Word: laval
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...years. Historian J. Frank Dobie, onetime "Professor Pancho" of the University of Texas, has sounded off on everything from the writing of Ph.D. theses ("transferring bones from one graveyard to another") to a onetime U. of T. president ("a flunky of the Laval pattern"). Last week he was off again when a reporter from the Houston Post asked him to say a few words about U.S. education...
...repudiated its U.S. debts. He irresolutely stuck to Marshal Petain's Cabinet in 1940, but two years later protested the twisting of the constitution into a dictatorship, was arrested by the Nazis and held until near war's end, when he politely refused the offer of Pierre Laval to form a provisional government...
...comes to putting Frenchmen into the tumbrels of political recrimination, none are more skillful than other Frenchmen. In The Gravediggers of France, in 1944, French Journalist Pertinax (André Géraud) called Paul Reynaud the third gravedigger (after Gamelin and Daladier and before Pétain and Laval). Reynaud now makes an eloquent case for the proposition that, if he helped dig the grave, it was really his political enemies who committed the murder and provided the corpse...
...most. He could envision something of what a war of movement and armor would do to France's static infantry. Above all, he knew that Hitler was not Kaiser Wilhelm I, "the old gentleman who took Alsace Lorraine from us," but a modern Genghis Khan. He knew that Laval, "the Robert Walpole* of the rabble," was squalid and detestable; that Pétain was a defeatist who had to be "kicked into" his victories in World War I, and in World War II, in the absence of all effective French arms, could only snuffle about the lack of carrier...
Died. Constant Victor André Mornet, 85, Procureur Général of France, prosecutor in the trials of Dutch dancing-girl-turned-spy Mata Hari (1917), Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval (1945); in Nohant-Vic, France. Called by his government to prosecute Pétain, Mornet summed up in a stormy five-hour speech, concluded: "I would not be doing my duty if I did not insist on the capital penalty...