Peaceman

Any Premier of France can tell roughly how he is doing by his success or failure to bring the Chamber and Senate cheering to their feet by a climactic purple passage or two leading up to La Patrie! Last week Premier Leon Blum, an intellectual of parts, had the nerve-racking experience of finding that neither the Chamber nor Senate would spark to a speech in which he used all the sure-fire La Patrie twists, introducing his new Popular Front Cabinet.

In what veteran Paris correspondents saw as "a curious victory along strictly party lines," the Chamber quietly voted the new Cabinet confidence, 369-to-196. It was a curiosity that the Popular Front Premier kept offering in the lobbies to resign in favor of a National Union Cabinet, kept finding insufficient takers.

As his own Finance Minister, Socialist Premier Blum was uneasily aware that he is the worst possible choice, from the viewpoint of those French and British capitalists from whom France must try to keep on borrowing at the rate of over 30,000,000,000 francs per year, to keep her armament program going. On the other hand, a point in the Cabinet's favor is that pathetic, inexperienced Yvon Delbos is no longer Foreign Minister, has been replaced by veteran Joseph Paul-Boncour, everlasting French delegate to the League of Nations. Like his great friend Lord Perth, who as Sir Eric Drummond was League Secretary General for 14 years, M. Paul-Boncour has been a believer in making a Four-Power Pact between Britain, Germany, France and Italy as a first step toward "The United States of Europe," proposed at Geneva by France's greatest Man of Peace, the late Aristide Briand (TIME, Sept. 16, 1929).

With the greatest possible reserve, seeing that the Soviet Union is linked in friendship with the French Republic by treaty, last week's Moscow proposals for an anti-Fascist conference were "accepted in principle" by Paul-Boncour. To French journalists he made it unmistakable that Paris will not act in the matter without London, which had already reacted negatively. When Premier Juan Negrin of desperate Leftist Spain went flying to Paris and begged Messrs. Blum & Paul-Boncour for aid last week he was cold-shouldered.

Enraged French Leftists, including some War veterans, staged a riot 4,000 strong along the Seine, shouting anti-Fascist slogans, and four Paris policemen were stabbed with knives. Soon afterward 3,000 leaders of Communist groups in all parts of France were summoned to Paris for a conference with French Red No. 1, Maurice Thorez. The 3,000 arrived shouting "Open the frontier to Spain!" and "Thorez in Power!" Orator Thorez instructed them to incite the French masses "against their enemies, both without and within!"

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