BLUM, RENÉ

BLUM, RENÉ (1878–1944), French ballet impresario. A brother of the statesman Léon Blum\>\> , René Blum began his career as a writer and was general secretary of the periodical Gil Blas, but gave up writing for art and ballet. When Diaghilev died (1929), Blum was chosen to succeed him as director of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Monte Carlo, and he held the post until the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. He was also associated for four years, from 1932, with Colonel de Basil's Ballet. In 1936 he founded the René Blum Ballets Russes and two years later, joined by Léonide Massine and other members of the de Basil company, he formed the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. After the German occupation of Paris, Blum refused to leave for the free zone of France, and at the end of 1941 was interned with nearly a thousand French-Jewish intellectuals in the camp of Compiègne. From there he was sent to Auschwitz, where he died in September 1944. The manuscript of his memoirs, which was in the hands of a Paris publisher in 1940, was not recovered after the liberation. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: I. Guest, The Dancer's Heritage (1960), 93ff.; S. Lifar, Histoire du Ballet Russe (1950), 245, 249.