew” (a concept developed by Birnbaum), Blum used the state to expand emancipation and reduce antisemitism. Starting his political career as a rapporteur of case law in 1896, Blum ultimately interpreted “266 cases, and between 1902 and 1919 he drafted 1,800 opinions” (74). As Birnbaum asserts, while the state was neither a dominant nor authoritarian power, its role was that of managing services and expanding the area of the public domain. In his 1927 speech to Parliament’s lower house, Blum said “the Government derives from its prerogatives as a public power, from its command authority over firms, and from its national and legislative authority” (75). Because the state was the center “of social and economic life,” Blum sought to strengthen the state as an agent for justice.

The trajectory of Blum’s career would eventually lead him to the position of Prime Minister of France in 1936. Jean Jaures had urged Blum to pursue a career in public life...