Pierre Laval

Pierre Laval (1940)

Pierre Etienne Laval (born June 28, 1883 in Châteldon , Puy-de-Dôme department , † October 15, 1945 in Fresnes prison , Val-de-Marne department ) was a French politician of the Third Republic and the Vichy regime .

At the beginning of his political career, Pierre Laval was a socialist . During the 1920s and 30s he held various government offices and was French Prime Minister twice (1931/32 and 1934/35). After France's defeat in World War II, Laval played a decisive role in the establishment of the État français (Vichy regime). In contrast to Head of State Philippe Pétain , Laval called for extensive collaboration with the National Socialist German Reich . From 1942 he ousted Pétain from his absolute position of power at the head of the state and pushed the French policy of collaboration with the German occupation authorities . After the end of World War II, Laval was sentenced to death and executed .

Life

Early years

Pierre Laval as a lawyer (1913)

Pierre Laval was the son of an innkeeper and hotel owner from the municipality of Châteldon in Auvergne . Despite his simple origins, he attended a Paris Lycée from 1898 , which he graduated with a Baccalauréat . Laval then began studying zoology , but switched to law . During his studies he was influenced by the writings of the syndicalist Georges Sorel and the teaching of Blanquism , which is why he joined the socialist Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) in 1905 . Due to varicose veins , Laval had to prematurely break off his two-year military service in the French army .

In 1909 Laval finished his studies and settled as a lawyer in Paris. In the years before the First World War, French society was characterized by industrial disputes and strikes . Laval defended the interests of the labor movement and made a name for himself as an advocate for socialist trade unionists for the CGT . At a trade union conference he said of himself: "I am a comrade among comrades, a worker among workers."

MP

Pierre Laval (1931)

After the parliamentary elections in April 1914, Laval moved into the Chamber of Deputies ( Chambre des Députés ) for the constituency of Saint-Denis and was the youngest member of the Socialist parliamentary group at just 31 years old. Laval represented pacifist positions after the outbreak of World War I , but did not oppose the Union sacrée in the Chamber . He spoke out in favor of a negotiated peace with the German Reich . When he noticed the growing criticism of his positions, he supported the course of the nationalist Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau from 1917 . Due to the strong loss of votes by the socialists in the 1919 elections, Laval lost his parliamentary seat.

In 1931 and 1932, and in 1935 and 1936, he was French Prime Minister. In 1934 he represented his country in the negotiations of the League of Nations on the Saar question . As foreign minister in 1935, together with his British counterpart Samuel Hoare , he drafted the Hoare-Laval Pact , which was supposed to guarantee the League of Nations' ability to act in the Italo-Ethiopian War and through which Italy would have obtained concessions in Ethiopia . Overall, however, he pursued a foreign policy that was critical towards Great Britain, while he sought rapprochement with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy. The Time magazines chose Laval 1931 Man of the Year . With the electoral victory of the Popular Front under Léon Blum , Laval became one of the most determined oppositionists and joined the conservative circles around Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain .

Vichy regime

After the Wehrmacht invaded France during the Second World War , Laval made sure in parliament that power was transferred to Pétain on July 10, 1940, thus ending the Third Republic . On July 16, 1940 Laval became deputy prime minister - at first there was no prime minister - and later foreign minister of the Vichy regime . On December 13, 1940, Laval was released and arrested by Pétain because Pétain did not want to work as closely with the Nazi regime as Laval requested.

In the hope of improving relations with the occupying power, Pétain called Laval again on April 18, 1942 as prime minister, whereupon the US government recalled its ambassador from Vichy. In the following time he became the most important decision maker of the Vichy regime; the influence of the aged Pétain diminished.

In a radio address on June 22, 1942, he affirmed that he hoped for a German victory - otherwise Bolshevism would spread everywhere. He called on the French to volunteer for the Service du travail obligatoire in German industry. On other points he tried to weaken the demands of the German occupation regime, but had little success. In July 1942 he made sure that Jewish children were deported to the extermination camps , with the words: "For reasons of humanity, the Prime Minister (contrary to the original German instructions) enforced that young people and children under the age of 16 may accompany their parents." In negotiations he got the German military government to promise not to deport people with French passports. In January 1943 Laval founded the Milice française , which was under the leadership of Joseph Darnand . He remained Prime Minister until August 1944.

