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Léon Blum. Un portrait
« La plus personnelle des biographies de référence », Robert Paxton
Dans ce portrait passionné et souvent inattendu, Pierre Birnbaum redonne pleinement vie à Léon Blum : le dreyfusard, l’homme de Juin 36 et de ses immenses conquêtes sociales, mais aussi le jeune dandy aux goûts littéraires d’avant-garde, l’homme d’action doté d’un réel courage physique, l’avocat de l’émancipation sexuelle des femmes, l’amoureux aux multiples vies. Il relit aussi ses engagements à la lumière de l’histoire de ces Juifs d’État, « fous de la République », auxquels il a consacré un livre qui a fait date. Figure accomplie de la francité, Blum ne renia jamais sa judéité.
Une vision singulièrement renouvelée.
Pierre Birnbaum, professeur émérite à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages parmi lesquels Les Fous de la République. Histoire politique des juifs d'Etats, de Gambetta à Vichy (Seuil, 1994), Le Moment antisémite. Un tour de la France en 1898 (Fayard, 1998), La République et le cochon (Seuil, 2013) et Les Désarrois d'un fou de l'Etat : entretiens avec Jean Baumgarten et Yves Déloye (Albin Michel, 2015).
Dans ce portrait passionné et souvent inattendu, Pierre Birnbaum redonne pleinement vie à Léon Blum : le dreyfusard, l’homme de Juin 36 et de ses immenses conquêtes sociales, mais aussi le jeune dandy aux goûts littéraires d’avant-garde, l’homme d’action doté d’un réel courage physique, l’avocat de l’émancipation sexuelle des femmes, l’amoureux aux multiples vies. Il relit aussi ses engagements à la lumière de l’histoire de ces Juifs d’État, « fous de la République », auxquels il a consacré un livre qui a fait date. Figure accomplie de la francité, Blum ne renia jamais sa judéité.
Une vision singulièrement renouvelée.
Pierre Birnbaum, professeur émérite à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages parmi lesquels Les Fous de la République. Histoire politique des juifs d'Etats, de Gambetta à Vichy (Seuil, 1994), Le Moment antisémite. Un tour de la France en 1898 (Fayard, 1998), La République et le cochon (Seuil, 2013) et Les Désarrois d'un fou de l'Etat : entretiens avec Jean Baumgarten et Yves Déloye (Albin Michel, 2015).
257 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 26, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 8, 2026
On February 13, 1936 Léon Blum, Socialist Party leader, dandy of the Revue Blanche, duelist, legal mind, and proudly observant Alsatian Jew, is dragged from his car on the Boulevard Saint-Germain by Action Française royalists screaming "Kill Blum!" They beat him bloody in the street. Within seconds, as Germaine Monnet recalls, he is soaked in blood and calmly tells her, "Don't worry. Let them do what they will." A few months later, after leading the Popular Front to electoral victory, he addresses the Chamber of Deputies as France's first Jewish prime minister, only to be greeted by Xavier Vallat's parliamentary welcome: "For the first time, this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew."
Pierre Birnbaum's biography of Blum opens at exactly this moment, a man in a broad-brimmed poet's hat, bleeding on a Paris boulevard, on his way to becoming head of state of the oldest antisemitic country that also happens to have dreamed up universal emancipation.
Blum's path there began in a silk merchant's apartment on the Rue Saint-Denis, through the École Normale Supérieure, where he brought kosher food, and on to the Council of State, where he quietly helped Fernand Labori dismantle the Dreyfus prosecution while publishing Symbolist criticism and befriending Gide, Proust, and Zola.
The Dreyfus Affair converted him to socialism and to an identity he had kept discreetly observant. After that he became the heir of Jean Jaurès, a parliamentary strategist of genius, a Stendhal scholar who fought forty duels, the architect of the Matignon Accords, the forty-hour week, and paid vacations, and, in parallel, president of the French Zionist Union, close confidant of Chaim Weizmann, champion of a Jewish national home, and the man whose name a kibbutz in Upper Galilee's Jordan Valley would carry: Kfar Blum, founded 1943 by immigrants from Britain, America, Canada, and the Baltic states, inaugurated with Golda Meyerson and Moshe Sharett in attendance, built on malaria-ridden marshland where a life-sized bronze of the former French premier now stands among flowers.
What Birnbaum reconstructs is the impossible algebra of a man who was simultaneously more French than anyone in the Chamber and more Jewish than anyone in the cabinet, who as prime minister told Hitler's envoy "I am a Marxist, I am a Jew, that is why I am eager for this conversation to produce results," and who declared publicly at the Zurich Zionist Congress, "I am Zionist because I am French, Jewish, and Socialist."
His reward for all this was Vichy, the Fort de Portalet in the Pyrenees, and eventually Buchenwald, where he wrote letters to his mistress Janot through the prison bars and continued to insist, in perfect French, on the revolutionary pact between France and its Jews.
The rest of the story, including whether the dandy and the prophet survived to see his kibbutz, awaits you in the pages of this incredible biography.
Birnbaum has written a short book about a very large problem. Antisemitism in France was, and still is, institutional, cross-party, and bottomless, as comfortable on the revolutionary left as on the royalist right.
Jaurès's own party abandoned Blum at Vichy. The Communists called him a reptile. L'Humanité mocked his "Freudian squirming." The French left has always preferred its Jews theoretical.
