That Flabby Hand, That Evil Lip

(See Cover)

When Pierre Laval came back to power in Vichyfrance last week, the world felt in its bones that the war had taken some great new malevolent turn. Said Pundit Walter Lippmann: "Hitler has brought France back into the war." Cried a De Gaullist spokesman in London: "Think of that flabby hand, that evil lip, that shifty glance, that sneer of the executioner -- and tell yourself that for 30 years France has not shed a tear without Laval gaining by it."

In Vichy a somber crowd of 2,000 waited for two hours for the return from Paris of Hitler's No. 1 French servant. Laval came heavily guarded in a fast, dark limousine followed by two police cars. He got out quickly, rushed up the steps and through the revolving doors of the Hotel du Pare. Not a sound came from the crowd. They were not there to pay tribute. They were there out of morbid curiosity. They, like millions of other Frenchmen, could guess what final cruelties and betrayals Laval would abet -- if Adolf Hitler willed it. They knew Laval would stop at nothing to assure a German victory. Laval had said (in a letter quoted by the journalist Pertinax, who estimated that 90% of the French people are pro-British): "I fully realize that the hangman will quickly take care of me on the day British arms triumph. . . ."

Said Laval in his first broadcast as leader of France: "I have always affirmed that rapprochement of France and Germany is the condition for peace in Europe. Like an obsession, I have always sought on every occasion an entente which would put an end to tragic misunderstandings which too often in the past set two great peoples against one another."

Bad News for Everyone. Laval's return was bad news for the U.S., which promptly recalled its Ambassador from Vichy ''for consultations" and advised U.S. citizens to get out of Vichyfrance while the getting was good.

It was bad news for the United Nations' navies, for if the Axis gets the French, fleet it will, have, on paper, the balance of world sea power.

It was bad news for the British in the western Mediterranean, where havoc could be created by German bombers and submarines based on the French North African coast.

It was bad news for the British in the Middle East and the Free French in Syria, for Laval might order the Vichy fleet and land forces to reconquer Syria at the same time that Hitler started a drive through Syria toward the oil of Iran and Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

It was bad news for the sailors keeping open the United Nations' lifeline around Africa to the Red Sea and beleaguered India. Hitler might now take full control of Dakar as a base for cutting the lifeline in the South Atlantic, and the Japs (if Hitler didn't mind) might get Madagascar as a base for cutting the lifeline again in the Indian Ocean.

It was bad news for the U.S. bomber Ferrying Command, which is flying planes and supplies across Africa to the British in the Middle East and India (see map). A Vichy attack on Free French bases in French Equatorial Africa might threaten that supply line in a dozen places.

It was bad news for the people of France, where many a patriot and many a liberal is now in danger of the concentration-camp horrors which the Petain Government had so far spared them.

And, paradoxically, it was bad news for the people of Germany too. At any time in the past 16 months Hitler could have forced his tough servant Laval into power in Vichy, but he had chosen to follow the safer course of accepting the senile collaboration of old Marshal Petain. The change in Hitler's policy toward France must have meant that Hitler wanted something from the Government at Vichy which he had not needed before, something for which he would risk placing in Vichy's seat of power the most hated man in France.

Great events are brewing today in Western Europe. Perhaps Hitler himself is planning a surprise drive to the West (see p. 23. Perhaps Hitler fears an Anglo-American attempt to set up a second front in the West. News came last week that Germany's brilliant Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, hero of the Nazi drive into the Ukraine, had been shifted to the Western Front, whether for offense or defense, and placed in command of Germany's coastal forces from Norway's far North Cape to Hendaye on the Spanish border.

But whether Hitler drove west or defensively feared the west, in this crucial spring he would want all the help he could get from France both inside France and wherever French forces might profitably go into action. Pierre Laval was the man willing to deliver that help, whether he found himself a shield & buckler for the Fuehrer or a cushion for Hitler's backside.

