Foreign News: Premier’s Pockets

FRANCE-GERMANY

(See front cover)

Premier Pierre Laval and Foreign Minister Aristide Briand emerged from a cabinet meeting in the Elysée Palace last week in high good humor. A little knot of passersby, a few photographers were waiting for them. The pockets of the Prime Minister’s neat blue suit bulged with strange objects. While shutters clicked there were impolite but audible comments on what was in them. A mousetrap? Fromage de Brie? Fishhooks?

“Mais quoi donc!” piped a voice. “Those are the things he’s going to talk about in Berlin next week!”

M. Laval laughed aloud. The little crowd raised the ancient war cry of three French armies, “A Berlin! A Berlin!”

All of France wanted to know what was in the Premier’s pockets. It was not enough for them that Mm. Laval and Briand were about to make an historic gesture,that they were about to pay the first official visit to Germany that any leading French statesman has made since Napoleon. They wanted to know what good it would do. What would they talk about when they got there? WhenChancellor Brüning and German Foreign Minister Julius Curtius paid their visit to Paris two months ago (TIME, July 27) the world Press felt that the mere fact that German statesmen had made such a visit was cause enough for celebration. Not so the logical French. They complained bitterly that the German statesmen had come with no definite plan, had made no concrete offers to improve Franco-German relations, that they had carefully kept every conversation to a series of polite generalities. There is a large intractable lump of the French population who want no traffic whatever with France’s hereditary enemy. Fortunately they are far from a majority, but the rest demand results. Newspapers did their best to answer the question that all Frenchmen were asking, “What good will it do?”

The Press got little help from the French Foreign Office. The only official statement on the objects of the Berlin visit last week was a brief announcement to the effect that conversations in Berlin will be limited to economic questions entirely. No political questions will be broached. Correspondents sifting through bales of rumor found definite points of discussion:

1) Plans are to be made for a permanent Committee on Franco-GermanCooperation, preferably of businessmen, not politicians, to handle economic problems arising between the two nations.

2) There will be discussion on extending the present Franco-German cartels in the iron, steel, dyestuffs and potash industries.

3) One thing that the French statesmen really can do is to try to put an end to cut-throat Franco-German competition in the North Atlantic maritime trade. So successful has been the revived German merchant marine in weaning U. S. freight and tourists from the French that the subsidized French Line was forced three months ago to ask for an even larger government subsidy. The Government promised that the subsidy for the New York line alone would be raised from 4,000,000 to 30,000,000 francs a year, and in return delegated former Minister of Finance Louis Germain-Martin and a new board of directors to reorganize the line. But with a French loan to dangle before German noses, Mm. Laval & Briand could do far more for the line than any board of directors.

Berlin Preparations. German police had their hands full preparing for the fateful visit this week. There were thousands of peaceable Germans eagerly awaiting their coming. There were other thousands chafing under the thought of France’s mastery of Europe, ready to try something desperate. The Frenchmen would only be in the capital two days. Every move, every minute was planned for. Policemen spent long hours deciding whether it would be safer for the visitors to disembark from the Friedrichstrasse station nearest to the French Embassy, but surrounded by tall roofs that offered good shelter to snipers, or whether they should be rushed across the city and through the Tiergarten from the more secluded Lehrter terminal.

White Ties. Premier Laval was not only risking his life in going to Berlin, he was gambling with one of the most meteoric careers in French politics. It is a tradition that any French Premier who leaves the country for more than three days will find himself out of office by the time he gets back. The much travelled Brer Briand, eleven times Premier of France, proved it over & over again. André Tardieu’s trip to London in 1930 cost him his job. Even though the Chamber of Deputies will not meet until November, Premier Laval was taking chances.

A year ago, before the German and British crises, Pierre Laval, Senator and Mayor of the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers, was as little known as Calvin Coolidge before the Boston police strike. Foreign correspondents called him ”the man with the white necktie” for, following the international tradition that politicians must have some idiosyncrasy of dress, he always wears a washable white cravat.

Swart, stocky Pierre Laval was born in the barren, backward region of Auvergne in the little village of Châteldon. His father was a grocer. Young Pierre used to drive a butcher’s cart. It is the Laval legend that the village priest discovered him one day delivering salami and reading Ovid. He helped him with his studies. Pierre Laval became a schoolmaster, then a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in Paris and in due time became Mayor of Aubervilliers. In May 1914 he became a Deputy and was listed almost immediately as a violent Socialist. When War broke out Pierre Laval was drafted, entered the army as a common poilu, saw actual service at the front.

In 1920 the French Communist Party was organized by a group of left-wing Socialists under Marcel Cachin. White-tied Laval disliked Communism and was disgusted at the growing conservatism of the other old-line Socialists. He broke away from the party altogether and has remained a complete independent. What political allegiance he owes is to that wily old Pacifist Aristide Briand. Before his Premiership, he flashed twice in the news. As Minister of Labor in the second Tardieu Government he put through the Social Insurance Act, France’s employer’s liability law. It was Pierre Laval, too, who authorized the use of typewriters in France’s antiquated Department of Justice.

Blue-jowled, rather unprepossessing in appearance, Pierre Laval tries hard to be a charmer. His voice is soft and pleasant to those who do not mind an Auvergne accent, and though he can be as stubborn as Herbert Hoover, he maintains a great show of personal modesty. Nasal voiced Chancellor Brüning, who speaks French and English fluently (Laval speaks neither English nor German), beamed at him in Paris last month when sly Premier Laval modestly explained: “You see, I am just learning this business of international discussion.”

On To Washington? Until he went to London for the Hoover Moratorium conference two months ago, Pierre Laval had never played an important part outside of France. This week he not only is on his way to Berlin, but has shown some desire to go to Washington before the Chamber of Deputies could assemble in November. The French Wall Street Journal, L’Information, sent up a trial balloon:

“We have learned from a reliable source that President Hoover has expressed a desire for a personal conference with Premier Laval on world problems after the latter’s visit to Berlin. . . .

“Mr. Hoover has heard and constantly hears the viewpoints of Britain and Germany . . . and for that reason is prone to judge us with a severity which is painful to France. . . . Since both countries are convinced of the necessity of Franco-American collaboration, why not discuss it in the only proper way?”

In Washington, Mr. Hoover said that as a matter of fact he had not expressed any desire for an interview with M. Laval, but now that the subject had come up it was not a bad idea. French newspapers proposed that since Premier Laval speaks no English he had better take Finance Minister Pierre Etienne Flandin with him, and then made out another little list of things for Laval to talk about in Washington:

1) He must explain the unchanging French attitude of demanding security before arms reduction.

2 ) He must insist on the sanctity of the Young Plan and the eventual resumption of German Reparations payments.

3) He might sound out Mr. Hoover on the old problem of the connection between War Debts and Reparations.

Knowing observers, realizing the tenseness of French domestic politics, were skeptical of the Washington visit ever materializing.