Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1931moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 4, 1932

INTERNATIONAL

Man of the Year:Pierre Laval



   On the last day of 1931, who loomed calm, masterful and
popular as Man of the Year?

   "It has been a lean year for everyone," said Prime Minister
James Ramsay MacDonald with suppressed emotion. Then, faced by
the conference that is to meet Jan. 18 to do something about
Reparations, he burst out, "For God's sake let us meet now!"

   "From this terrifying spectacle which the world presents we
must raise our eyes to Heaven!" cried Pope Pius XI in his
Christmas message. "It is to be feared that God will leave men to
themselves and that would be most terrible ruin."

   The year 1931 pitched even Colonel Lindbergh into heathen
waters; sent Mahatma Gandhi disgruntled back to India; faced
Josef Stalin with ragged gaps in the Five-Year Plan; failed to
produce a Fascist government under Adolf Hitler (potential Man of
1932). But who rose from obscurity to world prominence, steered a
Great Power safely through 1931, closed the year on a peak of
popularity among his countrymen?

   Only one man did these things and at the height of his sudden
greatness wagged an explanatory finger at President Hoover. The
keynote of 1931 was sounded by Man-of-the-Year Pierre Laval as he
sailed for Washington: "A severe correctional and disciplinary
period is indicated."

   French Coolidge. Twelve months ago Pierre Laval was as
obscure -- even in France -- as Governor Calvin Coolidge before
the Boston police strike.

   Swart as a Greek, this compact little Auvergnat (son of a
village butcher in Auvergnat (son of a village butcher in
Auvergne, south-central France) was a Senator of no party, an
Independent. The public neither knew that he always wears a white
wash tie (cheapest and unfading) nor cared to figure out that his
name spells itself backward as well as forward. Addicted to
scowling, didactic (he once taught school), possessed of mellow
but unexciting voice, identified with no conspicuous cause or
movement, Senator Laval was also too young to be noticeable in
France in January 1931. He was only 47 and France
likes its Premiers to be over 60. The extreme youth of
Pierre Laval was made glaring by the fact that France had just
dispensed with a Premier whom many considered "much too young,"
brilliant Andre Tardieu, 54, whose Cabinet was brought down by
the Oustric scandal.

   Worst of all, a good many Frenchmen who had vaguely heard of
"The Man in the White Tie" understood that during the War he was
a slacker and afterwards a Communist. In 1914, being already
Mayor of the proletarian Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, he was
elected to the Chamber of Deputies by his old constituents as a
Socialist. he did not enlist in the Army. When drafted he served
briefly at the front as a common poilu. His Socialist views
caused him to orate directly after the War against the Treaty of
Versailles. In 1919 he lost his seat as Deputy, quarreled with
some of his Socialist colleagues, remained friendly with others
and is said to have been briefly enrolled at one time as both a
Socialist and a Communist, not being sure which way the cat of
popular sentiment would jump.

   Aubervilliers was the irresolute young statesman's salvation.
He was and he remains today Mayor of Aubervilliers. Unshakeably
rooted in this Paris suburb he cultivated the friends he had made
as a Deputy, notably that bald, enigmatic millionaire Joseph
Caillaux, onetime Premier. In 1924 Mayor Laval again sought and
won election as a Deputy, not as a Socialist this time but as a
moderate Republican.

   Shrewd Aubervilliers understood. Her beloved Pierre was
doffing his radical cap and putting on a moderate political coat
to match those of his moneyed friends. Why not? Great Aristide
Briand had made exactly the same switch; so had Alexandre
Millerand, President of the Republic.

   Less than a year later the Auvergnat, diligent in his
attendance upon both M. Caillaux and M. Briand, was rewarded by
the minor portfolio of Public Works in a Painleve Cabinet which
starred Foreign Minister Briand and Finance Minister Caillaux.
When Patron Briand shortly came in as Premier he took Protege
Laval under his wing, gave him a course in Chamber intrigue as
secretary general of the Prime Minister's office, graduated him
prematurely in 1926 as Minister of Justice.

   Unfortunately Premier Briand had no head for finance. The
collapse of the franc drove him back to his favorite post of
Foreign Minister. In came great Premier Raymond Poincare to save
the franc, and incidentally to blight the careers of several
Briand satellites. Ousted Pierre Laval contrived to get himself
elected a Senator from the Department of the Seine (which he has
since represented). He dropped back for several years into
obscurity as a quiet Independent. Still close to Old Brer Briand,
he also made himself close to Young Andre Tardieu.

