Pride in Pawn

The staggering scandal which burst at Bayonne last week, appropriately followed by a minor earthquake, could only be appreciated from the point of view of Frenchmen who are justly proud of their pawnshops.

The original Paris Credit Municipal was founded by King Louis XVI, as a noble experiment to see whether the rapacity of private lenders could be checked by the State. It could. Under the august patronage of Napoleon I and his successors, pawnbroking in France has made steady, philanthropic strides. No Credit Municipal can be founded without the assent of the President of the Republic. Those at Grenoble and Montpellier are so heavily endowed that their interest charge to needy borrowers is zero. In Paris the Credit Municipal has its seat in an 18th Century palace, maintains a garage in which 2,000 motor vehicles can lie in pawn, chiefly during the winter months when their thrifty owners see no sense in gadding about. Because everything pawned in France is automatically insured at lowest rates, wealthy Parisians often pawn their plate and jewels when going to the seaside in summer, not because they need the money but because there is no cheaper way to make their possessions safe. In nearly all cases pawnshop profits go to charity. Thus the Paris Credit Municipal is known respectfully as "Le Mont de Piete" (The Mount of Piety) and with flippant affection as "ma tante" (my aunt). On the day President Roosevelt closed every U. S. bank more than 500 U. S. citizens obtained cash from Paris' Aunt.

"Kill him! Kill him!" screamed citizens of Bayonne last week as Manager Gustave Tissier of their Credit Municipal was hustled for questioning to the prefecture. Shocked friends recalled that only recently he was proposed for the Legion of Honor. Now police were saying that Manager Tissier had given jewelry left in pawn to his pretty friend. Impossible? Mais non! Soon grim detectives from Paris were staggering Bayonne with the assertion that Manager Tissier and his handful of jewels were not the point. They claimed, after a hasty rummage through the Credit Municipal's books, that French insurance companies had been mulcted of perhaps 500,000,000 francs ($30,000,000) by a swindler of Kreuger rank operating behind the pious, philanthropic front of the Credit Municipal. This swindler was not Manager Tissier. He was not the chairman of the Bayonne Credit Municipal, hitherto respected M. Joseph Garat, Mayor of Bayonne and a Deputy of France, who was soon also under arrest. He was--all France was amazed to learn--two well-known men who suddenly turned out to be one and the same. Without makeup or disguise this super-Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had managed to be both M. Serge Alexandre, the supposedly philanthropic founder of Bayonne's Credit Municipal, and also the notorious swindler M. Alexandre Stavisky, supposedly known to every detective in France. To cap all this the Founder, when last seen in public, was seated in his own leased box at a Paris theatre with none other than the Chief of Paris Police, M. Jean Chiappe.

To ships at sea, to police at every port, the French Secret Service flashed descriptions of the Founder-Swindler, asking his arrest. The Dutch steamer Alpherat promptly radioed that a passenger who seemed to fit the description had jumped overboard with a life buoy the evening before, eight miles from the Island of Teneriffe. Shrugged seasoned French operatives, "It has always been like that. Alexandre always escapes."

Alexandre, as Opposition newspapers hastened to remind Premier Camille Chautemps, is certainly the most notorious person ever permitted to found a French pawnshop. Slightly confused by his many aliases and escapes, French police think he is the Chevalier d'Industrie (confidence man) who so recently as 1926 cashed a forged check for more than a million francs. They think he is the "Handsome Alexandre" who twice escaped from agents of the Surete Generale who were taking him by train to Paris. In the first instance the agents went to sleep, drugged. In the second their prisoner slipped off his handcuffs by means best known to himself and ran. Only last winter, Chevalier d'Industrie Stavisky won a 2,000,000-franc baccarat duel at Cannes with Nicholas Zographos--and afterward marked cards were found in the baccarat shoe. Recklessly the Opposition Press in Paris hurled charges at Premier Chautemps that the Founder-Swindler had had a card as an inspector in the French Secret Service, that this alone had stopped French detectives from exposing him, that he had not fled last week but was still in Paris "under high protection." With her children Mme Stavisky was still in Paris, living in a new apartment under her maiden name which she resumed a few days before. Police questioned her, refused to say what, if anything, she had told them about her husband's whereabouts.

The Stavisky swindle consisted in selling to French insurance companies bonds of the Bayonne Credit Municipal to an amount fantastically greater than its assets. As in the Kreuger swindle, insurance company directors were duped by the aura of sanctity and good faith around French pawnshop bonds. Especially reassuring was a letter received by insurance companies in 1932 from the Minister of Labor, then M. Albert Dalimier. The letter stressed the fact that under French law insurance companies may hold part of their funds in pawnshop bonds, urged the desirability of doing so, mentioned Bayonne. As the scandal burst last week Premier Chautemps called to his office Letter Writer Dalimier, now Minister of Colonies. "I signed that letter purely as a matter of form," protested M. Dalimier. "I was asked to do so by Julien Durand[then Minister of Commerce] and all the world knows that the bonds of a French Credit Municipal are supposed to be good!" Thrice asked for his resignation, M. Dalimier at last gave it grudgingly.

President Albert Lebrun summoned Premier Chautemps. By this time the Opposition, hitting far below the belt, were charging that Swindler Stavisky visited the Premier's office on Christmas Day, that once he had hired as a lawyer the Premier's brother, M. Pierre Chautemps. When President and Premier had conferred M. Chautemps announced with quiet firmness: "Justice will follow its course to the end." M. Chautemps added that he had urgently requested Police Chief Jean Chiappe to return from Florence where he had gone for a holiday. Paris upped eyebrows in amazement that its Chief of Police had not rushed back of his own accord to hunt the swindler in whose box he had so recently sat. Politically the Bayonne scandal threatened not only to upset the Chautemps Cabinet but to shift the "point of majority" in the Chamber, which for a year and a half has been well to the Left. Successive Left Cabinets have been falling on the issue of the budget, finally wangled through by Leftster Chautemps with the greatest difficulty. Another Cabinet crisis just now--particularly if Left politicians can be tarred with the brush of scandal-- might give the Right a chance to spring what most Frenchmen dread, a Fascist Coup. When the Chamber reconvened this week Premier Chautemps faced the foulest field day of French Parliamentary mud slinging in years. In stricken Bayonne even the earth trembled as queasy temblors ran up & down the Basque coast. Just before Parliament met, operatives of the Surete Generale, with local constables, kicked down a bedroom door in the smart winter resort of Chamonix. A shot rang out. On a bed in the room lay the Founder-Swindler, dying with a bullet in his head. While Chamonix authorities hastily announced "suicide," the Opposition press screamed that the police themselves had fired the shot to silence Stavisky forever.

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