Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [24]
Bunny’s father-in-law was not from a similar aristocratic background. The mercurial Pierre Laval was born poor in the village of Châteldon. He studied law and defended trade unionists. In 1914, he was elected as a socialist to the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. When the party split between socialists and communists in 1920, he became an independent. He eventually bought the chateau in his home village and a flat in the exclusive Villa Saïd off the avenue Foch in Paris. In 1927, he moved to the upper chamber, the Senate, and became Président du Conseil, prime minister, in 1931. Time magazine named him its 1931 ‘Man of the Year’. ‘Swarthy as a Greek, this compact little Auvergnat (son of a village butcher in Auvergne, south-central France) was a Senator of no party, an Independent,’ Time commented. ‘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 a 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.’ In October 1931, he became the first French prime minister to visit the United States. His government fell in February 1932, but he served in several more cabinets until the 1936 victory of the leftist Popular Front coalition. Friends said that René’s devotion to his father-in-law, who called him affectionately ‘lapin’ rather than the English ‘Bunny’, derived from his passionate love for his wife, Josée. After René and Josée married, the two families became close and socialized regularly in Paris and the countryside.
On the morning of 14 June 1940, when Clara and Aldebert were evicted from the Hôtel du Parc in Vichy, Mr Hunt drove the Chambruns to see the Lavals at the Château de Châteldon. It was only a short detour on their way from Vichy to Le Puy. Pierre Laval was at home with his wife, Jeanne, and their daughter, Josée. The former prime minister immediately gave his in-laws the latest news. Clara wrote, ‘There was too much of it, and all bad: the Government was at Tours. They were joined there on June the thirteenth by Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, Lord Beaverbrook and General Spears–the latter some days later was to spirit away from Bordeaux the recently appointed Under-Secretary of War, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, elevated for the nonce to the rank of Brigadier General pro tem.’ Clara conceived at this time a hatred of de Gaulle. Her memoirs, while criticizing him as an upstart without compassion for French suffering, omitted his brilliant armoured offensive against the Germans–a rare French success during the debacle of 1940. Laval and the countess dismissed the proposal by de Gaulle and Premier Paul Reynaud to continue the struggle against Germany from the North African colonies as ‘a wild scheme of continued military resistance from across the Mediterranean’.
Although Clara favoured an early armistice to spare France the loss of more people, she insisted she was adamantly anti-German. Clara’s hostility to Germany dated to her Washington years, when the French and German embassies vied for influence over American opinion. She detested German behaviour during the Great War and believed Germany should have paid its full war reparations to France. She wrote that her son René ‘fully shared his parents’ anti-German feelings’. René founded the French Information Center in New York before the Second World War to counter