Blum and his prime ministers
At 8:15 p.m. on LCP
They are respectively scientist, teacher and activist. In 1936, Léon Blum appointed Irène Joliot-Curie, Suzanne Lacore and Cécile Brunschvicg in the first Popular Front government. In this documentary, Maud Guillaumin traces the history of these first French women ministers, who did not yet have the right to vote or the right to be eligible.
For a little over fifty minutes, alternating with archive images, their descendants, biographers and historians recount them, narrate their courage and their reluctance to accept the proposal of a resolutely avant-garde Léon Blum. Despite the opposition of his allies in the Radical Party, he kept his promise made a year earlier.
A short contribution swept away by the Second World War
The first he solicits is a woman of science, already holder of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Irène Joliot-Curie. After an initial refusal, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie agreed to become Under-Secretary of State for Research, on the condition of being able to resign three months later – which she did.
To Suzanne Lacore, a 61-year-old teacher based in the Dordogne, Léon Blum entrusts child protection. Left-wing woman accustomed to congresses, she accepts the post out of duty. Cécile Brunschvicg, whom Léon Blum offered to take care of national education, was a rebellious bourgeois and militant of the SFIO, «inhabited by the idea that we must act».
Thanks to a precise contextualization and a balanced construction, Maud Guillaumin’s documentary underlines their determination, each in her position, to undertake major social reforms and to combat inequalities, and the contribution of these pioneers to obtaining, in 1944, suffrage for women. A story all the more instructive as their commitment, swept away by the Second World War, was often forgotten.