In the years just before World War Two, the French far right followed their leaders’ directives with violent immediacy. On January 13, 1936, Charles Maurras, the publisher of L’Intransigeant, the most widely read fascist newspaper in France, called for the assassination of some 150 members of government, should they take the country to war in Ethiopia to defend that nation against Benito Mussolini’s invading Italian army. Included in that number was Léon Blum, whom Maurras listed as among many other dangerous “radicals, socialists, and communists.”  In just a few months, of course, Blum would be elected Prime Minister of France, becoming the leader of the Popular Front, an alliance of leftwing groups mobilized largely by the rise of so many fascist organizations in France during the 1930s. At the time of Maurras’ editorial, though, Blum served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, representing Narbonne, in Southern France.

There would be no war with Italy in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, exactly one month after Maurras’ denunciation, on February 13, three members of the fascist group Les Camelots du Roi pulled Blum from his car as he left the chamber in Paris’ seventh arrondissement and beat him practically to death before he managed to get away. The attackers were, no doubt, motivated by Maurras’ call to violence, although given their own animus towards the French left in general and their virulent anti-Semitism, they probably needed little inducement to go after Blum, who was Jewish.

Just a little over a week later, on February 21, the assailants were in a Parisian court for a preliminary hearing. Every prominent newspaper in the country covered the event, and each of them highlighted the same thing about this initial appearance, that a film of the attack was shown in court, in the presence of the presiding magistrate, the prosecuting attorneys, the defense counsel, and the defendants themselves. The movie had been made by amateur filmmaker Gérard Bennett, who may have had his camera that day to get some footage of the funeral procession, near the chamber, of rightwing historian Jacques Bainville, the reason so many fascists had gathered in the area.

Newspapers provided precise details of the movie and its screening. As Le Matin reported, “the film reproduces the entire scene, from the moment the crowd comes running up to the car to the instant Blum takes refuge in a building on the rue de l’Université.” Le Matin, like most other sources, emphasized that there were two showings in court, the first at normal speed, taking four minutes. The second was in “slow motion,” and “was interrupted two or three times to allow identification” of the assailants. One of them, Edouard Aragon, could not be seen. The other, Léon Andurand, was there “for a few moments…smoking a pipe,” while the third, Louis Courtois, “appeared throughout the film,” and “seemed furious, vociferous,” although he could not be seen “throwing punches” at Blum.

Most sources agreed that the film really didn’t show that much. Excelsior, for example, claimed that “the range of the camera was very limited, so the film does not constitute a document of great value.” Le Matin agreed that “the view is incomplete.” But the determination of the film’s worth might also come down to a newspaper’s political inclination. The far rightwing L’Ami du Peuple, which had been founded by perfume magnate and fascist supporter François Coty, informed readers that, “it was in vain that we looked in this film for the famous scene imagined by so many leftwing newspapers, where we might see one of the ‘aggressors’ hitting” Blum.

One of those “leftwing newspapers,” L’Humanite, actually seemed fairly measured, writing that, “despite the rapidity of the film, we clearly see two of the assailants, Andurand and Courtois.” L’Humanité then added that the latter’s “attitude and movements are particularly revealing,” reinforcing the reporting in the very staid Le Matin and other papers. 

One newspaper emphasized the historical significance of the film, which even transcended the event that it showed. “For the first time in France,” L’Oeuvre wrote on its front page on February 22, “the cinema has been used as evidence in a courtroom.” The article described the two screenings in detail, much more fully than other sources, and then interviewed the judge who had authorized the use of the film. He felt that the footage served as a terrific “means of investigation.” L’Oeuvre claimed that motion pictures as evidence were long overdue, because “justice has been using photography” for so long, and in particular because film had been introduced into American courtrooms years before.

In fact, US courts had been making use of film as evidence at least since 1923, in a case that was directly related to the popular culture of the period. In this instance, a vaudevillian had severely injured his leg in a car accident. As part of his trial for damages, his lawyer introduced a film of his stage routine, over the objection of the opposing attorney. But it’s unclear when, if ever, an American trial had used movie footage to determine the guilt or innocence of defendants, as in the Blum case. More than anything else, the French instance seems to anticipate Fritz Lang’s first American film, Fury, from 1936, which was released in Paris in the fall of that year to considerable acclaim (see my blogpost from September 1, 2022, at https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/38257950/posts/4230313808). In that movie, the newsreel footage shown in court identified all of the townspeople who had tried to lynch Joe Wilson, an innocent man wrongly accused of kidnapping, and played by Spencer Tracy.

In France, in the Blum case, the film itself, in addition to serving as evidence, quickly came to be involved in a dispute over ownership. The man who shot the footage went to court in March 1936, claiming that the police had seized his film and refused to return it, and possibly even profited from it, releasing, as they did, frame enlargements to the press. Newspapers reported on the filmmaker’s claim but then seemed to drop it, so the outcome remains unclear. The case against Blum’s attackers, on the other hand, ended much more decisively, if, perhaps, somewhat disappointingly. Newspapers informed readers at the end of April 1936 that two of the three men had been found guilty, and the film clearly had something to do with the verdict. Edouard Aragon, who did not appear in the footage, was released without punishment.  Léon Andurand, the man seen mostly smoking his pipe, was sentenced to 15 days in prison, while the “furious, vociferous” Louis Courtois received a sentence of three months, which in each case seems hardly enough given the severity of the attack.

Blum’s term as prime minister lasted only about a year, and the leftwing coalition he represented just a little more than that. If he is remembered today as having any connection with film, it is as the negotiator, with American Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, of the post-World War Two Blum-Byrnes agreement. Along with establishing other commercial contracts between the two nations, the agreement also set the relationship between the French and American motion picture industries, and which typically has been understood as significantly lopsided in favor of the US.  But years before that, he was involved in some of the most important amateur footage ever shot, footage that certified, in French courts at least, the place of motion pictures as evidence in criminal trials.

Today, in various national contexts, we might expect such evidence to be used. In the United States, for instance, at least dating to the 1963 film of the Kennedy assassination taken by another amateur, Abraham Zapruder, we have come to accept both the importance and inconclusiveness of cinematic evidence. But in 1936 in France, the footage of the attack on Blum—footage that apparently no longer exists—marked a significant moment in the country’s legal history, providing a new source of proof and also a frustratingly inadequate record of the events of February 13^th. The men who attacked Blum seem to have disappeared from the public record after their sentencing. Charles Maurras, the man who had instigated the attack on the deputy from Narbonne that Gérard Bennett recorded, would be arrested as a Nazi collaborator in 1944, after the liberation of Paris, and sentenced to life in prison.