France under Pierre Laval

Laval's actions in the cut regimen, and specially his foreign policy, reflect a narrow view of French interests and, ultimately, imply an even narrower view of opportunity to serve his declare career advancement and to place himself in a arrangement of power. Laval emerges as a political opportunist to the extent he appears to have sought, repeatedly, to align himself with whatever political force in Europe in general and France in particular would be at once the most powerful and the most subject to facilitate control of the population by the select (and blimpish and qualified and privileged) few. The way in which this pattern of activity unquestionable in Laval's career may be seen in his fill of French foreign policy toward Germany. In this regard, Warner anchors his study of Laval on his foreign policy: "Domestic affairs were of course fundamental during this period [193145], but the . . . incident that, for good or ill, Laval's major(ip) impact was in the field of foreign affairs inescapably made foreign policy the centre of attention. . . . [T]he main focus on is upon FrancoGerman relations, and her no explanation is necessary beyond the fact that this was how Laval saw things too" (9:xiii).

What was to come for Laval and for France under his influence as regards foreign affairs has been tied to his attitude toward domestic affairs. Shirer cites the fascisticled 1931 riots that brought down the democratically elected parliamentary governing of the Third Repub

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Warner cites diplomatic memoranda that take accounting system of the elements of Laval's foreign policy that were to control his actions doneout the 1930s and through World War II: "the anticommunism, the suspicion of Britain, and the desire for European unity based upon a FrancoGerman entente. It was the catastrophe of his career that this vision was to find its apotheosis in Adolf Hitler's impostor European 'new order'" (9:24). Elsewhere, Warner notes, "There can be few things more antipathetic to the individualistic French peasant who has made good, which is basically what Laval was, than Communism. In his view, anything was preferable to it" (9:420).

lic and says that the extreme rightwing drawing card of the riots, Colonel Francois de la Rocque, had made plans with the conservative head of the French military, marshall Petain, to establish a revolutionary provisional government that would embarrass Petain and Pierre Laval. In the event, de la Rocque did not physically attack the French parliament. Shirer believes, however, that an attitude fearful of authentic representative government and congenial to rightwing government by social club that would arise in 1940. As he describes it,

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