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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 Protégé 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 singlehanded, hurling his famed defy—"Presi-dent 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