That tradition aged into something other than wisdom. Today's vapid European left, inheritor of the same rhetorical apparatus, recycles the identical charges under updated packaging. The Jew, 0.02% of world population, as colonial aggressor, the Jewish state as the world's singular moral obscenity, Zionism as racism.
Blum understood what these heirs had discarded. A people deprived of a homeland is a people at the mercy of whoever needs a scapegoat this season.
Oh France…
❤️ 🇮🇱
Pierre Birnbaum's biography of Blum opens at exactly this moment, a man in a broad-brimmed poet's hat, bleeding on a Paris boulevard, on his way to becoming head of state of the oldest antisemitic country that also happens to have dreamed up universal emancipation.
Blum's path there began in a silk merchant's apartment on the Rue Saint-Denis, through the École Normale Supérieure, where he brought kosher food, and on to the Council of State, where he quietly helped Fernand Labori dismantle the Dreyfus prosecution while publishing Symbolist criticism and befriending Gide, Proust, and Zola.
The Dreyfus Affair converted him to socialism and to an identity he had kept discreetly observant. After that he became the heir of Jean Jaurès, a parliamentary strategist of genius, a Stendhal scholar who fought forty duels, the architect of the Matignon Accords, the forty-hour week, and paid vacations, and, in parallel, president of the French Zionist Union, close confidant of Chaim Weizmann, champion of a Jewish national home, and the man whose name a kibbutz in Upper Galilee's Jordan Valley would carry: Kfar Blum, founded 1943 by immigrants from Britain, America, Canada, and the Baltic states, inaugurated with Golda Meyerson and Moshe Sharett in attendance, built on malaria-ridden marshland where a life-sized bronze of the former French premier now stands among flowers.
What Birnbaum reconstructs is the impossible algebra of a man who was simultaneously more French than anyone in the Chamber and more Jewish than anyone in the cabinet, who as prime minister told Hitler's envoy "I am a Marxist, I am a Jew, that is why I am eager for this conversation to produce results," and who declared publicly at the Zurich Zionist Congress, "I am Zionist because I am French, Jewish, and Socialist."
His reward for all this was Vichy, the Fort de Portalet in the Pyrenees, and eventually Buchenwald, where he wrote letters to his mistress Janot through the prison bars and continued to insist, in perfect French, on the revolutionary pact between France and its Jews.
The rest of the story, including whether the dandy and the prophet survived to see his kibbutz, awaits you in the pages of this incredible biography.
Birnbaum has written a short book about a very large problem. Antisemitism in France was, and still is, institutional, cross-party, and bottomless, as comfortable on the revolutionary left as on the royalist right.
Jaurès's own party abandoned Blum at Vichy. The Communists called him a reptile. L'Humanité mocked his "Freudian squirming." The French left has always preferred its Jews theoretical.
That tradition aged into something other than wisdom. Today's vapid European left, inheritor of the same rhetorical apparatus, recycles the identical charges under updated packaging. The Jew, 0.02% of world population, as colonial aggressor, the Jewish state as the world's singular moral obscenity, Zionism as racism.
Blum understood what these heirs had discarded. A people deprived of a homeland is a people at the mercy of whoever needs a scapegoat this season.
Oh France…
❤️ 🇮🇱
October 19, 2017
j'ai beaucoup apprécié de découvrir la biographie de ce socialiste dont on connait aussi peu de choses sur lui.
April 21, 2026
Easily one of the better biographies I’ve read. Birnbaum presents Blum in such a complete way and does it while demonstrating how Blum personifies all these various currents and threads of history. It was a good book!
July 6, 2026
Fascinating biography
Blum is not as well-known as he should be. This book is a fascinating exploration of his life and politics and a natural companion to the Jewish Lives biography of Albert Dreyfus.
Blum is not as well-known as he should be. This book is a fascinating exploration of his life and politics and a natural companion to the Jewish Lives biography of Albert Dreyfus.
October 8, 2015
Interesting book about the Jewish prime minister of France in the late 1930's. For some reason, his name has been mostly lost to history. While we all remember the Alfred Dreyfus case in France, most Jews have never heard of Leon Blum. I guess it is human nature to forget your successes and focus on your problems. After the Nazi takeover, he was imprisoned in one of the concentration camps, Buchenwold. He was in a private home, and the Nazis wanted to use him as a bargaining chip. He survived the war and became for a very brief time prime minister once again. Blum led an amazing life. When he was prime minister, he enacted the 40 hour work week, the right to strike, and allowed collective bargaining.
January 10, 2016
Short, much focus on Blum's jewish roots, some on his socialism, little on his inner life and, except as achievements, very little on his policy platform (especially as there were debates raging on what to do just to exit from the Great Depression) -- so I feel I don't know him any better than before. I think I liked my blurry views of a political hero better before i learned about him in this book. Too bad.
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June 2, 2015Reviewed this book for THE BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW, based on complimentary review copies provided by the publisher.
May 3, 2017
I learned a lot about former French prime minister Leon Blum from this book, but it was helpful that I already knew quite a bit about that period of history (1872-1950). As is true of many of the Yale Press biographies, the chronology is sometimes difficult to follow, and the books are so short that a great deal of material has to be "scrunched in", leaving the reader at times perplexed. But I was especially enlightened about his avid support of Zionism, his personal life (maybe a little too much!), and his internment at Buchenwald.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews