Leon Blum by Joel Colton

Author:Joel Colton [Colton, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83089-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

The next stage, after the signing of the non-intervention agreement, is a story in itself—and again a painful one. “It caused us,” Blum confessed in later years, “many disappointments, many vexations.”70 The proofs of violations by Italy and Germany were soon overwhelming. Only a few weeks after Blum’s assurances on September 6 that there was no evidence of violation, the Spanish government was formally protesting to the newly formed Non-intervention Committee in London, and to the League in Geneva, over the continuing flow of arms from Italy, Germany, and Portugal to the military rebels, a flow of arms that had never ceased. The protests of the Spanish government continued for the next two and a half years. The pleas of its Foreign Minister, Alvarez del Vayo, were part of Blum’s torment. “It would be unjust,” Alvarez del Vayo has written, “not to point out that later realization of the mistakes committed in those early weeks … was to cause the Socialist Premier much anguish. Every time I went through Paris it was my duty to go to him and tell him frankly how things were going; at such meetings I saw his grief and something like despair.”71

Before long Mussolini boasted openly of the military aid and even of the troops he was contributing to Franco. German military and technical aid, although less obtrusive and less flamboyantly advertised, was no less significant. In October, the U.S.S.R. began to send tanks, artillery, planes, and technicians to the Spanish Republic as a riposte and threatened to abandon the agreement in view of the egregious violations by Germany and Italy. Volunteers from the democracies and antifascist emigres meanwhile went to Spain to fight on the side of the Republic. The French and British governments responded to the new turn of events by pleading for observance of the agreement that had been solemnly signed by all and by urging the tightening of frontier controls. In December 1936 and January 1937 the two governments even secured an agreement from the major powers, including Germany and Italy, to prohibit the enlistment and dispatch of “volunteers.” Again it troubled Blum, he confessed in the Chamber, to place on the same plane “two very different forms of enlistment or enrollment: the free gift of one’s person to an ideal and faith, after the model of those legendary examples … Lafayette, Byron, Garibaldi, Villebois-Mareuil, as against service under compulsion.” But he insisted that they had no choice. The ever-present danger of war could be avoided only by including “without distinction” the two types of “Volunteers.”72 The new agreement also proved ineffectual; and the long discussion that ensued on the withdrawal of troops already in Spain proved fruitless as well.

As the months went by, the C.G.T., the Communists, and the Left-wing groups in his own party seethed with impatience and resentment. The agreement which the Blum government had initiated was being shamelessly violated, to the cruel disadvantage of the Spanish Republic. For “a period of months,” Blum later explained, the French

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