(b. Châteldon, 28 June 1883; d. 15 Oct. 1945) French; Prime Minister 1930, 1935, head of government of the French state 1940, 1942 – 4 Pierre Laval was a classic example of the poor boy who makes good and turns bad. Born in the small town of Châteldon (Puy-de-Dôme), the son of a barkeeper, he was a brilliant schoolboy and managed by hard work to obtain a law degree. Like many of his kind, he decided to make his fortune as a lawyer in Paris and built up a reputation defending radical trade unionists who had fallen foul of the police authorities. His early political sympathies were with the Socialist Party of Jaurès and he became in rapid succession deputy and mayor of the working-class suburb of Aubervilliers, north of Paris. After the First World War, he began a journey away from the left which led him to swap his parliamentary seat for the more conservative Orne, to start representing companies rather than trade unionists, to build up a business empire based on provincial newspapers, and to buy the château in his home town. He held a number of ministerial portfolios in the late 1920s and in 1930 was briefly Prime Minister. His political skills, like those of his mentor Briand, were those of the negotiator and manipulator and he prided himself on what he regarded as his peasant cunning. By the mid-1930s, however, when he became Prime Minister for the second time he was clearly identified with deflation at home (public sector pay cuts) and appeasement abroad (the *Hoare — Laval pact of 1935). Neither of these policies was likely to appeal to the left-wing coalition which won the Popular Front elections in 1936. Laval's resentment at exclusion from office fuelled a hostility to the Republican parties which had caused it that would become obvious in 1940. Yet it was foreign policy which proved to be decisive in his political evolution. A committed supporter of appeasement, he nurtured the dream of an alliance with Mussolini's Italy and was openly critical of the decision to go to war with Germany. He participated in all the parliamentary intrigues designed to end the war in the winter of 1939 – 40.

Laval played no part in the events which led Pétain to seek an armistice with Hitler in June 1940. Once Pétain's intention to proceed to a constitutional revolution became clear, however, he rushed to Vichy to be at his side and his political skills played a decisive role in the French Parliament's decision to vote itself out of existence. When Pétain appointed himself head of the French state, Laval became his Prime Minister. He plunged into the task of establishing good relations with the Nazi Occupier and pledged himself to a policy of collaboration, Laval was indifferent to the reactionary fantasies of the ideologues of the État Français; they, like Pétain, regarded him with a mixture of contempt and fear. In December 1940 he was sacked and briefly detained in a coup organized by Pétain's inner court. His career was saved by the correct belief of the Germans that he was the best defender of the cause of collaboration. Relations with Pétain were patched up and by 1942 he was back in office as the official number two of the regime. It was now that he committed the acts which would eventually destroy him. Convinced both of his indispensability and of the necessity for ever closer collaboration, he co-operated with the Germans in the deportation of the Jews and introduced the hated system of industrial conscription which sent thousands of French workers to German factories in return for a small number of prisoners of war. His government introduced ever more repressive measures against members of the Resistance and underwrote the terror campaign carried out by Joseph Darnand. As the last remnants of Vichy's authority crumbled in the face of the liberating armies, Laval strove to protect his future (it is amazing he thought he had one) by unsuccessfully trying to persuade the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Herriot, to recall the National Assembly which had been dissolved in 1940. Deported with the rest of the Vichy crew to Germany, he refused, like Pétain, to take any part in the fantasy "governments of national liberation" set up by the Nazis. At the end of the war, he managed to flee to Franco's Spain, where he sought exile. Franco, however, handed him over to the French authorities who put him on trial for treason. At his and Pétain's trial, he tried to argue that collaboration had been designed to protect French soil and French lives. After a trial which brought no credit on the French judicial system, he was found guilty of treason and condemned to death. On the day of his execution, he tried to commit suicide by poison, was brought back to life by the prison guards, taken out, and shot. He was still wearing the tricolour sash which was the symbol of his office of mayor of Aubervilliers.

