94 Facts About Pierre Laval

Pierre Laval again occupied the post during the German occupation, from 18 April 1942 to 20 August 1944.

Pierre Laval held a series of governmental positions, including Minister of Public Works, Minister of Justice and Minister of Labour.

In 1931, Pierre Laval became Prime Minister, but his government fell only a year later.

Pierre Laval joined the conservative government of Gaston Doumergue in 1934 and served as Minister of the Colonies and then Foreign Minister.

Pierre Jean Marie Laval was born on 28 June 1883 in Chateldon, near Vichy in the northern part of Auvergne, the son of Gilbert Laval and Claudine Tournaire.

Pierre Laval's father worked as a cafe proprietor and postman.

The family was comfortably off compared to the rest of the village: the cafe served as a hostel and a butcher's shop, and Gilbert Pierre Laval owned a vineyard and horses.

The last name "Pierre Laval" was widespread in the region at that time.

Pierre Laval then continued his studies in Southwestern France, in Bordeaux and Bayonne, where he learnt Spanish and met Pierre Cathala.

The years before the First World War were characterised by labour unrest, and Pierre Laval defended strikers, trade unionists and left-wing agitators against government attempts to prosecute them.

Pierre Laval married Jeanne Claussat in 1909, the daughter of the Socialist politician Dr Joseph Claussat.

Pierre Laval was generally considered to be devoted to his family.

In 1911, he stood for the National Assembly in the Neuilly-Boulogne electoral district and caused the conservative candidate Edouard Nortier to win since Pierre Laval stood in the second round despite the Radical candidate, Alexandre Percin, doing so as well.

Pierre Laval was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the second electoral district of Saint-Denis.

Pierre Laval was listed in the Carnet B, a compilation of potentially subversive elements that might hinder mobilisation.

Pierre Laval remained true to his pacifist convictions during the war.

On 30 January 1917, in the National Assembly Pierre Laval called upon Supply Minister Edouard Herriot to deal with the inadequate coal supply in Paris.

When Herriot said, "If I could, I would unload the barges myself", Pierre Laval retorted, "Do not add ridicule to ineptitude".

Pierre Laval scorned the conduct of the war and the poor supply of troops in the field.

When Marcel Cachin and Marius Moutet returned from St Petersburg in June 1917 with the invitation to a socialist convention in Stockholm, Pierre Laval saw a chance for peace.

Pierre Laval refused, as the Socialist Party refused to enter any government, but he questioned the wisdom of such a policy in a meeting of Socialist deputies.

Pierre Laval let his membership lapse and did not take sides as both factions battled over the legacy of Jean Jaures.

Pierre Laval was asked by the local SFIO and Communists to head their lists.

Pierre Laval chose to run under his own list of former Socialists whom he had convinced to leave the party and to work for him.

Pierre Laval was seen as malin; a joke stated that he was so clever that he was born with a name that is spelled the same from left or from right.

Pierre Laval won over those whom he had defeated by cultivating personal contacts.

Pierre Laval was the only independent politician in the suburb and avoided entering the ideological war between socialists and communists.

Pierre Laval headed a list of independent socialists in the Seine.

The Cartel won, and Pierre Laval regained a seat in the National Assembly.

Pierre Laval's first act was to bring back Joseph Caillaux, a former Prime Minister, Cabinet member and member of the National Assembly who had once been the star of the Radical Party.

Pierre Laval successfully fought for Caillaux's pardon, and Caillaux became an influential patron.

Between 1925 and 1926, Pierre Laval participated three more times in governments of Aristide Briand, once as under-secretary to the Prime Minister and twice as Minister of Justice.

When he first became Minister of Justice, Pierre Laval abandoned his law practice to avoid a conflict of interest.

Pierre Laval's momentum was frozen after 1926 by a reshuffling of the Cartel majority orchestrated by the Radical-Socialist mayor and deputy of Lyon, Edouard Herriot.

Author Gaston Jacquemin suggested that Pierre Laval chose not to partake in a Herriot government, which he judged to be incapable of handling the financial crisis.

In 1927, Pierre Laval was elected Senator for the Seine, which withdrew him from and placed himself above the political battles for majorities in the Chamber of Deputies.

Pierre Laval longed for a constitutional reform to strengthen the executive branch and to eliminate political instability, a major flaw of the Third Republic.

On 2 March 1930, Pierre Laval returned as Minister of Labour in the second Andre Tardieu government.

Tardieu and Pierre Laval knew each other from the days of Clemenceau and had come to appreciate each other's qualities.

From 1927 to 1930, Pierre Laval began to accumulate a sizeable personal fortune.

The circulation of the Moniteur had stood at 27,000 in 1926 before Pierre Laval took it over.

Profits varied, but during the 17 years of his control, Pierre Laval earned some 39 million francs in income from the paper and the printing works combined.

The Socialist politician Leon Blum, never one of Pierre Laval's allies, conceded that Pierre Laval's "intervention was skilful, opportune and decisive".

Pierre Laval had to reconcile the divergent views of Chamber and Senate.

In two months, Pierre Laval presented the Assembly a text that overcame its original failure.

On 27 January 1931, Pierre Laval successfully formed his first government.

Ministers who formed the Pierre Laval government were in great part those who had formed Tardieu's governments but that was a function of the composite majority thaf Pierre Laval could find at the National Assembly.

Pierre Laval had known Cathala in Bayonne, and Cathala had worked in Pierre Laval's Labour Ministry.

