magistrates’ unions want to have the portrait of Pierre Laval, still present at the Ministry of Justice, taken down

The request is not new. However, the ministry does not intend to change anything, he argues, to face the dark sides of our history.

Several magistrates’ unions from the Paris Court of Appeal will meet the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, on Tuesday February 13, and will ask him to take down the portrait of Pierre Laval, France Culture has learned. Number 2 of the Vichy regime is still displayed on the wall of the large gallery of the Ministry of Justice, where the portraits of former ministers are present.

This is not the first time that ministry employees have asked to remove the embarrassing portrait of one of the main figures of the Collaboration, short-lived Minister of Justice in 1926. Béatrice Brugère, magistrate and general secretary of the Unité- union Magistrate SNM FO, has already made this request twice, orally. The CGT of Chancelleries and Judicial Services has also already raised awareness on the subject five years ago. In vain. The matter will therefore be raised again on Tuesday morning, during a meeting between the unions and the current Minister of Justice, Éric Dupont-Moretti. The CGT will ask that this portrait be covered with a black background, as at the Quai d’Orsay.

Because in 2018, the same controversy took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Pierre Laval was the head of French diplomacy between 1934 and 1936. The minister at the time, Jean-Yves Le Drian, then decided that the portrait of the former head of the Vichy government would be replaced by a black background.

“Convinced of national unworthiness”

This is not what the Ministry of Justice decided in 2019, which preferred to add a note to the portrait master key: “Convinced of national unworthiness, Pierre Laval was condemned to national degradation on March 9, 1945”. What is missing is that he was subsequently sentenced to death for high treason and conspiracy, before being shot. Contacted by France Culture, the Ministry of Justice does not currently intend to modify either the portrait or its mention installed in 2019, arguing that this allows us to face the dark sides of our history and that a darkening might draw too much attention to this character.

Pierre Laval is known to be one of the most hated characters in French history. Few people apart from him have attracted so much hatred, before sinking into oblivion, confirmed the historian Renaud Meltz, one of his biographers, to France Culture.