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In his university years, while gayer lads of the Latin Quarter caroused, Mendès sat up nights arguing with friends about the devaluation of the franc, organized leftist lectures and debating clubs. Once he was cornered by rowdy royalists who tried to throw him out a second-story window, but succeeded only in breaking his nose.
Edouard Herriot, hearing young Mendès speak extemporaneously (he had lost his notes) at a Radical Socialist meeting, told him: "You are one of the most brilliant minds for your age I have ever met." The next year, Mendès became, at 21, the youngest lawyer in France; his thesis on Raymond Poincare's financial policy was published and provoked a long letter from Premier Poincare himself.
At the urging of fellow Radical Socialists (they are a moderate businessmen's party), Mendès moved to the Normandy town of Louviers to set up law practice and run for Deputy. Just four months over the legal age for Deputies (25) in 1932, he squeezed out a victory over the conservative rival, when the Communist candidate withdrew in his favor. He was the youngest Deputy in France.
His victory in a conservative stronghold marked him as a coming man. In 1933, when he married beautiful, Egyptian-born Lily Cicurel, whose family owns Cairo's most fashionable department store, the two witnesses at the wedding were Cabinet ministers—Edouard Daladier and Georges Bonnet.
With impressive energy, Mendès worked at politicking, wrote extensively on international economics, and began a history of Germany (the manuscript was lost during the war). In 1935, he was elected mayor of Louviers. He is still mayor, and delights in the job. "The inertia of the Assembly in Paris has always made him suffer," says a friend. "Out in Louviers, he can see his ideas take shape."
In France, it is often useful to have two political careers at once: one national, one local. The young mayor's economic ideas were brought to the attention of Leon Blum, then trying to form his second Popular Front government, and in 1938 Pierre Mendès-France, only 31, was made Under Secretary of State for the Treasury, the youngest government member of the Third Republic.
Mendès' program in that crisis-crammed year called for mobilizing production for war. The Senate rejected the plan, and the Blum government fell. "A policy of abandonment and cowardice would not avoid war," said Mendès later. "It would only lead to a war in which we would be faced with worse conditions." Out of that brief episode came Mendès' friendship with Georges Boris, a leftist journalist turned civil servant, who had recommended Mendès to Premier Blum. Now a crisp old gentleman in his 60s, Boris is Mendès' chief of Cabinet, the only man older than Mendès himself in his immediate entourage and his only really intimate friend.