Josée did her best to assemble the most experienced team of defence lawyers, while her husband, René de Chambrun, having largely spent the war in America, now returned to support his wife and father-in-law. He assured the press that, with enough time to summon documents and witnesses from abroad, Laval could refute all charges. Laval’s short trial – one that a number of historians believe today was deeply flawed, reflecting the poisonous political atmosphere in France at the time – began on 5 October 1945 and lasted just over a week. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Following a failed suicide attempt – Laval swallowed poison so old that it failed to work adequately and he was revived by use of a stomach pump – he was executed by firing squad on 15 October. His was one of just three death penalties imposed on politicians in the following four years.*
The instant the verdict was announced, Josée, apparently, was seized by fright. She was ‘stricken like a wounded animal. The brilliant light of those extraordinary eyes was suddenly extinguished as she stared blankly at all those around her and at a fate she could not accept.’ But she quickly recovered. Childless, she devoted the rest of her life to the fight to clear her father’s name, and to caring for her dogs. In the grounds of the family mansion at Chateldon in central France, she had a well-tended dog cemetery resembling those surrounding ancient village churches. Each pet, having died of natural causes, had its own engraved tombstone. There was Barye (1890), Pompée (1891), Madou (1908), Brutus (1909), all buried before she was born. But then came ‘Whisky, 1948–1962, the issue of Soko, loyal friend of my father’. It was seeing the tombstone for a dog that had once belonged to Pierre Laval, the man who said in his own defence that he had encouraged the deportation of children under the age of sixteen in order that families should not be separated, that prompted the author Philippe Grimbert, son of Holocaust victims, to realize that part of his ongoing trauma resulted from the fact that his dead half-brother and mother had never been remembered properly. The thought that even Pierre Laval’s dogs were being honoured in death so outraged Grimbert that he was inspired to write a bestselling autobiographical novel called A Secret.
Josée de Chambrun died in 1992, at which point her husband handed over her papers to Yves Pourcher, her biographer. According to Pourcher, her faith in her father was like a religion. ‘She never accepted that he had had a fair trial and battled to the end. She had a limitless admiration for her father.’
There were not many people, other than daughters and wives, prepared to speak up for those on trial for collaboration. And sometimes families turned upon one another. Agnès Humbert, a member of the early Musée de l’Homme resistance group, had survived a sentence of five years’ slave labour at Anrath prison in Germany. Forced to work in gruesome conditions at a nearby rayon factory where many workers went blind, she survived against the odds and was freed by American troops in early 1945. She then worked alongside these troops for two months, setting up soup kitchens and first-aid posts for German civilians, returning to Paris eventually in the summer. There she learned that one of her sons, Jean Sabbagh, a naval lieutenant, had spent two days following the Liberation under arrest in Bordeaux because of his position there during 1944 in charge of the Harbour Police. She wrote to Jean: ‘Monsieur, I understand that you [she used the formal ‘vous’] were arrested for collaboration with the enemy. Henceforth you will therefore no longer consider yourself as my son.’ Some months later there was a reconciliation of sorts. But irreparable damage had been done to the family.
One of those who went out of her way to help a collaborator was Simone Signoret, schoolfriend of Corinne Luchaire, when she heard that both father and daughter had been arrested in May and were awaiting trial in Fresnes. Simone was by 1945 ‘an actress without a contract, a future unwed mother’. André Kaminker, Simone’s Jewish father, had now returned to France with the Free French to find, as Simone put it, his ‘pretty child pregnant thanks to the labours of a director who had never directed anything and, just to round everything off, was the younger brother of Colonel Allégret, who was my father’s direct superior in the chain of command that led to General de Gaulle’. Reminding her father how her job at Luchaire’s paper Les Nouveaux Temps had been so critical for a time in ensuring his family did not starve, she immediately asked him to file a deposition in support of Jean Luchaire, ‘the same Luchaire who had provided his family with a livelihood for a little while’.