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“Pierre Laval[‘s ...] political history is minutely recounted in Geoffrey Warner’s study... Mr. Warner seems to have read all the records and basic material... The book [... is] not dramatic history, but then Pierre Laval was not the stuff heroes are made up either.” — The New York Times
“[T]he first meticulously researched political biography of Pierre Laval. In particular, by mastering a daunting mass of contemporary documentation, German, Italian, and American, [Geoffrey Warner] has freed his subject from the self-serving perspectives of French postwar trials and memoirs. The result is an original assessment and the soundest work on Laval in any language.” — The Journal of Modern History
“Geoffrey Warner’s lengthy study of Laval is [...] scholarly, readable, far and away the best thing on the man, and one of the most interesting accounts of the last years of the Third Republic and of the French State which followed it for four years. The point of view is detached and critical, the proportions, particularly for foreign affairs, are generous [... a] very good book” — International Journal
“With remarkable diligence, Warner has scrutinized all the available evidence — the memoirs, the diaries, the testimony at the liberation trials, the depositions before the parliamentary investigations, and the available documents from the Foreign Office, and he has questioned as well a number of surviving participants. He uses his sources critically and applies extreme caution in his deductions [...] an extended, detailed account of the course of French affairs, principally diplomatic, in the 1930’s and 1940’s [...] everyone will be indebted to Warner for his painstaking examination of the record.” — The American Historical Review
“Geoffrey Warner’s life of Laval is a welcome reminder that serious history need not be dull. His book, with its easy-flowing style and numerous illustrations, looks at first sight like a typical popular biography. It is, in fact, a very scholarly work, supported by impressive research into primary and secondary sources, and its argument is distinguished by well-documented precision of the highest academic standard. This is likely to remain the most thorough biography of Laval for a long time.” — International Affairs
“Geoffrey Warner is to be commended for running a tight intellectual ship. It is quite a feat to steer adroitly through the key domestic and foreign developments of France from 1931 to 1945 and yet keep sharp focus on the primary object of examining, explaining, and evaluating Pierre Laval in his many roles over those fifteen years. The author lucidly exposes the standards and vision, the passions and prejudices, the consistencies and contradictions, the talents and shortcomings of Laval in his function as man, as parliamentarian, prime minister, and foreign minister during the Third Republic and then as multi-titled politician in the Vichy Regime. [...] Warner has been impeccable in his scholarship and sophisticated in his judgment.” — The Historian
“An exhaustive, multidimensioned, sometimes sprawling examination of what happened in France [...] from Laval’s first premiership to his execution.” — Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
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About the author
Born in 1937 in Swanley, London, England, Geoffrey Warner whose father was a cinematographer who ran picture houses during the war, moved with his family to Bourne End in Buckinghamshire where he attended grammar school (in High Wycombe).
Warner excelled at school and gained an open scholarship to read History at Cambridge, Sydney Sussex College, aged just 17. Following his degree, he studied for a PhD in Paris, France, then returned to Cambridge in 1959. He started his career by lecturing in history at Reading University and then in Canberra, Australia for three years before being appointed Professor of History at Hull University, followed by Leicester, and then Milton Keynes. Warner completed his career as a Professor at Oxford University’s Brasenose College where he was Supernumerary Fellow in Modern History.
Warner has authored some 15 books, one of his first being including Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France, 1931-1945, and many articles and papers. After retirement he still wrote books, the final one about the troubles in Northern Ireland, published when he was in his seventies.
