Assassinations of young anarchists: They killed Rašín in Prague, they attacked the president in France
“At noon today, Paris was surprised by the news that an attempt was made to assassinate President Millerand when he returned to the Elysee Palace after a large military parade in Longchamps to celebrate Bastille Day,” the evening newspapers reported a week later. What actually happened in Paris then?
Three shots from a revolver
As the motorcade with the presidential carriage approached the Elysee Palace (the traditional residence of French presidents), twenty-four-year-old Gustave Bouvet stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots from a revolver at the car in front of it. He believed that this particular car belonged to the President, but in reality it was the Prefect of Police. The president was sitting in an open carriage a few tens of meters further in the motorcade.
Even though the assassin was wrong, Millerand remained vulnerable, so his carriage was immediately surrounded by a mounted guard of honor composed of cavalrymen from Algiers, France. The procession sped up to disappear outside the palace gates as quickly as possible.
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In the meantime, a bystander crowd pounced on Bouveta and started beating him. When the police worked their way to him, paradoxically, they had to protect her from lynching rather than prevent him from another attack. However, it was possible to take over the situation, arrest the assassin and take him to the station. Tama found out his identity: he turned out to be a young unemployed tinkerer and painter who had already been punished once for behaving as a militant anarchist.
The President survived the assassination in good health and on the same day visited French General Hubert Lyautey, whom he appointed Marshal of France. Aside from the evening headlines, the assassination attempt didn’t really cause any major uproar.
French President Alexandre Millerand, who held the presidency from 1920 to 1924 and was accused by the left of favoring conservatives. On July 14, 1922, he became the target of an assassination attempt
Why was the attempt made?
Why did this violent action happen in the first place? The beginning of the 1920s was a very turbulent time for Europe. In March 1919, the Communist International, or Comintern, was established in Moscow, that is, an international communist organization, in which the Russian Bolsheviks, who in the fall of 1917 carried out a successful communist coup, had the main say.
By 1922 it was already clear that this was the only successful coup of that time, and Bolshevik Russia remains the only solid support to which the communist movement can cling. All other attempts at a similar project failed: Hungarian in August 1919, Czechoslovak in December 1920, and German in March 1921.
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In parallel with the communists, anarchists also sought to eliminate the existing social order, and since the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, they committed terrorist acts directed against the contemporary representatives of political power, with whom they wanted to provoke a mass workers’ uprising. One of the most famous victims of such an assassination was in 1898 the Empress of Austria and Queen of Bohemia and Hungary Elizabeth of Bavaria, the wife of Francis Joseph II. aka the famous Sissi. Her life was ended on September 10, 1898 by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, who stabbed her with a file.
Millerand was an attractive target for anarchists because the left at the time accused him of favoring conservatives. Although he was elected to the presidency in 1920 as a compromise candidate between the right-wing National Bloc and the fragmented French left, after his first year in office he dismissed then-prime minister Aristide Briand, whose appointment as prime minister was welcomed by both left and right, and replaced him with a conservative republican Raymond Poincaré. This was not something that radical leftists were willing to put up with.
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Nevertheless, the assassination attempt ultimately took place without serious consequences, not only for the potential victim, but even for the perpetrator. Although Bouvet was sentenced in January 1923 to five years of forced labor (in earlier times one would say to the galleys) and ten years of exile from France, he was released from prison after only two years, in January 1925. Although he became partially paralyzed in prison, which also led to his early release, he still married and lived another 59 years.
Millerand was president until 1924, after which he had to resign in the face of increasing conflict between his office and the elected legislature. He was succeeded by the current president of the French Senate, Gaston Doumergue. Millerand died in 1943 in Versailles and was buried in the Passy cemetery.
Unfortunately, the violent actions of the young anarchists did not end with Bouvet’s failed attempt. Even the young Czechoslovakia, which had close diplomatic ties with France after the First World War, was to be convinced of this in a short period of time.
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On January 5, 1923, less than half a year after the shooting in Paris, the first Czechoslovak finance minister, Alois Rašín, became the target of a similar assassination attempt. When he was leaving his apartment in Žitná Street and was about to get into the minister’s car, he shot the young anarcho-communist Josef Šoupal in the back and side. Rašín did not have Millerand’s luck and succumbed to the consequences of the assassination on February 18.
The murderer Shoupal in addition to a number of similar characters with his French “colleague”. He was also very young (he was not even 21 years old at the time of the assassination), he also shot with a revolver, he also publicly confessed to his act and he even originally wanted to kill Rašín as early as 1922 – but his first attempt was thwarted by subordinate ministers, who they refused to let Rašín into the office. Finally, he was also arrested at the scene of the crime.
During the investigation, he found out that he intended to kill other Czechoslovak “representatives of the capitalist order”, namely the first Prime Minister Karel Kramář and the Czech banker Jaroslav Preiss. Due to his age, however, he was not sentenced to death and instead served 18 years in Carthage.