watering the weeds

The Stavisky scandal. One mans contradictory relationship with truth and death. Yes, the big crooks live on; greedy and cold they get to get swindled another day. Stavisky stood off attacks from the press with bribes, which he called “watering the flowers” .Stavisky seemed to be the final blow in the fall of France. The boot in the arse that made the croissant crumble. The Third Republic just keeled over and kicked the bucket; its rotted corpse had been sick for a generation. Stavsisky’s France of 1933 was a bit like America today: high unemployment, wage rollbacks, low savings and a bourgeoisie in a belligerent mood.  But who was the real Stavisky, and how wide was his reach….

Stavisky began as a petty crook and swindler, a middling conman who was able to build an empire based on the ponzi principal. However, his financier’s business began to crumble through lack of funds and his borrowing from A to pay off B began to unravel. To escape ruin, Stavisky is forced to resort to ever more spectacular schemes, one of which was including issuing millions in false credit vouchers and laundering funds destined to support the approaching Spanish civil war. It was a sham empire which took in the upper classes of all stripes, all greedy for that extra slice. In another context, Stavisky would be a peddler of mortgage backed derivatives, CDO’s and other sophisticated financial products designed to self-destruct. Stavisky would be a Madoff or a composite of many swindlers and hucksters reaching from the Lansky and the Jewish mobsters of his era to the boardroom’s of a Goldman Sachs.

Stavisky had,  in the process of his empire building, partially deceived even himself. He’s a man of vast contradictions who wants, on the one hand,as a Jew, to be embraced by French society (he even changes his given name Sacha to the more common Serge) and, on the other hand, to hold this new peer group in contempt. He understands how his frauds work and yet,surprisingly,  he actually seems to believe in them. Stavisky fights with impeccable sincerity against inflation and unemployment and,yet,  in the process, all but succeeds in hammering a blunt stake in the French economy.

Stavisky though, came from a middle-class background. He did not become a criminal because of a deprived childhood or bad companions, but by vocation. He belonged to a species that finds its greatest satisfaction in duping others, a species that Jung, in “Archetypes” calls the trickster figure, whose aim is to master the world through guile, just as the engineer masters it through mathematics and technology. They are in every age, and Stavisky’s climb to the flimsy summit was no different. As his influence grew, he began to paint on a larger canvas. Why swindle a man with a forged check when you can swindle an entire city, an entire country?

The basic scandal was bonds not covered by sufficient deposits and backed by assets that did not exist. Two set of books were used. Stavisky then pitched these bonds to insurance companies who were under the impression they were guaranteed by the state. But, he had no means of redeeming the bonds until he launched an even bigger swindle. He bought up Hungarian junk bonds from the war reparation years which had no value, and used these to back government bonds for financing public works projects. This proved to be his undoing and ultimately hounded by the press and police he allegedly took his life. However, the classic headline Resnais used in the film was ” Stavisky committed suicide with a bullet that was  fired at him point blank”

 

Resnais’s interesting assertion, history be damned or at least str

ed, was that Trotsky’s expulsion from France was due to the Stavisky case. The Stavisky scandal led to a bloody right wing uprising in the place de la Concorde, which provoked the collapse of the government. The right wing press charged that granting asylum was one of the crimes of a rotten regime, and clamored for his banishment. Therefore, afraid of renewing rioting, the government expelled Trotsky.

Ultimately, Stavisky had a gift for exploiting the favoritism, vanity and nepotism of the Republique des Camarades: the republic of chums. Stavisky had merely taken advantage of what Edmund Burke called “the confused and scuffling bustle of local agency”. Stavisky was less important for what he did than for the way he was used by the opposition. The scandal gave the right wing the chance to show that it could bring down governments by taking to the streets. The Popular front also came to power through mass pressure through the occupation of factories. It was a crisis of authority and the German invasion that brought the end and not Stavisky.

ADDENDUM:

Just as most readers pass over the “boring” business pages of a newspaper (where all the real news is to be found), most viewers are bored by business movies, and that’s what Stavisky is, a symphony of loan repayments, spread sheets, interest rates, blind trusts, periodic payments, and numbered accounts. The movies’ relationship with business — in such films as Executive Suite, Rollover, and Wall Street — is probably one of not revealing the secrets of the Hollywood machine itself, which is really built on a foundation of Manhattan banks. Stavisky, however, has a powerful human element as well: It is a profile of a man moving quickly and selfishly to avoid death….Semprun also came up with a clever compare-and-contrast character: Leon Trotsky, who was in exile in France at the same time that the Stavisky scandal was coming down. The connection is not as odd as it seems: Both men were Russian Jews, both were truly outsiders in their society while being charismatic leaders, and both suffered violent deaths meant to silence them. Semprun cunningly overlaps characters between these two camps, primarily in the form of a young radical German actress named Erna Wolfgang (Silvia Badesco) who also runs in Trotsky’s circles. Read More:http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/s/stavisky.shtml