Laval
LAVAL $2.50 By OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
FORMERLY one of the most learned and eloquent of French lawyers, now a refugee from the France of Vichy, M. Torres employs his talents as a counsel for the prosecution in this mordant and revealing biography of Pierre Laval, whom many French patriots regard as one of the main villains in their country’s fall. Son of a provincial innkeeper, then a radical lawyer and a defeatist during the First World War, Laval achieved the familiar French version of the rise from rags to riches. His politics became more conservative as his clients became more wealthy; he displayed an uncanny capacity for making money, often by extremely devious means; he finally became the owner of the feudal castle which towered over his native village. There was something of the incurable parvenu about Laval; his manners, his dress, his phrases were always more or less unkempt. Shrewdness and pertinacity helped him on the road to power; it was this shrewdness, unilluminated by any touch of generous idealism, that caused him to foresee France’s disaster and to plump heavily for the winning side. The author knew Laval personally fairly well and recalls significant talks with him. He thinks this champion of collaboration with Germany is adequately characterized by one of his own sayings during his radical days: ‘The bourgeoisie has no more men of its own. It is compelled to find them in the dustbin where the Socialist Party discards its garbage.’
W. H. C.