Laval remains to this day an outcast figure in France and no serious attempts have been made to rehabilitate him. His unattractive personal appearance and politican's cunning made him a convenient scapegoat, after his execution, for the error of others. Yet if he cannot be regarded as Vichy's evil genius, his responsibility for some of the worst cruelties of the Occupation, and his enthusiasm for a German victory, are beyond question. A belief that Nazi Germany was the only way to prevent the Bolshevization of France is one part of the answer, sheer lust for office another. But perhaps the principal motivation was his belief that he alone could strike a deal with Hitler. Laval prided himself on his realism and on his peasant's ability to negotiate a good bargain. It was a misplaced pride and one which cost him, and France, very dear.

The French politician Pierre Laval (1883-1945) served as chief minister in the World War II Vichy regime. He was later tried for treason and executed.

Pierre Laval was born on June 28, 1883, the son of a café owner at Châteldon. Financing his legal education by tutoring, he entered politics on the extreme left. After earning a reputation as a labor lawyer, he was sent to Parliament in 1914 as a Socialist deputy by the working-class voters of Aubervilliers. During World War I Laval first demonstrated the extreme ideological flexibility that marked his entire career. Aligned for 2 years with Joseph Caillaux, who advocated a negotiated peace with Germany, Laval was known as a defeatist. Sensing that Caillaux's views were increasingly unpopular, Laval adeptly switched sides in 1917. Soon he clamored for the return to power of the ultranationalist Georges Clemenceau, who became prime minister in November 1917 and immediately jailed Caillaux.

Laval was momentarily damaged politically by his association with Caillaux and was defeated for reelection in 1919. The next 5 years he spent amassing a substantial fortune in legal practice, journalism, and other business interests. Officially remaining a Socialist and an admirer of Lenin in the early 1920s, he abandoned his party shortly before the elections of 1924 and reentered the Chamber as an independent leftist.

Premier and Foreign Minister

In 1926 Laval was elected to the Senate and continued his movement to the right. Often a minister in the late 1920s, he became premier for the first time in January 1931. Brought down after a year in office over a question of fiscal policy, he served as prime minister once more from June 1935 to January 1936.

Before 1940 Laval had his greatest impact on French foreign policy. Four times foreign minister during 1932-1936, he steadfastly sought accommodation with Mussolini's Italy against resurgent Germany. Coauthor of the abortive Hoare-Laval Agreement, which was meant to appease Mussolini at the expense of Abyssinia, he was overthrown when the British Cabinet repudiated the arrangement. For the rest of his life Laval hated the British and was determined to exact his revenge. Realizing that a united Franco-Italian front against Germany had been rendered impossible by the British action, he did an about-face and began to urge the necessity of reaching an understanding with Hitler. France, Laval argued, could not survive the ordeal of another war.

Vichy Regime

Out of office after 1936, Laval in 1939 was an advocate of peace at any price. After the fall of France in June 1940, he joined the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain as the chief minister. Instrumental in securing parliamentary ratification of the armistice terms and the granting of full constituent powers to Pétain, Laval during the last 6 months of 1940 urged that France must accept the fact of German victory and through collaboration find its rightful place in Hitler's "New Order." Considered far too willing to collaborate by his fellow ministers, he was ousted from power in a palace revolt on Dec. 13, 1940.

Laval remained out of office until April 1942, when Berlin pressured Pétain into restoring him to power. The Germans rightly calculated that they could obtain from him greater supplies of French workers than they were getting from his predecessor, Adm. J. F. Darlan. Engaged massively against the Soviet Union, the Germans also knew that a frankly collaborationist regime in France under Laval guaranteed their security in the west. Laval responded by accentuating his collaborationism and said that he "hoped for a German victory to avoid the Bolshevization of Europe."

Realizing in the summer of 1944 that the end was near, Laval sought to call a national assembly at Paris to deal with the new situation. Intended to save his own skin as well, the maneuver was too little too late, and in the middle of the month he was ignominiously carried off in the baggage of the retreating Germans. Escaping his captors, he was found by the Americans in Austria and handed over to the French.

