Volume 6, Number 10 · June 9, 1966
A Middle Way
By James Joll
Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics
by Joel Colton
Knopf, 512 pp., $10.00
There are certain statesmen whose reputation is based more on their personal qualities and on the ideas they are held to symbolize than on their actual political achievements. While Lincoln and Gladstone and Lenin can be judged by their accomplishments, others—Rosa Luxemburg and Adlai Stevenson, for example—depend for their fame on what they were or on what they were believed to represent. Léon Blum was one of these: for, although the reforms which he introduced in France during the twelve months of his Premiership from June 1936 to June 1937, mark a real effort to introduce long overdue changes, the esteem in which Blum was held by many, and the hatred—comparable in some quarters to that felt for President Franklin D. Roosevelt—in which he was held by others, rested on more than his brief period of power or even on his long term as leader of the French Socialist party.
Review, 1706 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |