For All Mankind

THIS book of less than 200 pages was written in 1941, for the most part in the prison of Portalet. There, by one of history’s ironies, Philippe Pétain, the senile egoist at whose order Leon Blum was imprisoned following the formation of the Vichy regime, was himself to spend long months awaiting trial for treason. Parts of the book, smuggled from Portalet after the famous Riom trials, were published anonymously in the French Underground press. The whole book was in circulation in Paris by the spring of 1945, when Blum was rescued from Buchenwald by the United States Army. The appearance of For All Mankind in an excellent English translation finds Blum once more directing the destinies of the French Socialist Party and sharing in the rebuilding of French democracy.

For All Mankind is as remarkable in matter as in its origins and adventures in manuscript. There were, of course, Frenchmen in France and in exile whose faith did not falter during the dark autumn of 1941. But was there among them all, at home or abroad, in prison or in the Underground, any other who dared to assign himself the task which Léon Blum chose? At a moment when force ruled triumphant, and the consequences of defeat grew each week to an ever more appalling dimension, he decided that the time had come to analyze calmly and objectively the defects which had caused the downfall of France, to rescue the principles of democracy, to point out the ways in which correction would be found, and to design the kind of remade world which is needed if those principles are to function in peace within and among nations.

M. Blum’s book is by no means an attempt at personal exculpation. He treats his own Socialist Party with the same impartial rigor that marks his handling of the Radical Socialists, the various Conservative factions, and the Communists. In this respect, For All Mankind differs sharply from most books thus far written by French statesmen who found themselves involved in the common disaster. His book assumes less importance as a chapter in autobiography than as a remorseless political treatise on government and the frustration of the democratic principle in the twentieth century. It lays hare the central political phenomenon of our day: the failure of the historic middle class in Western democracy to fulfill the role assumed by it through control of power; and the reasons for that failure as illustrated by the response of the French ruling class to the crisis of 1939 — 1940.

The democratic principle, as the leader of the Popular Front government of 1936 points out, remains unshakable and unimpaired. What is needed is revision and readaptation of democracy’s instruments to a changing society. For that, task M. Blum finds the old political middle-class capitalism unsuited and incompetent, lacking in vision and devoid of will. His answer, given some four years before post-war elections in Europe, is social democracy at home and a coöperative world government to which all nations would yield some part of their sovereignty in exchange for the assurance of peace.

The lucidity, the moderation, the subtlety, and the power of this little book are equaled by the generosity and breadth of its author’s vision, and by a profound political sagacity which foresaw, half a decade before they arose, the difficulties which now beset the peacemakers.

JAMES H. POWERS