FRANCE: Blum Is in Power!

Marked is the personal respect of French Socialists bigwigs for Socialist Leon Blum. As a moneyed young man Leader Blum for years helped impecunious comrades keep their landladies at bay. Yet last week militant pinks set themselves to make the Socialist Party Congress at Marseille hot for Vice Premier Blum. His recent resignation “without a fight” as Premier (TIME, June 28, et seq.) and his orders to Socialists to support the new Cabinet of moderate Premier Camille Chautemps they flung last week in Leader Blum’s face with fury, charged him with betrayal. “Everything should be done by us Socialists to make life impossible for the Chautemps Cabinet!” cried Delegate Jean Zyromski.

Meanwhile Leader Blum had arrived quietly from Paris, his secretaries exuding confidence and saying, “Just wait and see.” After some hours of Congress wrangling, Socialist Blum rose in the late afternoon, introduced himself with a sentence which set every cartoonist in France to scratching: “I shall not speak as God or as Caesar, but as for my stewardship as Premier for 13 months, I do not think that the record is so bad.”

The way to win back his prestige with the Socialist rank & file, Vice Premier Blum judged correctly, was to sound clarion calls for action to achieve such old favorite Socialist “reforms” as nationalization of French railways and to demand that the Senate be made subordinate to the Chamber. “Remember how this was done,” cried Orator ‘Slum, “in the case of the House of Lords in England!”

It proved popular talk for to Socialist rank-&-filers the Senate is anathema because of the way it is elected. Deputies to the Chamber are chosen all at once by universal male suffrage, either at four-year intervals or whenever the President ascertains that no Premier can find a majority, and orders the Chamber dissolved. Senators are elected for nine-year terms, an election taking place every three years for one-third of the Senate. They are chosen not by universal suffrage but by electoral colleges whose members are Deputies or elected delegates from communes and departments. Senatorial candidates must be at least 40, and they tend to be wealthy, political oldsters, congenitally unsympathetic to the Popular Front. Vice Premier Blum finished up at Marseille by revealing that he and Premier Camille Chautemps are going to nationalize French railways by. Sept. i, merging them by Cabinet decree into one big company of which the State will be controlling stockholder. With this concrete move and his popular harangue about the House of Lords, persuasive Orator Blum won from the Socialist Congress an approximate 3-to-1 majority to carry on as Leader amid shouts from his supporters of “Blum is in power!”

Then President Lebrun summoned Leon Blum’s Chautemps Cabinet to sit as a formal Council of Ministers and approved decrees flashing every ministerial budget save that of the Defense. Upped was France’s Defense budget by $411,675,000. Free-spending Emile Labeyrie resigned as governor of the Bank of France. Conservative Vice Governor Pierre Fournier took his place. The Bank revalued its gold stocks up by $299,400,000. U. S. tourists were able to get three centimes less for every dollar they exchanged.

On the day Leon Blum resigned as Premier occurred the Paris by-election in which famed ex-Communist Jacques Doriot who has turned Fascist (TIME, June 7), was defeated, after he had dramatically resigned his seat as Deputy in a “challenge to the Popular Front.” Since Doriot is down—he describes himself as having resigned from the Chamber to devote all his efforts to the political struggle to save la Patrie, French Fascists were again last week looking around for the Mussolini or Hitler they have never quite been able to find. Up momentarily was the stock of Colonel Count François “Casimir” de la Rocque, the comparatively mild founder of the Croix de Feu War veterans league now reorganized as the French Social Party (TIME, March 29). Last week this party bought for 9,000,000 francs the Petit Journal of Paris, and Frenchmen started guessing what moneyed interests are backing de la Rocque now with so much cash. Without proof they pointed at thick-lipped, sagacious Senator Pierre Laval, recalled how, after he lost out as Premier, he lay low for a whole year, then came hurtling into action as one of the Senate leaders who brought down the Blum Cabinet.