Laval, Pierre (1883–1945)

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LAVAL, PIERRE (1883–1945)

EARLY CAREER
PEACE WITH GERMANY
FINAL DAYS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Head of the Vichy government in France during World War II; considered by many to be the evil mastermind of collaboration.

Pierre Laval was born in Châteldon, in the Auvergne, to a family of shopkeepers. He did well in school, earning his Certificate of Primary Studies at twelve. In spite of his father's insistence that he work in the family business, Laval earned his baccalaureate in 1902. After a year of military service in the infantry in 1903, Laval was discharged as unfit for service owing to varicose veins.

EARLY CAREER

Laval eventually moved to Paris, completed a law degree in 1907, and began his law career, serving primarily a working-class, syndicalist clientele. In 1909 he married Jeanne Clausset, whose father had encouraged Laval's ambitions when he was a child, and in 1911 their only child, Josée, was born.

Laval won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1914 as a Socialist, representing Aubervilliers, a heavily working-class suburb north of Paris. Unlike most Socialists, Laval refused to support World War I in August 1914, manifesting for the first time his rigid, antimilitarist pacifism. Laval never served in the war and lost his seat in the postwar conservative upsurge of 1919. Returning to his law career, he amassed a personal fortune and began shifting away from socialism.

Elected mayor of Aubervilliers in 1923, Laval built a strong public following as a hard-working pragmatist. His constant struggle with Aubervillier's powerful Communist Party gave rise to the second mainstay of Laval's political doctrine, fierce anti-communism. In his last run as a Socialist, Laval was elected to the Chamber in 1924.

Laval broke with the Socialists and in 1927 won a Senate seat as an independent. He served in various cabinets before becoming prime minister for the first time in January 1931. Laval dealt with the crisis sparked by U.S. president Herbert Hoover's call for a moratorium on German reparations for World War I, for which Time magazine designated him Man of the Year. By the time he fell in February 1932, Laval's three unwavering political beliefs—categorical pacifism, profound anti-communism, and an unshakable desire for rapprochement with Germany—had become entrenched. They drove his decisions to the end of his life.

Laval's appearance, personality, and style were all distinctive. His childhood left him with a driving ambition and a deep sense of being unloved. He was extremely hard-working, stubborn, and quick tempered. Laval always chafed at party discipline, preferring to deal with people one-on-one and negotiate his way through tough situations by bargaining and by wheeling and dealing his way to a solution. He attributed his reputation for being a horse trader to his Auvergnat origins. He saw himself as pragmatic. His stubbornness and sense of being unappreciated led him to dismiss outside advice and to develop a misplaced confidence in his diplomatic skills.

Laval again became prime minister on 7 June 1935. To deal with the Depression, Laval pursued a strictly deflationary fiscal policy. Prior to and during Laval's second ministry, he also served as foreign minister. Hoping to build an alliance, Laval made key colonial concessions to Italy that contributed to the Abyssinia crisis. After Italian forces invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, Laval and British foreign minister Samuel Hoare negotiated a secret plan to give Italy much of the territory it had conquered and permission to enlarge its colonial holdings in East Africa in exchange for ending the war. News of the secret plan leaked on 10 December 1935, resulting in public outrage over appeasement of Italian aggression. The scandal led to Laval's resignation on 22 January 1936.

Laval took this fall from power badly and began nurturing the illusion that he had a personal mission to preserve peace in this dangerous era and that he would someday be called on to fulfill it. Out of the limelight from January 1936 until war broke out in 1939, Laval returned to Châteldon, where he continued to amass wealth, building a media empire and ruminating on the idea that he alone knew what was right for France but that no one appreciated it. By the late 1930s, Laval's desire to reach an accord with Germany had become an obsession.

PEACE WITH GERMANY

By 1938 Laval led a right-wing, anticommunist, pacifist group of politicians who insisted on peace with Germany. He opposed the declaration of war in September 1939. During the Battle of France, which began 10 May 1940 and quickly became a military debacle, Laval worked to bring Philippe Pétain into the cabinet. On June 16, with German armies advancing across France, Prime Minister Pierre Reynaud stepped down and Pétain formed a cabinet. The next day, Pétain announced that he would seek an armistice, which Laval strongly supported. Laval joined Pétain's cabinet on June 23. In spite of his years as a politician, Laval played a key role in the National Assembly's July 1940 decision to grant full powers to Pétain, destroy the Third Republic, and create an authoritarian government, simply called the French State, located in the spa town of Vichy. Pétain was chief of state, and on 12 July 1940 Laval became vice president of the Council of Ministers and Pétain's designated successor.