Laval's trial for treason by the provisional government of Charles De Gaulle began at Paris on Oct. 4, 1945. Even for a political trial it was a shabby affair: irregular, mismanaged, and - embarrassed by Laval's clever and effective defense - cut short by the government. Laval was convicted and sentenced to death, and Charles De Gaulle personally refused him a new trial. Nearly escaping Gaullist justice by swallowing poison, Laval was revived by a team of frantic doctors and a few hours later was executed by firing squad, on Oct. 15, 1945.

Pierre Laval is one of the most intensely controversial figures in recent French history. His detractors portray him as the archvillain of wartime France who sold his countrymen to the Nazis. His admirers claim he is the unsung hero who single-handedly kept French losses to a minimum after April 1942 by playing a double game with the Germans. There may be partial truth in both views. In any case, although so closely identified with the Vichy regime, Laval loathed the cultist idolatry of Pétain and scorned the high-flown emptiness of the National Revolution. Instead he had an instrumental view of French national interest and, because he was convinced of the finality of German victory, that necessarily meant collaboration. That in the end he miscalculated may then be due to the fact that the politics he had learned in the sovereign Third Republic were irrelevant to the satellite status of France after June 1940. From this perspective Laval may be seen as much the prisoner of his own narrow political opportunism as he was the captive of his German sponsors.

Further Reading

Laval states his own case in The Diary of Pierre Laval (1948). There is no good study of him in any language. The best short biographies are David Thomson, Two Frenchmen: Pierre Laval and Charles De Gaulle (1951), and Hubert Cole, Laval: A Biography (1963), both of which are sympathetic without being apologetic. There is an interesting psychoanalytic treatment of the man in David Abrahamsen, Men, Mind and Power (1945). Laval's son-in-law, René de Chambrun, collected several hundred sworn statements from French, German, and American witnesses in France during the German Occupation (3 vols., 1958-1959), intending to present a favorable view of the Vichy regime in general and of Laval in particular. Recommended for general historical background are Alexander Werth, The Twilight of France, 1933-1940 (1942); Paul Farmer, Vichy: Political Dilemma (1955); and Robert Aron, The Vichy Regime, 1940-1944 (1958).

Additional Sources

Chambrun, Rene de, Pierre Laval: traitor or patriot?, New York: Scribner, 1984.

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(pyĕr läväl') , 1883–1945, French politician. Elected (1914) to the chamber of deputies as a Socialist, he held various cabinet posts and in 1926 became a senator as an Independent, moving away from his leftist affiliations. In 1931–32 and 1935–36 he was premier and foreign minister. With Sir Samuel Hoare (later Viscount Templewood), he proposed (Dec., 1935) a settlement to halt the Italian conquest of Ethiopia; the plan was seen as appeasement of Benito Mussolini, and his government collapsed. After the start of World War II and the fall of France in 1940, Laval reached new prominence. In the Vichy government under Marshal Pétain he became vice premier and foreign minister, but in Dec., 1940, he was dismissed and replaced by Admiral Darlan, apparently on suspicion that he was planning to overthrow Pétain. Entering the German-occupied part of France, Laval outspokenly advocated collaboration with Germany. Pétain reinstated Laval in Apr., 1942, and in November gave him dictatorial powers. Laval's government drafted laborers for German factories, cooperated in the persecution and deportation of Jews to death camps, authorized a French fascist militia, and instituted a rule of terror. After the Allied invasion of France he was taken (Aug., 1944) with the retreating Germans to Germany. He fled (May, 1945) to Spain, was expelled, and finally surrendered in Austria to American forces, which extradited him to France. Tried for treason, he was sentenced to death, and after an unsuccessful attempt at suicide he was executed. While the verdict may have been just, Laval's trial was conducted so poorly that it was denounced by many. Laval defended himself brilliantly and ascribed patriotic motives to his opportunist policies. His notes for his defense were edited by his daughter, Josée Laval, comtesse de Chambrun, and appeared in English in 1948.

Bibliography

See biography by Hubert Cole (1963); D. Thompson, Two Frenchmen: Pierre Laval and Charles de Gaulle (1951); G. Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (1968).

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