Pierre Laval was a French politician whose collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War made his name a byword for treason. Born to a modest family in the Auvergne, he trained as a lawyer and began his career on the political left, championing pacifism and the working class, before drifting steadily toward the right over the following decades.
A shrewd and ambitious operator, Laval served repeatedly in French governments and twice as prime minister during the 1930s, gaining a reputation as a wily deal-maker. When France fell to Germany in 1940, he played a leading role in voting full powers to Marshal Pétain and became a principal figure in the collaborationist Vichy regime.
As Vichy's head of government from 1942, Laval pursued a policy of active collaboration with the German occupiers, declaring that he hoped for a German victory. He organized the dispatch of French workers to labor in Germany and, most damningly, presided over the deportation of Jews from France to the Nazi death camps.
When Germany was defeated and France liberated, Laval fled but was captured and returned to face justice. Tried for treason in a hasty and stormy proceeding, he was convicted and sentenced to death. After a failed suicide attempt by poison, he was revived and shot by a firing squad in 1945, his name forever linked with the darkest chapter of modern French history.