France

Corporate Crime

But the golden age of business crime and scandal in France was the Third Republic, especially the years from the 1880s to World War I. Some of the effects from this period are still important today, such as the Panama Canal, projected as comparable to the Suez Canal some years before by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps.

The ambitious plan failed as a French enterprise not necessarily due to technical problems arising from the construction of such a gigantic project (to be finished later by the United States), but due to the corruption of the French political class. When the Panama scandal broke, it had an immense impact on the parliamentary elections of 1893, when the Assembly was purged of all those politicians implicated in the scandal.

During World War I, the subject of war profiteers reappeared. The link between business crime and the republican democracy, installed in France after 1870, was always used by the political enemies of this system to discredit it. The Panama, and[Page 337] other scandals before 1900, were unsuccessfully used by monarchists to try to get rid of the republic, and an anti-Semitic notion became imminent with the infamous Dreyfus Affair.

In the 1920s more modern fascist organizations, with some elements within the industrialist bourgeoisie, tried to undermine the democratic aspects of the French form of government, whereby antiSemitic tendencies gained more and more importance. A decisive step was the Stavisky affair in 1933–34, when the bank Crédit Municipal de Bayonne collapsed. It turned out that the known swindler, Serge Stavisky, an emigrant of Jewish origin in Russia, was the founder of this bank and had corrupted his entrance to the banking business with gifts to many important politicians. While the affair was investigated, Stavisky died in an incident which was officially labeled as a suicide.

The extreme right gained some public support from this affair and (not only for this reason) tried an unsuccessful coup on February 6, 1934. When, in 1936, the Front Populaire, that is, a government of socialists and communists, took office, the extreme right became even more violent. The secret right-wing association, La Cagoule, (the Hood) plotted to murder representatives of important associations of employers and to blame the left for such atrocities.

The plan failed, but when Nazi Germany invaded France in May–June 1940, some elements from these right-wing extremist groups slipped into office of the collaborationist administration of France (the Vichy government). Under German supervision, robbery of Jewish property in France started, and French collaborators and German occupiers profited alike.

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