FRANCE: Blum’s Blues

Though 5,000.000 French workers, benefiting from cultured, straggle-haired Socialist Premier Blum’s new social laws, are enjoying a 40-hour working week, there was plenty of discontent in France last week. Hotel, restaurant and cafe workers, still waiting to be included in the 40-hour setup, staged a noisy demonstration to protest against employers who refuse to grant shorter working hours during the impending tourist season. To appease them the French Government had already been obliged to abolish the Droit de Tab-lier (“Right of the Apron”), the “privilege” of waiters, hat-checkers, washroom attendants, doorkeepers to pay their employers for allowing them to work for tips. In some swank Paris cafés this has cost waiters as much as 100 francs ($4.43) a week. Bricklayers, plumbers, plasterers were keeping the Premier jittery by stringing out construction of buildings for the Paris Exposition, because they fear unemployment when the job is finished. By last week construction on the Exposition was so delayed that the French Government frankly admitted that it could not possibly open May 1, the date originally set, but would now open on May 17. Premier Blum’s political enemies received this news skeptically, felt that July was nearer the mark.

Angry building unions threatened to call a strike unless Premier Blum, who has pruned his budget down to a minimum, revises his finances, sets aside at least six billion francs ($265,800,000) for a public works program.

In Premier Blum’s own party discontent smoldered last week. The extreme Leftists were still kicking against his non-intervention in Spain, muttered angrily when Le Havre’s Mayor Léon Mayer, during a meeting of the National Council of the Socialist Party, thundered: “We want no red flags, no Internationale, no clenched fists.”

This week on the eve of the new parliamentary session the furrows in Premier Blum’s brow grew deeper. So apprehensive was the Paris Bourse that Bank of France stocks dropped 585 francs ($26), nearly one-tenth of their value. Meantime 30,000 small storekeepers assembled angrily in the capital to denounce Premier Blum’s two-days-a-week closing order.

Café-loungers and boulevard philosophers were less absorbed in Premier Blum’s political problems than in a treatise which he wrote 25 years ago, called Le Mariage, but which only lately crashed into the limelight. By last week these amateur reflections on the subject nearest to every Frenchman’s heart had run to a 20th edition. The book advises young men “to sow plenty of wild oats.” “not to love their wives too much when finally they marry.” Other Blum tenets for successful marriage are: “Don’t marry for love. . . .” Men should have sexual adventures, “otherwise married life soon will strike them as insipid and monotonous” though “it is better to choose love affairs before marriage than after.” Women are not ready for marriage before 30 because until then they are in “a polygamous state.”

With everybody in Paris smirking and chattering about his amorous outpourings, Premier Blum blushed crimson one night last week, moaned hopelessly: “I wish people would forget.”