Word: blum
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...Papa," said the boy Leon Blum, "how dare you sell your ware for more money than you paid for it?" There is no record of Papa Blum's answer; of Alsatian Jewish stock, a Parisian merchant in the reign of Napoleon III, he went right on selling laces and ribbons for a tidy profit. But son Leon rebelled against what he later called the dishonesty and decay of bourgeois capitalism...
...Popular Front. Young Lawyer Blum helped defend Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He became a protege and confidant of the great French Socialist leader Jean Leon Jaures. But Blum's approach was steadfastly intellectual: he seemed to disdain practical politics. The assassination of Jaures and the shock of World War I changed the current of his life. In 1919, at 47, the dilettante was elected a deputy...
Fifteen years later Blum stood at the apex of his career-the Socialist leader of the Popular Front. He had never liked the Communists but, uneasily, he allied himself with them against the rising menace of fascism. His long legs and long nose, stringy mustache and thick-lensed spectacles, wide-brimmed hat and spats were targets of caricaturists of Right and Left. Once Royalist hoodlums dragged him from his car and beat him up; he refused to prosecute them. In 1936 the Popular Front carried the elections. Leon Blum took the premiership...
...will not ruin but also we cannot cure and save this bourgeois society," he proclaimed. Before his government fell a year later, he had given France government-enforced collective bargaining, a 40-hour week, vacations with pay, regulated banks, a nationalized arms industry. Later, some men said that Blum's alliance against fascism had weakened and divided France, made it an easy prey to fascist aggression...
Under World War II's Vichy regime, Blum was imprisoned and brought to trial. At Riom, he defended himself and the cause of French liberty so eloquently that the Nazis called off the show. Blum was transferred to Buchenwald. During his imprisonment he wrote another book, For All Mankind...