FRANCE: Without Honor

Pierre Laval spent his last days in sackcloth in the death row of the Fresnes prison. He wrote farewell letters to his family, his lawyers. He chain-smoked. His grieving wife cried that the people who “got France into the war so unprepared” now wanted to silence him with death. General Charles de Gaulle refused every request for a new or re-opened trial; the grotesquerie of the first one had revolted all France.

Laval turned philosopher. To a fellow prisoner going to death he said: “Ne t’en fais pas: it lasts only a few seconds . . . it’s like being killed in a bus accident on the Place de 1’Opéra.”

For Laval, death was like a very messy bus accident. He was lying on his cot as officials approached the cell to take him. Before they could reach him, he slipped a poison capsule into his mouth, rolled writhing to the floor.

For two hours prison doctors labored over the prostrate Auvergnat with emetics and stomach pumps. They postponed his death, but they could not make him stand up. The firing squad waited. At length two men escorted him to the stake. A hearse stood by, a coffin rested on the ground.

Tied to the stake, Laval stood facing the rifle points. “Vive la France,” he cried. The volley sent a chilly stir through the prison building.

Slowly Laval sank to his knees. An officer rushed to the bending figure, fired a final bullet into his ear. Pierre Laval’s death, like his life, had brought no honor to France.