lar would be at once the most powerful and the most able to facilitate control of the population by the select (and conservative and qualified and privileged) few. The way in which this pattern of activity developed in Laval's career may be seen in his conduct of French foreign policy toward Germany. In this regard, Warner anchors his study of Laval on his foreign policy: "Domestic affairs were of course important during this period [1931 45], but the . . . fact that, for good or ill, Laval's major impact was in the field of foreign affairs inevitably made foreign policy the centre of attention. . . . [T]he main focus is upon Franco German relations, and her no explanation is necessary beyond the fact that this was how Laval saw things too" (9:xiii).
What was to come for Laval and for France under his influence as regards foreign affairs has been tied to his attitude toward domestic affairs. Shirer cites the fascist led 1931 riots that brought down the democratically elected parliamentary government of the Third Republic and says that the extreme right wing leader of the riots, Colonel Francois de la Rocque, had made plans with the conservative head of the French military, Marshall Petain, to establish a revolutionary provisional government that would include Petain and Pierre Laval. In the event, de la Rocque did not physically invade the French parliament. Shirer believes, however, that an attitude fearful of authentic representative government and congenial to right wing government by fiat that would arise in 1940. As he describes it,
What was true was that La Rocque's storm troops could have taken the Palais Bourbon, chased out the
deputies, and assumed the lead in setting up a
provisional government. . . . On the night of February
6 [1931], in fact, the seeds were sown that later would
make Petain and Laval the chief actors in buying the
...