   In 1929-30 the Tardieu skyrocket went up, twice. In the first
Tardieu Cabinet there was no Pierre Laval; in the second he was
unobtrusively Minister of Labor; and when this Cabinet fell his
chance almost came. Briand and Tardieu both insisted that Laval
be asked to form a Cabinet. He tried and he failed, because by a
typical quirk of "loyalty to my friend Andre" (Tardieu) he
insisted that in a Cabinet of which he was Premier his friend
must be a Minister. To form a cabinet including Friend Andre at
that moment proved impossible. Again M. Laval slipped into
obscurity; but 1931 was just around the corner. Briefly Theodore
Steeg, former French Resident General of Morocco, headed a shaky,
stop-gap Cabinet.

   Laval's Year. On the morning of Jan. 24, 1931 there was again
a French crisis. The Steeg Cabinet had fallen following charges
that the Minister of Agriculture had speculated in wheat.
Importunate telegrams flashed from the President's Palace to Brer
Briand at Geneva begging him to become Premier for the twelfth
time.

   Surfeited with such honors Briand wired his courteous but
absolute refusal, suggesting Pierre Laval. By this time the
Oustric scandal was somewhat cold, the constantly shifting line-
up of the Chamber had altered, and sturdy Auvergnat Laval was
able not only to form a Cabinet but to smuggle into it as
Minister of Agriculture his friend Andre Tardieu.

   Thoroughly befuddled were such correspondents as supposed
Andre Tardieu to be roughly ten times as big a man as Pierre
Laval. One cabled: "The Tardieu Cabinet has been reformed with
Laval as Premier." Others assumed that Protege Laval would dance
inevitably to Patron Briand's tunes. Scarcely anyone realized the
tremendous will-to-rule of the Man of the Year. Perhaps Georges
Mandel, long the most intimate colleague of "Tiger" Clemenceau,
had a glimmering of what was coming. "The Laval Cabinet has
nothing to fear," he wrote. "It will last if it gives the
impression that it is working. . . . This country likes a
Government that really governs."

   Straight through 1931, while other Premiers or Presidents
hesitated, wavered and in some cases fell, Pierre Laval gave
month after month the consistent impression that he and his
Government were working, are working:

   February: Just getting into his stride, Premier Laval leaned
on the stooped shoulder of old Brer Briand in Chamber debate,
backed him in pledging France to observe the One-year Naval
Holiday proposed by Foreign Minister Dino Grandi of Italy.

   March: Faced by Red riots in French Indo-China, the Premier
convened the High Colonial Council in Paris for the first time in
three years and studied critically the results of guillotining
700 native Communists in the past two years -- with the result
that Minister of Colonies Paul Reynaud is now in the Far East
"sympathetically examining native grievances."

   April: Foreign Minister Aristide Briand's conciliatory policy
toward Germany having been discredited in French eyes by the
revelation that Germany and Austria planned a zollverein (customs
union), Premier Laval put tactful pressure on his own Foreign
Office, forcing Old Brer Briand to take a "stronger line" which
later forced zollverein into the World Court, where it died.

   May: When the Chamber and Senate sit together as the National
Assembly at Versailles and vote for the President of France, who
shall vote first is determined by opening the dictionary at
random. Last spring the dictionary opened at L. Alphabetically no
other L name in the National Assembly could beat Laval. Having
cast the first vote Premier Laval saw his shaggy old mentor
Aristide Briand heartbreakingly defeated for the Presidency,
which fell to water-drinking, penny-pinching Paul Doumer.

   Opening in May the French Colonial Exposition proved
phenomenally successful in a bad year, strengthened the
"impression" that the Laval Cabinet was "working."

   June: Premier Laval showed his tough Auvergnat mettle by
holding up the Hoover One-Year Moratorium single-handed, hurling
his famed defy -- "President Hoover can entrench himself behind
his Congress and I can entrench myself behind the Chamber" -- and
hanging on doggedly until the Moratorium was modified into a form
acceptable to France.

   July: M. Laval signed the Moratorium Accord after negotiations
at the French Foreign Office with Statesman Stimson and Secretary
Mellon, "to which Briand was brought in like an aged grandmother
whom it is desired not to leave out of the family festivities,"
as venomous "Pertinax" remarked in L'Echo de Paris.

   August: The Premier in his character of Worker, Driver, Leader
recuperated in the grand manner by taking the cure at Vichy where
go so many French, U.S. and British tycoons.

