French History Advance Access originally published online on June 25, 2009
French History 2009 23(3):383-404; doi:10.1093/fh/crp054
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The Paul Doumer assassination and the Russian diaspora in interwar France
* The author is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Skidmore College. She may be contacted at: katherine_foshko{at}yahoo.com
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Abstract |
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The assassination of French President Paul Doumer by the deranged Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov in May 1932 has been largely dismissed by scholars as a colourful episode of limited historical import. On the basis of extensive new archival evidence, this article re-examines the aftermath of the crime through the lens of France's relations with Russian émigrés, the country's ‘model’ immigrant group of the interwar years. The émigrés were as economically deprived as many other immigrant groups during this period. Their special status manifested itself in their relatively privileged legal situation, their reputation for political reliability and, most visibly, their prominence in French popular culture. This article argues that, given the anti-immigrant attitudes that prevailed in the early 1930s, this special status in part explains the surprising moderation of the French reaction to the assassination. Simultaneously, the article delves into the panicked reaction to the event on the part of the émigrés themselves, a group who increasingly felt the vagaries of the deteriorating economic environment and for whom the assassination was both a marker of their gradual loss of status and an important impetus to assimilation. The Gorgulov affair thus sheds light on both the French capacity for selectively assimilating some of its immigrant groups—a topic as timely today as in the years of the French ‘second wave’ immigration—and on the Russian émigrés’ own, often conflicting, sense of how far they had come on the road to acceptance by the early 1930s.