Word: briand
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Unfortunately Premier Briand had no head for finance. The collapse of the franc drove him back to his favorite post of Foreign Minister. In came great Premier Raymond Poincaré to save the franc, and incidentally to blight the careers of several Briand satellites. Ousted Pierre Laval contrived to get himself elected a Senator from the Department of the Seine (which he has since represented). He dropped back for several years into obscurity as a quiet Independent. Still close to Old Brer Briand, he also made himself close to Young André Tardieu...
...Tardieu skyrocket went up, twice. In the first Tardieu Cabinet there was no Pierre Laval; in the second he was unobtrusively Minister of Labor; and when this Cabinet fell his chance almost came. Briand and Tardieu both insisted that Laval be asked to form a Cabinet. He tried and he failed, because by a typical quirk of "loyalty to my friend André" (Tardieu) he insisted that in a Cabinet of which he was Premier his friend must be a Minister. To form a cabinet including Friend Andre at that moment proved impossible. Again M. Laval slipped into obscurity...
Laval's Year. On the morning of Jan. 24, 1931 there was again a French crisis. The Steeg Cabinet had fallen following charges that the Minister of Agriculture had speculated in wheat. Importunate telegrams flashed from the President's Palace to Brer Briand at Geneva begging him to become Premier for the twelfth time...
Surfeited with such honors Briand wired his courteous but absolute refusal, suggesting Pierre Laval. By this time the Oustric scandal was somewhat cold, the constantly shifting lineup of the Chamber had altered, and sturdy Auvergnat Laval was able not only to form a Cabinet but to smuggle into it as Minister of Agriculture his friend André Tardieu...
Thoroughly befuddled were such correspondents as supposed Andre Tardieu to be roughly ten times as big a man as Pierre Laval. One cabled: "The Tardieu Cabinet has been reformed with Laval as Premier." Others assumed that Protégé Laval would dance inevitably to Patron Briand's tunes. Scarcely anyone realized the tremendous will-to-rule of the Man of the Year. Perhaps Georges Mandel, long the most intimate colleague of "Tiger" Clemenceau. had a glimmering of what was coming. "The Laval Cabinet has nothing to fear," he wrote. "It will last if it gives the impression that it is working...