The Value of Petain. In the beginning, Marshal Petain had been a natural for Hitler. The old man was a totalitarian and a collaborationist who was also known to many Frenchmen as a French patriot. With his help the French Fleet and the French African bases were neutralized, forming a buffer between Britain and Axis operations in the Mediterranean. With his help democrats were purged from the French Navy, Army and police -- a purge which Laval may find very handy.

The old Marshal also countenanced certain outright military aid to the Axis. French Indo-China was yielded to the Japanese, with the catastrophic results visible since Dec. 7. Last year Axis planes used Syrian airports en route to Iraq. Recently Vichy shipped gasoline and other supplies to the Axis Libyan armies from French North Africa. Rumors that Axis submarines work out of Dakar have constantly been heard, if as constantly denied.

Meanwhile, and perhaps most important of all, the Petain Government approved full economic collaboration with Germany. French production of planes, tanks, artillery and munitions for Germany has increased, despite sabotage by slowdown and sometimes by violence. France has shipped to Germany 14,000 head of cattle a month, huge quantities of cheese, potatoes, sugar beets, wheat, fruit, champagne and wine reserves. Some 100,000 French skilled workers have been moved to Germany.

The Trouble with Retain. Despite this torrential milking of France, Marshal Petain's collaboration was never 100% satisfactory to the Nazis. Even a year ago the Nazi-kept Les Nouveaux Temps was howling: "Collaboration must be expanded from the economic to the political plane to be really productive. It can be accomplished only by Laval."

Marshal Petain's senile totalitarianism harked back fondly to the ancien regime. It was monarchical, clerical, aristocratic. The Marshal wanted to expunge the memory of the French Revolution. But while he felt that French totalitarianism depended largely on the success of Nazi totalitarianism, he did not want his neofeudal France to be a neo-vassal state of Germany's. He kept making this clear to Germany with his creaking stubbornness about the sanctity of the French Fleet and the African colonies.

Moreover, from the German viewpoint, he was overly tender about the feelings of Frenchmen. He would not shoot them, no matter what their crimes against totalitarian progress. He even pardoned (with life imprisonment) zealous young Paul Collette, who last summer pumped bullets into the chest of Pierre Laval.

And Frenchmen kept rebelling. Besides slowdown sabotage, it was estimated last fortnight that since the fall of France 74 steel foundries had been violently sabotaged, 18,000 trucks loaded with war materials destroyed, 30 ammunition dumps blown up and 184 trains derailed. Last week another German troop train was derailed, killing 44. Two grenades wrapped in newspapers were hurled into the Nazis' Paris headquarters. In a Rennes theater this week, when Jacques Doriot, rabid collaborationist and good Laval friend, got up to address a meeting, someone in the balcony threw a bomb which exploded harmlessly in the orchestra pit.

No More Nonsense. There is no feudal nostalgia about Pierre Laval's totalitarianism. It is of the most streamlined Nazi type -- profoundly opportunistic and no nonsense about it. Whereas Laval may, and probably will, provoke twice as much resistance as Marshal Petain did, Laval will have the stomach to meet resistance with the firing squad, the guillotine or any weapon handy. Around him he has gathered a Cabinet of obedient bureaucrats

(the only member widely familiar in the U.S. is Fernand de Brinon, recently Vichy's agent in Paris). Laval himself is Chief of Government, holds the portfolios of Foreign Affairs, Interior and Information. Former Vice Premier Admiral Darlan has been given command of all Vichy's armed forces and made an Admiral of the Fleet for life.

Marshal Petain retains the innocuous title and role of Chief of State. Doubtless Pierre Laval would have no objection to the aged bulk of the Marshal walking, as Field Marshal von Hindenburg once walked, beside Adolf Hitler on the day of triumph.

That Shifty Glance, That Sneer

Pierre Laval, 58, whose swart skin may be traceable to Moorish ancestry, was born twelve miles from Vichy at Chaaateldon, where he now owns an old chateau (see cut, p. 29). His father was the innkeeper, butcher and one-man post office. As a boy, Pierre haggled with his father's customers, was known as a vicious bully.