In 1940 Laval, sure of an imminent German victory against England, believed that France's empire and naval fleet gave it the leverage to bargain with Germany and calculated that to get concessions France had to offer solid proof of good will, even anticipating German demands. Collaboration thus was a choice Laval and other leaders at Vichy pursued. Laval met and developed a close working relationship with the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz. Using that connection, Laval arranged the 22 through 24 October 1940 meeting in Montoire between Adolf Hitler and Pétain, which resulted in Pétain's announcement that France was ready to seek a policy of collaboration. Laval was abruptly fired on 13 December 1940 (only Abetz's intervention prevented Laval's arrest on 13 December), not because Pétain rejected Laval's pursuit of collaboration, which continued even without Laval, but because he hated Laval's secretive style.

Under the Armistice of June 1940 Germany directly occupied the northern two-thirds of France. It created a border, the demarcation line, between the occupied and the southern, or unoccupied, zone. This one-third of France, popularly called the zone libre or free zone, was not occupied by German troops after June 1940. The French state at Vichy (in the unoccupied zone) was the civil authority over all of France, but the German occupation authority had ultimate authority in the northern, occupied zone. However, in late 1942, with the Allied takeover of North Africa, German troops moved south and occupied all of France. Laval and others at Vichy considered the existence of "autonomous" unoccupied territory an important bargaining chip, but they did not resign when Germany occupied that zone.

On 27 August 1941, a student named Paul Collette tried to assassinate Laval as he reviewed French troops volunteering to serve with the German army in the Eastern campaign. Laval returned to power on 18 April 1942, never changing his assumptions in spite of the steady loss of all France's assets, its empire, its fleet, and its unoccupied territory. Laval met increasingly harsh German demands by continuing to anticipate them in hopes of gaining advantages. To avoid the imposition of forced labor, Laval negotiated an agreement in June 1942, called the Relève, whereby for every three skilled workers France sent to Germany, Germany would repatriate one French prisoner of war. In announcing the Relève to the public, Laval, sealing his doom, insisted, "I hope for a German victory." Otherwise, he said, bolshevism would spread across Europe. The Relève failed to satisfy German labor demands and forced labor began in France in February 1943.

Shortly after Laval returned to power, Germany escalated its demands for the deportation of Jews from France, requiring fifty thousand Jews from the unoccupied zone. Laval's response provides another example of his style, its futility, and the way it implicated France in the worst aspects of the Nazi regime. Laval offered Germany stateless and foreign immigrant Jews in a vain attempt to spare French Jews. As a symbol of French sovereignty, Laval insisted that French police carry out raids to arrest Jews, something that aroused widespread public dismay. Although Germany had not asked for Jewish children, Laval insisted that Jewish children be deported with their parents because including them helped Laval fill his quotas.

FINAL DAYS

Still, Laval stayed on to the bitter end, insisting he would "make the French people happy in spite of themselves." In January 1943, he authorized the creation of the Milice française, an ultracollaborationist military force that waged war on the Resistance, communists, and Jews.

With the Allies advancing into France, the French government moved to Belfort in August 1944. In October the retreating German army ordered French authorities to leave, carting them to a castle in Sigmaringen, where they played out the last days of the war bickering over office space.

On 2 May 1945, Laval flew to Spain but on 31 July the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco turned him over to American forces in Austria, who extradited him to France on 1 August 1945. At his trial for treason, which lasted from 3 to 9 October 1945, members of the jury yelled insults at him. Convicted and sentenced to death, on the eve of his execution Laval attempted suicide with cyanide but his stomach was pumped and he was revived so that the execution could be carried out.

To the moment of his death, Laval expressed no remorse, only a sense that he had been unjustly accused by an ungrateful country that he had saved in spite of itself. His son-in-law, Renéde Chambrun, worked for years to rehabilitate his reputation. But in a 1980s poll taken in France, some 33 percent of those polled would have had him executed again.