Historical story

Paris in revolt

The yellow vests have been in the news for weeks with their protests against tax increases. Ordinary life is becoming more and more expensive and wages are not rising. The comparison with the French Revolution of 1789 is easily made. But also in 1934 the French people took to the streets, which led to a coup attempt by the right.

The year 1934 already started restlessly. The illustrated sensation weekly Détective placed a startled looking blonde on the cover of its January issue. The caption read riotously:"1934 opens her anxious, distraught eyes to a future full of hatred, tragedies and disasters." In Paris there were strikes every once in a while. Makeshift barricades were erected on the wide boulevards and the police clashed with demonstrators in various places.

But on February 6, 1934, things really caught on. An angry mob tried to storm the Palais Bourbon via the Pont de la Concorde. The National Assembly of the Third French Republic – similar to the Dutch House of Representatives – gathered here to listen to the government statement of the newly appointed Daladier II cabinet. The angry mob demanded the departure of that cabinet and the appointment of a single strong leader, who would once firmly tackle "the corrupt political gang" in the Palais Bourbon. The Third Republic had to go!

Economic stagnation

What preceded this? France was in the doldrums in 1934. The country had still not recovered from the great losses it had suffered in World War I. A demographic crisis had arisen because ten percent of adult men had died in the trenches.

Reconstruction had been slow and relied heavily on German reparations. In the course of the 1920s, these continued to fail, and the Great Depression of 1929 was added on top of that. Due to the low population figures, unemployment initially remained low, but France was also hit hard in 1933.

Featured by the editors

MedicineWhat are the microplastics doing in my sunscreen?!

AstronomySun, sea and science

BiologyExpedition to melting land

Successive cabinets – five in 1933 alone – all chose not to devalue the franc and to keep the budget balanced, forcing many French people to cut spending themselves and keep their scarce money in their pockets. The result:total economic stagnation.

Jealous of German dynamism

Moreover, the Third Republic had become politically paralyzed. The moderate right-wing Radical Socialist Party has played a key role in the rapidly succeeding cabinets since 1924, opting for centre-left and centre-right coalition partners on one occasion.

But whatever political signature the cabinets had, they failed to solve the problems that plagued France. Politicians blamed each other for the misery and spent most of their time and energy fighting each other. In addition, there were numerous scandals; corruption and nepotism were not in the air.

In 1934, most French people no longer had any faith in the established political order. There was great distrust, especially on the extreme right flank of the political spectrum. There they feared a final economic collapse, followed by communist takeover. French conservatives looked jealously at neighboring Germany. Hitler was firmly in control in 1934 and under his leadership, the road was firmly established. The German dynamics contrasted sharply with the French standstill.

There were voices in right-wing circles to overthrow the Third Republic and follow the German example. Wealthy industrialists supported the conservative and anti-democratic Action Française and smaller far-right groups such as the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Solidarité Française and the Mouvement Franciste, who vehemently agitated against the government. The embittered war veterans of the Union Nationale des Combattants and the Croix de Feu were also involved.

Fake news

The media further fueled the unrest – a situation comparable to the disruptive influence of the polarized newspapers, news sites and TV channels during the recent US presidential election. In French illustrated weeklies such as Détective scandals and bankruptcies were widely reported. Every political movement had its own magazine and a fierce battle was fought in the newspaper columns.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism, which were always present in France at the time, were played out in books, films and articles. After the First World War, many French people felt abandoned by the Americans, who had withdrawn into isolation after their decisive contribution in the war, so anti-Americanism was also popular.

Informing the public was not high on the priority list. After all, it was much easier to blame all problems on foreigners and Jews and escape into exciting crime stories and sensational gossip. With a skewed eye on the sales figures, many media did not take it too closely with the truth. Newspapers affiliated with political organizations had their own agenda. Politics and sensationalism became entangled and fact and fiction became confused. Fake news avant la lettre.

The Stavisky Affair

At the end of 1933, the French media became fascinated by the affair surrounding Sacha Stavisky, a Russian Jewish immigrant who, during a long career as a con man, had worked his way up to the finer points of French business. Thanks to handy connections and through bribes, Stavisky managed to stay out of the hands of justice for years. His most profitable construction was the issuance of false bonds worth two hundred million francs through a municipal lending bank he co-founded in Bayonne.

When the economic crisis also reached France, Stavisky's customers tried to redeem their bonds in Bayonne, but were unsuccessful. The house of cards collapsed and within weeks Stavisky's scam network was rolled up. One corrupt official after another was arrested, and when Minister Albert Dalimier also turned out to be involved, the entire center-left Chautemps cabinet eventually fell over the affair.

Stavisky fled to Chamonix and committed suicide when the police showed up at his hiding place on January 8, 1934. However, according to the newspapers, there was no suicide at all, but the police had been ordered from above to kill Stavisky because he could reveal too many names. The right-wing press in particular called for the resignation of the government. Stavisky's suicide thus set the fuse in the political powder keg.

February 6, 1934

On February 6, all far-right groups, from the Action Française to the Croix de Feu, took to the streets. Some of the protesters eventually stormed the Palais Bourbon. Fifteen people were killed and 2,000 injured, but the police managed to disperse the crowd.

Center-left Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, incidentally, partly owed the popular anger to himself. He had just fired popular Parisian police commissioner Jean Chiappe in an attempt to clean up and promoted several suspected officials over the Stavisky affair – fueling suspicions that politicians were fighting each other.

The Daladier cabinet tendered its resignation and center-right Gaston Doumergue took over. The sting had now been taken out of the Stavisky affair. Because the anti-democratic camp had no parliamentary representation, it was unable to provide an alternative to the Doumergue cabinet. Moreover, the extreme right-wing groups turned out to be so fragmented, both organizationally and ideologically, that they no longer acted in unison after 6 February. They lost momentum due to their division.

'Rather Hitler than Léon Blum'

On the left side of the political spectrum, just the opposite happened. Liberals, socialists and communists reacted with shock to the coup attempt and formed a single national front under the name of the Front Populaire. With the support of the trade unions, it promised to defend the Third Republic against fascism and promised measures against the economic crisis and social reforms. The Popular Front then won the elections with flying colors in the spring of 1936 and formed a government under Léon Blum.

Conservative circles reacted with horror:the fate of Catholic France was now in the hands of a Jewish socialist! "Better Hitler than Léon Blum" was soon whispered. When Blum banned all far-right groups, the Croix de Feu transformed itself into a real political party, the Parti Social Français. With success:the number of members grew from thirty-five thousand in February 1934 to one million members when the Blum cabinet fell in 1937.

The much-needed reforms had only begun, and the Front Populaire was soon gone. France muddled on until the conservatives' wish was granted:Hitler invaded the country in 1940…