In 1914 he escaped military service because of varicose veins. In 1917 he was elected to the Chamber as its youngest Socialist member. Shortly afterwards the

Clemenceau Government arrested him as a defeatist follower of onetime Premier Joseph Caillaux, but later promised him safety if he would snitch on other defeatists. Many were shot, imprisoned or deported. Laval went free.

After the war he played both sides of a Socialist split, formed his own group in Aubervilliers, married the simple, homely daughter of Socialist Leader Dr. Georges Claussat. He has since kept Madame Laval in the background. He began to prosper as a legal fixer, moved to a swank home in Paris, wangled an amnesty law for defeatists through the Chamber, and snuggled up to influential Joseph Caillaux.

In the post-war years Laval was variously a Socialist, Communist (for a few days), and numerous shades of rightist. Running this gamut he became a past master of French political intrigue, served as Foreign Minister and in other posts with several Cabinets. He also began to make big money as a corporation lawyer and super-fixer. Said he: "I don't like to work amongst files and documents. Give me the human element."

Typically human transaction: Laval had a friend who was a director of the commissary department of the Wagons-Lits. Laval and he decided to put the bottled waters of Laval's birthplace, Chateldon, in every French dining car. But the Government sanitary authorities three times refused to endorse the waters of Chateldon, which had no special properties whatever. Laval got a friend appointed Health Minister in a fast-disappearing French Cabinet, got his endorsement, made his sales. Laval's legal manipulation was especially lucrative while his friend Caillaux occupied the Finance Ministry. He figured in many great French financial scandals from the Stavisky case down.

As France's Foreign Minister, Laval instigated the Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935 which brought French businessmen a billion francs in contracts. Sixteen months in advance he told Mussolini it would be all right to rape Ethiopia, and later set his seal on the deed in the Hoare-Laval Pact with Britain which sanctioned Ethiopia's enslavement.

Papal Count. Laval's politically ambitious daughter Jose, swarthy as her father, became his right-hand woman. They traveled together in Italy, Russia and the U.S., where Laval hobnobbed with Herbert Hoover at the White House. Through daughter Jose, Laval reached into French aristocracy. Jose married young Rene de Chambrun, son of the onetime French Ambassador to Italy, descendant of Xa-fayette, nephew by marriage of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Through the De Chambruns, Laval met Marshal Petain. Laval eventually rose so high as to be made a Papal Count.

As World War II approached he worked mightily for more & more French appeasement for Germany. After the fall of France, he was the man who bullied President Lebrun into his defeatist decision not to withdraw to Africa, where a Free French Government might have seriously handicapped German designs. Laval got the Vichy Vice Premiership, was the leading exponent of collaboration with Hitler.

Petain intimates claim that in December 1940 Laval planned a coup d'etat which would have detained Petain in Versailles and shifted the Vichy Government to Paris. At any rate, Laval was arrested and imprisoned in his chateau at Chatel-don (the man who arrested him was Marcel Peyrouton, who last week resigned as Vichy's Ambassador to Argentina). Next day Otto Abetz, the German ruler of Occupied France, sped to Vichy in a huge Mercedes mounting two machine guns, demanded and got Laval's release. Then & there began the German pressuring for Laval's restoration which culminated last week.

Laval devotes much time to his toilet, but he is one of the untidiest political figures on earth. The cigaret drooping from his lip is always stained with spittle. His teeth grew that way. His hair insists on its greasy disarray. His expensive grey suits wrinkle fast over his fleshiness. He often changes his habitual white ties several times a day, but they invariably get smudged. He is a heavy, un-French eater and uses his fingers as a fork, his fork as a toothpick.

Despite his slovenliness, Pierre Laval has the personal magnetism often found in men of powerful and candid unscrupulousness. Many who hate him are also perversely fascinated by him. His brand of statesmanship puts no premium on culture, and he is a widely ignorant man, even of such subjects as geography. A close observer said of Laval's terms as Foreign Minister: "Questions of international relations, alliances to make or not to make, the attitude to be taken with the League of Nations or on sanctions were all solved by him in relation to the number of votes he would gain or lose in the Chamber."

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