Political Crisis of 6 February 1934
The affaire Stavisky went public with Stavisky's arrest, escape and death and rumors of murder. Then his long criminal record as an embezzler and confidence 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-wing opposition 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 reliably leftist 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 Cobban characterizes as a right-wing putsch. It would be more accurately characterized as a "putsch attempt", in the words of French historian Serge Bernstein. 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"), the Croix-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 a coalition 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 the communist party, which in turn led to the 1936 Popular Front.
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