Word: laval
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White Tie & Tales. An early and devoted disciple of Peacemaker Aristide Briand, Laval was a tireless negotiator of disarmament treaties. When these failed, he turned to his own grand design-a chain of mutual assistance pacts between France and all the countries that ringed Germany. As French Premier and later as Foreign Minister, Laval haggled his way through the capitals of Europe. Wearing his famous white tie and eternally rumpled blue suit as a trademark, he was a grotesque but effective figure, despite a deplorable tendency to try to cap anyone else's punch line. (When he praised...
...Laval's chain was never totally forged, in part because the British helped drive Mussolini into Hitler's arms during the Abyssinia crisis, in part because disputatious Deputies back in Paris sabotaged his efforts. Laval never forgave either. Ironically, France's No. 1 traitor-to-be fell into views that precisely paralleled those of hero-to-be De Gaulle. He despised the French Parliament, thought France needed a new constitution, and was convinced that he alone could bring all this about...
...Dozen Bullets." Apologists for Laval's World War II behavior too often get lost in justifiable (but not entirely relevant) outrage at the conduct of his trial in 1945. (Nothing was proved against him; he was allowed almost no chance to make a defense; the jurors kept shouting things like "Skunk! A rope for his neck! A dozen bullets for his hide!") Cole avoids this by calmly letting the chilling facts of the trial speak for themselves. But in describing Vichy, he falls into another trap: the tendency to feel that Laval is somehow less guilty because...
...question, of course, is Laval's motive for official collaboration with the Germans, which he never denied. And what, if anything, he accomplished for France. Laval, to the last, insisted that he made the occupation easier-by keeping Hitler from planting a terrorist German regime in France as he did in Holland, by dragging his feet in dispatching conscript French workers to Germany, by getting prisoners of war repatriated, by fighting to protect French Jews. "You don't save France," he reproached the Gaullists, "by quitting her soil...
...Smile." Cole does not pursue these estimates as carefully as he should. How many prisoners of war, for example, did Laval actually get repatriated, and at what cost in French workers sent to Germany? He concludes, however, that Laval tried honestly to do what he claims, though he did not succeed any too well. Laval was a skilled bargainer. "You ask Laval for a chicken," grumbled German Ambassador Otto Abetz, "and he gives you an egg and a smile." But Hitler was in a position to get pretty much what he wanted and eventually...