The Great Is Back

Over the hungry and stricken land there rose once more the deep-throated roar of Jacques ("The Great") Doriot.

In Bayonne, where the great Stavisky financial scandal had its origins, Jew-baiting Doriot, coatless and snapping his galluses, demanded immediate execution without trial of onetime Premiers Leon Blum and Paul Reynaud and onetime Minister of Interior Georges Mandel. He wanted their deaths as the first of a series of reprisals against civilian leaders who led France to war in 1939.

For 16 years, Doriot, a sweaty mountain of a man whose rubber-tired spectacles made the French think that he was somehow endowed with American go-get-'em, was a rabid Communist leader--until he was read out of the party in 1934. By 1937 he had attacked his old Communist comrades, welded unemployed and middle-class dissidents into the Germanophile People's Party with the aid of funds from Pierre Laval and other Rightists. He came to be known as the "coming Fuehrer of France." Later he disappeared politically into Franco Spain. But now, in 1942, with his old friend, shrewd, grubby Laval, again in power, Doriot had a France run more to his liking.

Doriot's claim, as Vichy had tried in farcical vain to prove at the discontinued Riom war-guilt trial, was that France--far from having been sabotaged by stupid militarists and demagogues of his own changeable colorations --had been "be trayed" by democratic leaders. A bomb tossed at him on April 20 had missed its mark. Frenchmen read into his Bayonne speech not only The Great's reply to the bombing but a new bid for power.

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