Exile and death

In September 1944 Laval was brought to Sigmaringen - according to his own statement against his will - where he lived together with Marshal Pétain in Sigmaringen Castle owned by Friedrich von Hohenzollern . In January 1945 he moved with 19 members of his cabinet to the castle in Wilflingen, about 14 km away . In both places he led a puppet government in exile with cabinet meetings, his own French daily newspaper, a radio station and his own guard.

He left Wilflingen Castle on April 20, 1945. He was later flown to Barcelona on an Air Force plane in front of the advancing Allied troops . General Franco's government responded to the de Gaulle government's request after a period of 90 days and extradited Laval to the Americans in Austria on July 30, 1945. They immediately handed him over to the French government in Paris.

Laval was charged and sentenced to death for high treason . After attempting to kill himself with potassium cyanide on October 6, 1945 , he received medical care in Fresnes Prison and was finally executed by firing squad several days late at noon on October 15, 1945. His grave is on the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris.

literature

• Renaud Meltz: Pierre Laval. Un mystère français. Perrin, Paris 2018.
• Christiane Florin: Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. The image of two collaborators in French memory. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997.

About the trial before the Haute Cour de Justice (October 1945)

• Fred Kupferman: Le Procès de Vichy: Pucheu, Pétain, Laval. Éditions Complexe, 2006. (French)
• Fred Kupferman: Pierre Laval. Balland, 1987. New edition: Tallandier, 2016. (French)
• René de Chambrun: Le "Procès" Laval. France-Empire, Paris 1984. (French)
• Géo London: Le Procès Laval. Bonnefon, Lyon 1946. (French)

Fiction

• Leslie Kaplan : Fever (novel) (on Laval: pp. 141 ff.)

Web links

Commons : Pierre Laval  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Pierre Laval in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Pierre Laval in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Henry Torrés: Pierre Laval. Oxford University Press, New York 1941, pp. 17-20.
2. ↑ ↑ Le Petit Parisien , April 27, 1914 a. May 11, 1914. Saint-Denis is one of the arrondissements de la Seine, qui en compte trois. Il compte 8 sièges en 1914. Laval obtient 8 885 voix au 1er tour, contre 6 486 à Marcel Habert, et 2 973 et 2 168 voix pour deux candidats radicaux. Dictionnaire des parlementaires: "Au second tour, Laval obtient 10 912 voix et Habert, 8 587".
3. ^ Ardent Hitler admirer in Vichy . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur . ( deutschlandradiokultur.de [accessed on April 19, 2017]).
4. ↑ on the question of whether Pétain was actually a puppet in the hands of a group around Laval see: Anja Köhler: Vichy and the French intellectuals: the “années noires” as reflected in autobiographical texts. Dissertation. Tübingen 2001, p. 56 f. ( online )
5. ↑ Je souhaite la victoire allemande, parce que, sans elle, le bolchevisme demain s'installerait partout .
6. ↑ The end of the war in Sigmaringen 1945. ( Memento of the original from November 12, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Website of the city of Sigmaringen. 
7. ↑ Claudia Mäder: Pierre Laval: How a simple Frenchman became a collaborator of the Hitler regime. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 2, 2019.

predecessor	Office	successor
Théodore Steeg Fernand Bouisson Philippe Pétain François Darlan	Prime Minister of France January 27, 1931–6. February 1932 June 7, 1935-22. January 1936 July 16, 1940–13. December 1940 April 18, 1942–19. August 1944	André Tardieu Albert Sarraut François Darlan Charles de Gaulle
Aristide Briand Louis Barthou Paul Baudouin François Darlan	Foreign Minister of France January 14, 1932-20. February 1932 October 13, 1934-24. January 1936 October 28, 1940–13. December 1940 April 18, 1942–20. August 1944	André Tardieu Pierre-Étienne Flandin Pierre-Étienne Flandin Georges Bidault
Georges Leygues Pierre Pucheu	Minister of the Interior of France January 27, 1931-14. January 18, 1932 April 18, 1942-20. August 1944	Pierre Cathala Adrien Tixier
René Renoult	Minister of Justice of France March 9, 1926-19. July 1926	Maurice Colrat