Stavisky affair

The Stavisky affair, involving embezzler Alexandre Stavisky, was a financial scandal in France in 1934. The scandal had political ramifications for the Radical Socialist moderate government of the day when it was revealed that Prime Minister Camille Chautemps had protected Stavisky, who suddenly died in mysterious circumstances. The political right engaged in large anti-government demonstrations on 6 February 1934, resulting in Paris police firing upon and killing fifteen demonstrators. A right-wing coup d'état seemed like a possibility at the time, but historians agree that the multiple right-wing forces were uncoordinated and not trying to overthrow the government.[1]

Alexandre Stavisky
Police Magazine
14 January 1934

Stavisky

Serge Alexandre Stavisky (1888–1934), who became known as le beau Sacha ("Handsome Sasha"), was a Russian Jew born in modern-day Ukraine whose parents had moved to France. Stavisky tried his hand at various professions, working as a café singer, a nightclub manager, a soup factory worker, and as the operator of a gambling den. In the 1930s he managed municipal pawnshops in Bayonne but also moved in financial circles. Stavisky sold lots of worthless bonds and financed his "hockshop" on the surety of what he called the emeralds of the late Empress of Germany—which later turned out to be glass.

Stavisky maintained his façade by using his connections to many people in important positions. If a newspaper tried to investigate his affairs, he bought them off, either with large advertisement contracts or by buying the paper.

In 1927 Stavisky was put on trial for fraud for the first time. However, the trial was postponed repeatedly and he was granted bail nineteen times. Stavisky probably continued his scams during this time. One judge who claimed to hold secret documents involving Stavisky was later found decapitated. Janet Flanner wrote:

The scheme which finally killed Alexandre Stavisky, his political guests' reputations, and the uninvited public's peace of mind, was his emission of hundreds of millions of francs' worth of false bonds on the city of Bayonne's municipal pawnshop, which were bought up by life-insurance companies, counseled by the Minister of Colonies, who was counseled by the Minister of Commerce, who was counseled by the Mayor of Bayonne, who was counseled by the little manager of the hockshop, who was counseled by Stavisky.[2]

Faced with exposure in December 1933, Stavisky fled. On 8 January 1934, the police found him in a chalet in Chamonix, dying from a gunshot wound. Stavisky was officially determined to have committed suicide, but there was a persistent speculation that police officers had killed him. Fourteen Parisian newspapers reported his death as a suicide, but eight did not. The distance the bullet had traveled led Le Canard enchaîné to propose the tongue-in-cheek theory that Stavisky had "a long arm".

Political crisis of 6 February 1934

After Stavisky's death, details about his long criminal history, his ties to the French establishment, and his controversial death became publicized. His close involvement with so many ministers led to the resignation of Prime Minister Camille Chautemps amidst accusations from the right-wing opposition that he and his police had intentionally killed Stavisky to protect influential people. When Chautemps was replaced by Édouard Daladier, one of his first acts was to dismiss the prefect of the Paris police, Jean Chiappe, notorious for his right-wing sympathies and suspected of encouraging previous anti-government demonstrations. Daladier then dismissed the director of the Comédie Française, who had been staging William Shakespeare's controversial play Coriolanus, and replaced him with the head of the Sûreté-Générale, a supporter of Chautemps and Daladier's centre-left Radical Socialist Party. He also appointed a new Interior Minister, Eugène Frot, who announced that demonstrators would be shot.

The dismissal of Chiappe was the immediate cause of the 6 February 1934 crisis, which some saw as a possible right-wing putsch. According to historian Joel Colton, "The consensus among scholars is that there was no concerted or unified design to seize power and that the police lacked the coherence, unity, or leadership to accomplish such an end."[3] The historian of fascism, René Rémond, described it as "barely a riot ... a street demonstration".[4]

However, the left feared an overt fascist conspiracy. Fomented by several conservative, anti-Semitic, monarchist, or fascist groups, including Action Française, the Croix-de-Feu and the Mouvement Franciste, the demonstration took place on the night of 6–7 February 1934. The police fired upon and killed fifteen demonstrators. Daladier was forced to resign. His successor was conservative Gaston Doumergue, who formed a coalition government. It was the first time during the Third Republic that a government had to resign owing to oppositional rioters. Other results were the formation of anti-fascism leagues and an alliance between the SFIO socialist party and the French Communist Party, which in turn led to the 1936 Popular Front.

Further consequences

The scandal engulfed a remarkable range of personalities from politics, high society and the literary-intellectual elite of Paris. Mistinguett was asked why she had been photographed with Stavisky at a nightclub; Georges Simenon reported on the unfolding affair and Stavisky's ex-bodyguard threatened him with physical violence; Colette, referring to the inability of any of Stavisky's high-placed friends to remember him, described the dead con-artist as "a man with no face".

A trial of twenty people associated with Stavisky began in 1935. Printed charges were 1200 pages long. All of the accused, including Stavisky's widow, two deputies, and one general, were acquitted the following year. The amount defrauded was estimated to be the equivalent of $18 million at then prevailing exchange rates plus an additional $54 million that came within months of being attained. The location of Stavisky's wealth is still unknown.

The Stavisky Affair left France internally weakened. The country remained deeply divided for the rest of the decade, but the political weaknesses it exposed and exacerbated were not confined to France. The Affair was emblematic of a broader erosion of democratic values and institutions in post-World War I Europe.

Portraits of the affair

French film director Alain Resnais told the story in the 1974 film Stavisky, featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role and Anny Duperey as his wife Arlette.

In Forces occultes, a film commissioned in 1942 by the "Propaganda Abteilung", a delegation of Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry within occupied France, Stavisky was presented as both a Freemason and a crook.

Hollywood released a depiction in 1937 with Stolen Holiday, starring Claude Rains as Stavisky's fictional counterpart, Stefan Orloff, and Kay Francis as his wife. Stolen Holiday asserted unequivocally that Orloff was shot by police and his death made to look like a suicide.

See also

Notes
  1. Paul F. Jankowski, Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (2002)
  2. Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday (1972)
  3. Joel Colton, "Politics and economics in the 1930s" in From the Ancien Regime to the Popular Front, ed. Charles K. Warner (1969), p. 183
  4. Peter Davies, The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present: From de Maistre to Le Pen (Routledge, 2002), p. 96.

Sources
  • Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 3: 1871–1962 (1965). Penguin Books. (No ISBN)
  • Janet Flanner (Genêt), Paris was Yesterday, (1972), articles from The New Yorker, 1925–1939. ISBN 0-207-95508-5
  • Paul Jankowski, Stavisky – A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue, (2002) ISBN 0-8014-3959-0
  • Large, David Clay, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (W. W. Norton: 1990) pp. 24–58, a scholarly account
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