W as Blum an economist? A noted jurist, an eminent busi-
ness lawyer, former head of the cabinet of a socialist
Minister of Public Works, surrounded by men like Au-
riol, Spinasse, and Jules Moch who were constantly con-
cerned with problems of exchange and production, Blum, unlike
Daladier and Herriot, was not a stranger to these questions. But he was
caught in a series of contradictions which finally crushed him.

The first was the opposition between his socialist convictions and his
fundamental suspicion of a planned economy. The second derived
from the choice he had made to depend on the capitalist democracies to
save his socialist-inspired experiment. The third was bound up with the
very nature of the Popular Front coalition.

To be sure, there are forms of socialism that do not require a planned
economy. There are no references to such plans in Marx, and they are
rare in Jaurès. But many socialists and union members in the thirties
considered the planned economy the economic framework of the doc-
trine. Blum took the opposite point of view, but not simply because
Marcel Déat and his "neo" lieutenants were the most ardent champions
of economic planning. More profoundly, it was because Blum saw in
the idea of a planned economy (held by Henri de Man, for example) an
"intermediate regime" between democracy and totalitarianism which
risked falling into Fascism. The future was to show that this pessimism
was well founded.

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