   September: Taking Old Brer Briand in tow, Premier Laval
junketed to Berlin, confered with Chancellor Bruning and Foreign
Minister Curtis (since resigned), achieved little or nothing, but
boosted his fame enormously and is said to have made a warm
friend of Dr. Bruning. ("What a man!" Visitor Laval exclaimed to
beaming German newshawks. "I wish there were more such men in
France!")

   October: Leaving his Foreign Minister and his wife behind and
taking his daughter Jose (Josette to him) along, Pierre Laval
made the journey to Washington. D.C. that stamped his name upon
millions of U.S. minds and swelled his fame throughout the world.

   President Hoover is well known to dislike almost all
Frenchmen. He and Premier Laval had high words which they called
"free and frank." Smoking U.S. cigarets at the furious rate of 80
per day, the didactic Frenchman in striped trousers, black
jacket, white tie and suede-topped buttoned shoes wagged his
short forefinger at the President in high-laced shoes and
conservative business suit, making hotly such points as that
France will not stand for having another Moratorium thrust
forward from the U.S. "suddenly and brutally." (Never understood
in the U.S., the French position was and still is that President
Hoover had a perfect right to be as "sudden" as he liked about
sacrificing for one year $257,000,000 due the U.S. (that being
his own business and Congress not being in session): but that the
President had no right "brutally" to insist that France make a
similar abrupt sacrifice of $97,000,000, that being Premier
Laval's business and the French Chamber being not only in session
but twice as angry as Congress when Congress finally convened and
voted.) Equally blunt was Mr. Hoover, according to some reports,
in challenging the French thesis of "Security before
Disarmament," insisting on "real disarmament" when the
Disarmament Conference meets.

   Concrete result of the White House negotiations was almost
nil, Premier Laval departing vastly puffed and pleased by a
verbal agreement that he should summon the German Ambassador on
his return to Paris and start Germany taking the initiative for a
final settlement of her troubles by appealing under the Young
Plan for a committee to study them, which has now been done.

   November: The complete dominance of Premier Laval over what
was once supposed to be someone else's Cabinet was dramatically
pointed up when 69-year-old Aristide Briand collapsed in the
Chamber Nov. 17 and lay for a few moments crumpled down upon his
desk. As chairman of the League Council (both before and after
this collapse) Old Brer Briand lost further prestige by failing
utterly to restrain the aggression of Japan in Manchuria.
Meanwhile short Premier Laval and his tremendously tall, broad-
shouldered and aggressive Finance Minister, Pierre Etienne
Flandin, were fighting through the Chamber their fiscal program
for next year.

   December: Chamber and Senate passed not only numerous routine
Budget bills and the like but also approved several highly
controversial steps involving the personal prestige of Premier
Laval and Finance Minister Flandin:

   1) The loaning from the Treasury to the Bank of France of
$100,000,000 to cover the Bank's present paper loss on
Sterling which it still holds. Premier Laval, it
was revealed, kept the Bank under pressure during the summer to
"stand by the pound" when its directors wanted to sell Sterling.

   2) The loaning of $12,000,000 to the French Line to complete
their unnamed super-super-liner.

   3) The adoption of a $140,000,000 program of public works to
relieve French unemployment, two-thirds of this sum to be
furnished by the Treasury and one-third by local bodies.
According to Laval Cabinet official estimates there are
unemployed some 500,000 Frenchmen, compared to some 7,200,000
U.S. citizens.

   On Christmas Eve the Chamber gave Premier Laval a straight
vote of confidence 315 to 255, then adjourned to the second
Tuesday in January, leaving the Man of the year unshaken,
triumphant. How great is his achievement may be measured by the
fact that only four French Premiers since the War have been able
to remain in power for as much as one year.

   Pierre Laval in his year-end public address at Chapelle-la-
Reine nailed to his Cabinet's mast a French policy (practical or
impractical) respecting Reparations which was endorsed next day
by virtually the whole French press: "We will not allow
Reparations to be sacrificed to private debts!"

   "Tenez bon! Hold tight!" shouted a delighted auditor.

   "I always do!" cried the Man-of-the-Year. "We will not let the
Young Plan be torn up!"

   Nation of the Year? France closed 1931 with vastly greater
gold stocks than any other European state (the U.S. has half
again as much); she could count her unemployed in hundreds of
thousands while Britain and Germany counted theirs in millions;
but her trade balance has turned adverse: her U.S. tourists
dwindled from 300,000 in 1929 to 100,000 in 1931. The conviction
is strong among Frenchmen that they are just entering hard times.