Jean de Laborde (29 November 1878-30 July 1977) was an Admiral of France who served in the Boxer Rebellion, World War I, and World War II. He defected to Vichy France in 1940 and scuttled the French fleet at Toulon rather than let the Axis Powers or the United Kingdom capture it, and his life imprisonment sentence by the Allied Powers after the war was overturned in 1947.
Biography[]
Jean de Laborde was born on 29 November 1878 in Chantilly, France, and he entered the naval school in 1895. Laborde served overseas in the Boxer Rebellion in China before becoming a pilot in 1914 in Siam, and during World War I he commanded an air unit from Dunkirk. In 1925, between the world wars, Laborde became the head of naval aviation and was given command of the Bearn, France's first aircraft carrier. In 1938, he was promoted to full Admiral, and in 1940 he became the commander of Vichy France's navy after Nazi Germany invaded France and forced Philippe Petain to sign an armistice and set up a puppet government with the Germans. Minister of Marine Gabriel Auphan denied Laborde's plan to attack the Allied fleet carrying out Operation Torch in 1942, and Laborde harbored a hatred of the United Kingdom and Charles de Gaulle. When Germany occupied southern France after Francois Darlan's armistice with the Allies in North Africa, Laborde decided to scuttle the whole French fleet at Toulon to prevent it from falling in German, Italian, or British hands. During the "legal purge" by De Gaulle after World War II's end in 1945, Laborde was sentenced to death; this was commuted to life imprisonment, and then overturned in 1947. He died in 1977 at the age of 98 in Castillon-la-Bastille.