(4 of 5)
September: Taking Old Brer Briand in tow, Premier Laval junketed to Berlin, conferred with Chancellor Bruning and Foreign Minister Curtius (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."— 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 (see p. 7).
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 (see col. 3).
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.