René Floriot

René Edmond Floriot (20 October 1902, Paris – 22 December 1975, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French lawyer.

Life

Père-Lachaise Cemetery"Son of a Paris municipal clerk, Floriot studied law at the Sorbonne, started practicing before his 21st birthday. In the 1930s, he prospered by winning divorces for the wealthy in a week, though the cumbersome process usually takes two to three years in France. After the war, he unabashedly defended war criminals and collaborators."

Floriot drove "a research staff of six lawyers, known as "l'usine Floriot" (the Floriot factory). Gifted with prodigious memory, he can simplify the most complex case for the dullest of jurors. While other French lawyers deliver elegantly vague speeches to nodding, berobed judges, Floriot deals in facts, not forensic flourishes. In a profession heavily weighted toward lawyers with social standing, Floriot has succeeded entirely on drive and shrewdness."

Later he participated in some film productions.

People defended by Floriot Otto Abetz Floriot "saved Otto Abetz, the hated Nazi German ambassador to Vichy France, from execution; Abetz received 20 years imprisonment, was later freed, and died in a car accident."

Pierre Jaccoud "In his most spectacular murder trial (1960), Floriot defended Swiss Lawyer-Politician Pierre Jaccoud, onetime dean of the Geneva bar. Police had the murder weapon; witnesses insisted that Jaccoud had shot and stabbed the father of a man who had stolen his mistress. But Floriot harried the witnesses into damaging concessions about the murder weapon, wrung lurid testimony from the mistress. He airily dismissed Jaccoud's lack of alibi: "Only criminals have alibis. Intelligent people never remember how they spend their evenings." Jaccoud got seven years."