Laval Charges Doriot’s Anti-semitic Party is Plotting Against Him; Prohibits Meetings

Suspecting that under the guise of organising “direct anti-Jewish action,” Jacques Doriot, the leader of the anti-Semitic French Popular Party, is preparing an organized force of uniformed Storm Troopers for the purpose of seizing control of the Vichy Government, Premier Laval today announced that he will no longer permit Doriot’s organization to hold political mass-meetings in unoccupied France.

Practically all mass-meetings held by Doriot’s followers featured anti-Semitic slogans and many of them were followed by violence against Jews. In today’s statement, Laval, as chief of the Vichy Government, declares that he has discovered that the real aim of these meetings was to prepare the ground for Doriot to become the dictator of France, utilising the anti-Jewish propaganda and terror as a means of strengthening the ranks of his uniformed Storm Troopers which are organized on the model of the Brown Shirts in Germany.

“Doriot wants to take power for himself,” Laval said, “but the power is the Government, and I am so far the Chief of the Government.” Laval also disclosed that he and Doriot had a serious quarrel this week during a visit to Paris.

JEWISH WOMEN ATTORNEY APPEARS IN PARIS COURT WITH YELLOW BADGE ON ROBE

The Paris press sensationally features a story of how one of the two Jewish women still permitted to practice law in Paris appeared in a court there yesterday, prominently displaying a yellow Mogen David on her lawyer’s robe. Her husband, a French officer, was killed in the war.

Refraining from disclosing the women’s name, the collaborationist press in Paris terms her silent demonstration in court “a scandal.” Pro-German newspapers in Paris, in publishing the news, demand that Jews should be completely barred from practicing before French courts, irrespective of the services they may have rendered to France in the past.