Laval Returns

Pierre Laval, the best hated man in France, came back into power this Tuesday when old Marshal Petain knuckled under to Hitler again, announced that he would give Hitler's slippery French favorite a post in the Government. At the same time Petain called off the Riom trials until they could be rigged nearer to Hitler's desire.

Laval is the father of Vichyfrench collaboration with Hitler and served as Vice Premier and Foreign Minister for the first six months after the fall of France. But in December 1940 Petain found him at once so unpopular and so highhanded in his pro-Naziism that he cast him into outer darkness. His return to power is a tip-off of further collaboration to come, focussing all eyes again on the French fleet (see p. 23) which may hold the balance of sea power today.

Even before Petain's decision the U.S. State Department had pretty well discounted the durability of Vichy's neutrality. Answering Petain's protest over U.S. recognition of the Free French De Gaullist regime in French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons, the U.S. had allowed itself the rare diplomatic luxury of speaking frankly. Said the U.S. note: "(A) handful of Frenchmen ... in contempt for the high tradition of liberty and individual freedom which has made France great, have sordidly and abjectly, under the guise of 'collaboration,' attempted to prostitute their country to that very regime in Germany which is bent upon nothing else than the permanent enslavement of France. . . .

"The French people may rest assured that the Government and people of the United States will continue to maintain unimpaired their full respect for the sovereign rights of the people of France. They may continue to be confident that by the victory of the United Nations those rights will be restored intact to them."

Yes, it was a time for totalitarians to stand together. Their game, in France as elsewhere, had been fully recognized. And so in the coming weeks Vichy would contribute more than ever, perhaps openly and militantly, to the Axis cause.

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