Pierre Laval invited Diagne to join his cabinet as Under-Secretary to the Colonies.

Pierre Laval called on financial experts such as Jacques Rueff, Charles Rist and Adeodat Boissard.

Pierre Laval's government included an economist, Claude-Joseph Gignoux, when economists in government service were still rare.

Pierre Laval declared on embarking for the United States on 16 October 1931, "France remained healthy thanks to work and savings".

Pierre Laval attended conferences on the world crisis, war reparations and debt, disarmament and the gold standard.

However, Pierre Laval blocked the proposed package for nationalist reasons and demanded for France to receive a series of diplomatic concessions in exchange for its support, including renunciation of a prospective German-Austrian customs union.

Such breach could be approved in France only by the National Assembly, and the survival of Pierre Laval's government rested on the legislature's approval of the moratorium.

In support of the Hoover Moratorium, Pierre Laval undertook a year of personal and direct diplomacy by which he traveled to London, Berlin and Washington.

Pierre Laval did not get a security pact without which the French would never consider disarmament, and he did not obtain an endorsement for the political moratorium.

Pierre Laval's optimism was such a contrast to his grim-sounding international contemporaries that in Time magazine named him as the 1931 Man of the Year, an honour that had never bestowed before on a Frenchman.

Pierre Laval became Minister of Colonies in the new conservative government of Gaston Doumergue.

Pierre Laval was then opposed to Germany, the "hereditary enemy" of France, and pursued anti-German alliances.

Pierre Laval met with Mussolini in Rome, and both signed the Franco-Italian Agreement on 4 January 1935.

Pierre Laval denied that he had given Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia and even wrote to Il Duce on the subject.

Pierre Laval's eyes were on the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland; his thoughts on the Locarno guarantees.

Pierre Laval was forced to resign on 22 January 1936, and was driven completely out of ministerial politics.

The victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 French legislative election meant that Pierre Laval was out of power, but he had a left-wing government to target in his media.

Pierre Laval was on record as saying in March 1940 that although the war could have been avoided by diplomatic means, it was now up to the government to prosecute it with the utmost vigour.

Pierre Laval had meanwhile left Chateldon for Bordeaux, where his daughter nearly convinced him of the necessity of going to the United States.

Pierre Laval realised that only through that position could he effect a reversal of alliances and bring himself to favour with Nazi Germany, the military power that he viewed as the inevitable victor.

One consequence of those events was that Pierre Laval was later able to claim that he had not been part of the government that requested the armistice.

The concept of "collaboration" had been written into the Armistice Convention before Pierre Laval joined the government.

In October 1940, Pierre Laval understood collaboration more or less in the same sense as Petain.

In November 1940, Pierre Laval took a number of pro-German decisions of his own, without consulting with colleagues.

Pierre Laval's actions were a factor in his dismissal on 13 December 1940.

That evening, Pierre Laval was arrested and driven by the police to his home in Chateldon.

On 27 August 1941, several top Vichyites, including Pierre Laval, attended a review of the Legion des Volontaires Francais, a collaborationist militia.

Pierre Laval added he "wished for a German victory" because otherwise "Bolshevism [would] establish itself everywhere".

Pierre Laval had been in power for a mere two months when he was faced with the decision of providing forced labour to Germany, which was short of skilled labour because it needed troop replacements on the Eastern Front.

Pierre Laval received German demands to send more than 300,000 skilled labourers immediately to factories in Germany.

Pierre Laval delayed by making a counteroffer of one worker in return for one French prisoners-of-war.

When ordered to have all Jews in France rounded up to be transported to German-occupied Poland, Pierre Laval negotiated a compromise by allowing only Jews who were not French citizens to be forfeited to German control.

Pierre Laval went beyond the orders given to him by the Germans, as he included Jewish children under 16, whom the Germans had given him permission to spare, in the deportations.

Pierre Laval had to maintain Vichy's authority to prevent Germany from installing a puppet government, which would be made up of French Nazis such as Jacques Doriot.

In 1943, Pierre Laval became the nominal leader of the newly-created Milice, but its operational leader was Secretary General Joseph Darnand.

Pierre Laval received permission to enter Spain and was flown to Barcelona by a Luftwaffe plane.

Madame Laval was later released, but Pierre Laval remained in prison to be tried for treason.

Scholars including Robert Paxton and Geoffrey Warner believe that Pierre Laval's trial demonstrated the inadequacies of the judicial system and the poisonous political atmosphere of that purge-trial era.

Pierre Laval firmly believed that he would be able to convince his fellow countrymen that he had been acting in their best interests all along.

Pierre Laval was charged with plotting against the security of the State and intelligence with the enemy.

Pierre Laval dealt mostly with Jaffre, who sat with him, talked, listened and took down notes that he wanted to dictate.

Baraduc, who quickly became convinced of Pierre Laval's innocence, kept contact with the Chambruns and at first shared their conviction that Pierre Laval would be acquitted or at most would receive a sentence of temporary exile.

Naud, who had been a member of the Resistance, believed Pierre Laval to be guilty and urged him to plead that he had made grave errors but had acted under constraint.

Pierre Laval attempted to commit suicide before the sentence could be carried out by taking poison from a vial stitched inside the lining of his jacket.

Pierre Laval did not intend, he explained in a suicide note, that French soldiers should become accomplices in a "judicial crime".

Pierre Laval's corpse was initially buried in an unmarked grave in the Thiais cemetery until it was buried in the Chambrun family mausoleum at the Montparnasse Cemetery in November 1945.