Word: laval
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Swart, frog-faced Pierre Laval had the look of a man born to play a horrid role. And in the popular Gallic fairy tale that still passes for the history of France during World War II, he has always made an ideal ogre-a sinister greasy eminence who bamboozled the National Assembly into capitulating in 1940 and dragged Marianne in the muck by collaborating with Germany. When gallant Charles de Gaulle returned to slay this monster and (with some small American help) deliver France from thralldom, his countrymen threw Laval into a traitor's grave, hoping that five years...
Since then, not surprisingly, most of the writing about Laval has been wildly partisan. Now, nearly 20 years after Laval's execution, a British editor turned historian has made a levelheaded but phlegmatic try at the first full-length biography of Laval written in English...
Hubert Cole's Laval is neither traitor nor hero. Instead he is a complex, unprepossessing peasant, skillful but overwhelmed by pride, brilliant but narrow, who gambled his life (plus what was left of his country's honor) in the hope of horse trading with Hitler to ease the pangs of the occupation in France. "If I succeed," Laval said prophetically in the dark days of 1942, "there won't be enough stones in this country to raise statues to me. If I fail, T will be shot...
...sharp-tongued, terrible-tempered son of a butcher from the poverty-parched Auvergne, Laval scrabbled his way to the top through law and politics. He was first elected to the Assembly in 1914. In 1931 he became, at 47, one of the youngest French Premiers ever. He freely switched parties (far left to right) and party bosses. But what looked like vacillation was really a form of tenacity. By nature a disputatious loner who hated abstract ideologies and fixed positions, Laval wanted to be free to bargain practically...
What he worked for (besides his own fortune) in the doomed years between the wars was a hard currency at home and peace in Europe. Laval, Cole insists, had an almost psychotic revulsion against violence and a pinchpenny peasant's hatred of war for its waste of blood and cash. In 1944 he defended Vichy with a startling comment: "These four years of occupation have cost less than three months...