In the restless summer of 1936, the socialist leader Leon Bloom was the prime minister of France. In April of that year, the parliamentary elections held in the country gave victory to the People's Front Coalition of which he had assumed leadership.
Bloom, who, although a lawyer, excelled in book and theater criticism, became involved in politics because of the Dreyfus case – of which he was a staunch supporter – and was led to socialism by his admiration for Jean Zores. In a heated era - in August of the same year the Spanish Civil War would break out and three years later the Second World War - the role of the government of a powerful country like France could be decisive:defending social justice at home, and reflecting abroad, advocacy of world peace at the diplomatic level.
But, as it turned out, Bloom's short-lived administration did little. It fell, burdened by the internal disagreements of the Coalition, mainly about the Spanish Civil War, by the fierce opposition (the historical saying "better Hitler than Blum") and after previously Blum was forced to resign from the prime ministership.
Later, in 1942, he was tried by the treacherous Vichy government as responsible (!) for the defeat of the French by the Germans.
Leon Blum's policy was consistent with socialist principles:he nationalized the war industries and the bank of France while trying to deal with the problem of the growing power of the German-Italian axis.
But it's not only because of all this that it has gone down in history:the Bloom administration, along with the other major social reforms it imposed - the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining and contracts - first legislated "paid breaks", the paid leave of employees.
In June 1936, the Coalition of the Popular Front submitted to the French Parliament the relevant draft law which was voted in favor on the 20th of the same month. This was certainly not something that the opposition forces of the right took lightly. In the infamous 1942 trial, Bloom apologized for this too:
“I was accused of making the French workers lose their appetite for work, of encouraging the spirit of pleasure and ease. And yet, entertainment is not a school for laziness. It is the rest after work. A kind of reconciliation of the worker with the physical life from which he has been cut off and alienated".
Bloom didn't just stop at "paid breaks". At the same time he founded the Ministry of Social Entertainment , which he assigned to one of his youngest MPs. "The proletariat," he said, "which by its labor is the active force of the world, has a right to all the flowers that its labor provides, to all the pleasures of culture, to all the pleasures of art."
Thus, the humble paradises enjoyed by the workers, especially during the summer, "were no longer a nostalgia. Nor", as the poet says, "much more, a reward. It was a right" (Elytis, The Small Nautilus). Right to reflection, to search, to elevation.
The proletariat today, from the manual workers to the clerks and the middle managers, terrified by the uncertainty of our times - equaled only by Bloom's era - has the same chains and the same agendas. Reflexes of the same system that made Blum's political opponents say "Hitler is better" with right-wing governments have overturned decades of gains. Collective bargaining and contracts went awry, 8 o'clock became "ideology", 10 o'clock, see Austria, is here.
The terrifying primary accumulation taking place in the West, eighty-two years later, has already destroyed the humble paradise of June 1936 for European man. The legacy of paid breaks, from the few that are left, perhaps, the day after tomorrow, will become the new ideology from which the "right of the Lord" across Europe will decide to rid society.
General respect for his person
Blum stayed in the prime ministership for just one year. In June 1937 he resigned when the conservative majority Senate refused to grant him emergency powers to deal with the country's economic problems. Attempts were made to reconstitute the government, and Bloom served as its vice-president and prime minister again for a month in 1938. But eventually the Popular Front disbanded.
With the occupation of France by the Germans in 1940 the Vichy regime arrested Bloom on the charge that he was responsible for the defeat. But the sharp orator Bloom and his co-defendants turned their trial into a blistering indictment of their accusers. The Germans were enraged by this development, interrupted the trial and transferred Blum to a concentration camp, from where he was liberated by American troops in 1945.
After the liberation of France, Bloom, surrounded by universal respect, led a purely socialist caretaker government for a month in 1946-47 and helped shape the institutions of the French Fourth Republic.