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Until war actually broke, Premier Laval had been scarcely popular, but the shock rallied Frenchmen to warm approval last week for his careful and realistic though tortuous diplomacy in 1935. While adapting his public statements to the Woodrow Wilsonian idea of League supremacy in Europe, an ideal cherished nowhere more ebulliently than in France. M. Laval in private made a pact with Mussolini giving him a "free hand" in Ethiopia (TIME, Jan. 14). In return Premier Laval won Italian support and friendship for France in place of the bitterness which had estranged these "Latin Sisters" for a decade and more.
What Realist-Idealist Pierre Laval failed to foresee was the emergence in Great Britain of passionate Leaguophilism as a factor in the coming British General Election. When this moved His Majesty's Government to send Sir Samuel Hoare to Geneva with demands for a League crackdown upon II Duce, Sir Samuel's remarks were seconded by M. Laval in a speech which one sympathetic editor called "Laval's intellectual crucifixion" (TIME, Sept. 23). As a sequel to this excruciating performance, neither Dictator Mussolini nor Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was in the least angry last week at Pierre Laval who retained his usefulness and that of France to the full as an "honest broker" among the Great Powers. The French Cabinet last week, though a vociferous third of its members are of Left (antiFascist) parties, ended by not daring to provoke the Croix de Fen. Voted by the Cabinet was unanimous approval of the Premier's acts thus far and support for his future policy at Geneva-understood in France to be that under no circumstances will France vote for or participate in military sanctions against Italy.