TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1389> <title> Man of Year 1931: Pierre Laval </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Man of the Year </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 4, 1932 Man of the Year Pierre Laval: INTERNATIONAL </hdr> <body> 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. Unshakably 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, conferred 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. </body> </article> </text>