Alexandre Stavisky

Alexandre Stavisky, July 1926

Serge Alexandre Stavisky (born November 20, 1886 in Slobodka, Kyiv Governorate , Ukraine ; † January 8, 1934 in Chamonix ) was a Franco-Ukrainian impostor, financial juggler and fraudster, whose affair in 1933/34 shook the Third French Republic severely.

The history

Stavisky, called the "beautiful Sascha", was born in the Ukraine to Jewish parents. His parents immigrated with him via Hungary to France in 1899, where his father then became a dentist .

He committed his first scams as a teenager, when he used forged business cards to trick himself into theater tickets. In 1909 he and his grandfather cheated on investors with a sham theater company. In 1925 he founded a front company for soup production, the shares of which he sold. From July 1926, he spent 17 months in La Santé prison after organizing a stock fraud and issuing forged treasury notes. After he was released from pre-trial detention in 1927 , he managed to postpone his trial again and again (19 times in total) against bail with political help. In his other companies, he made it a point to involve prominent business people, aristocrats, high officers and politicians.

He founded a company called "Phébor", which made wooden refrigerators on paper for the African colonies, but had the small disadvantage that they did not cool. In 1928 he developed a new fraud scheme in Orléans : Using counterfeit emeralds (allegedly partly from the last German Empress) as security, he took out loans from municipal pawn shops .

When repayment difficulties arose in 1930, he and partners founded a new municipal pawnshop bank (Crédit municipal) in Bayonne , through which he ultimately placed counterfeit bonds from the city of Bayonne worth over two hundred million francs. B. were bought by life insurers and union pension funds after Stavisky claimed they were guaranteed by the state. He had the backing of high-ranking politicians like the Mayor of Bayonne, Joseph Garat.

Stavisky played an important role in society, ran night clubs and organized games of chance. If reporters got too close to him, he simply bought the newspapers or gave them large advertising contracts in order to influence their reporting in his mind. Finally, serious investigations into his financial structures began, which he wanted to expand even further by founding state-funded development funds operating throughout Europe - at that time there was a depression.

The scandal

When his vertigo was close to being exposed, Stavisky fled in December 1933. On January 8, 1934, he was found with a fatal gunshot wound in a villa in Chamonix. He was dying when the police stormed inside. Suicide was officially identified as the cause of death, but rumors of police involvement continued. A judge involved in the Stavisky trial, Counselor Albert Prince, was found beheaded after allegedly threatening to publish documents. Since Stavisky was a Jew, anti-Semitic tendencies arose in connection with the affair , reminiscent of the Dreyfus scandal . In 1935 several accomplices were charged, including his widow and a general. Although the prosecution was very complex (the indictment contained 1200 pages), the trial ended in 1936 with acquittals for all of the accused. The whereabouts of Stavisky's fortune could never be clarified. He had lost part of it playing baccarat .

Political Consequences

The scandal shook the Third Republic and the ruling Radical Socialist Party , whose corruptibility he made evident. The " Action française " accused Prime Minister Camille Chautemps of having initiated Stavisky's murder for fear of exposing corruption. After violent press attacks and demonstrations, Chautemps resigned on January 27, 1934. His successor Édouard Daladier (also from the Radical Socialists) replaced Jean Chiappe, the right-wing police prefect of Paris, who was accused by left-wing groups of being involved in the alleged murder of Stavisky. On February 6, 1934, bloody street riots broke out in Paris , organized by right-wing groups ( Ligue d'Action française , former front-line fighters, right-wing city councilors), took on almost coup-like proportions and resulted in 14 deaths and over 2,000 injuries. After Daladier's cabinet was attacked in the press on February 7th as the "government of the murderers", new demonstrations started and parts of the administration and judiciary opposed the implementation of the repressive measures ordered, Daladier resigned. His successor was the conservative Gaston Doumergue , who formed a cabinet of the "National Union" with the participation of the radical socialists. The ongoing demonstrations were not as strong as before, were massively suppressed again by order of the new government and resulted in two more deaths and several hundred additional injuries on the evening of February 7th. There were no further demonstrations in the days that followed.

Literary and cinematic aftermath

Georges Simenon tried to shed light on the affair in reports in 1934, but was not very successful in his own estimation. In the 1943 film Forces Occultes, commissioned by the German propaganda department in 1942, he is portrayed as a freemason and a crook. In 1974 Alain Resnais' affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role of Stavisky and Anny Duperey was filmed under the title Stavisky .

literature

• Georges Simenon : Payday in a Bank , Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-21224-0 (Reports, Stavisky ou La Machine à Suicider ), first edition 1934
• Ilja Ehrenburg : People - Years - Lives (Memoirs), Munich 1962, special edition Munich 1965, Volume II 1923–1941, ISBN 3-463-00512-3 , pages 315–318
• Frank Arnau : "Talents on the wrong track" , Ullstein Verlag, 1964
• Paul Jankowski: Stavisky - A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue , Cornell University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8014-3959-0

Web links

• Review of Jankowski's book by Mouré
• Stavisky in the Internet Movie Database (English)

References and comments

1. ^ Wilfried Loth : History of France in the 20th Century (pp. 84–86) S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1992. ISBN 3-596-10860-8
2. ↑ Ehrenburg, then a correspondent in Paris, claims that Stavisky was shot by a police agent named Voie. He also describes the unrest that was triggered.