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role in pre-World War II diplomacy
...and King Alexander of Yugoslavia were shot dead in Marseille by an agent of Croatian terrorists. The new French foreign minister, the rightist Pierre Laval, was especially friendly to Rome. The Laval–Mussolini agreements of Jan. 7, 1935, declared France’s disinterest in the fate of Abyssinia in implicit exchange for Italian support of Austria. Mussolini took this to mean that he had...