Stavisky Affair

Alexandre Stavisky

The Stavisky Affair was a 1934 financial scandal generated by the actions of embezzler Alexandre Stavisky. It had political ramifications for the FrenchRadical Socialist moderate government of the day. The scandal was described by the New Yorker'sParis correspondent Janet Flanner as follows:

“

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.

The affaire Stavisky went public with Stavisky's arrest, escape and death and rumors of murder. Then his long criminal record as an embezzler andconfidence trickster went public. The suicide or murder, the losses many of the general public suffered, and his close involvement with so many ministers led to the resignation of premier Camille Chautemps amidst accusations from the right-wingopposition that Chautemps and his police had intentionally killed Stavisky to protect influential people.

Chautemps was replaced by Édouard Daladier from the same Radical-Socialist Party. 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. Next Daladier dismissed the director of the Comédie Française, who had been staging William Shakespeare's anti-democratic Coriolanus and replaced him with the head of the Sûreté-Générale, who was as reliablyleftist as the Paris police chief had been of the right. He also appointed a new Interior Minister, Eugène Frot, who announced that demonstrators would be shot.

The dismissal of the Prefect by the Paris police was the immediate cause of the 6 February 1934 crisis, which the historian Alfred Cobbancharacterizes^{[citation needed]} as a right-wing putsch. It would be more accurately characterized as a "putsch attempt", in the words of French historianSerge Bernstein.^{[citation needed]} However, the left-wing at the time did fear an overt fascist conspiracy. Fomented by conservative, anti-Semitic, monarchist, and fascist groups, including Action Française (AF's leader, the novelist Léon Daudet, called the government "a gang of robbers and assassins"), theCroix-de-Feu and the Mouvement Franciste, the riots resulted in fourteen deaths over six hours on the night of 6–7 February 1934 at the hands of 800 police. The événement failed in its aim of overthrowing the Third Republic (1871–1940) but Daladier had to resign. His successor was conservative Gaston Doumergue who created acoalition cabinet. It was the first time during the Third Republic that a government had to resign before the pressure of the streets. They also led to the formation of anti-fascism leagues and to the agreement between the SFIO socialist party and thecommunist party, which in turn led to the 1936Popular Front.

SOURCE : Wikipedia