The Marseille assassination

At around 4.20 p.m. on 9 October 1934, on the Canebière in Marseille, in front of the stock exchange, a man ran out of the crowd that was cheering a royal visitor. Shouting “Long live the King!”, he jumped on to the running board of the open car and fired a burst from a Mauser pistol at close range. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who had come ashore less than an hour earlier to begin an official visit to France, died shortly afterwards without regaining consciousness. The French Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou, sitting beside him, was wounded in the arm – most probably by a bullet from a French policeman’s revolver, as a ballistics report made public in 1974 showed – and bled to death before doctors could save him. The assassin was a Bulgarian, Vlado Chernozemski, a fighter of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), acting on behalf of the Croatian Ustaše of Ante Pavelić.

Some studies state that Alexander and Barthou were working for peace in Europe, “especially between Germany and the USSR”, while at the same time preparing France and Yugoslavia for war. This is a simplification. Barthou was not reconciling Germany with the Soviet Union; he was building a security system intended to contain Germany, and he wanted to bring the USSR into it. The King’s visit was meant to strengthen the Franco-Yugoslav alliance and prepare the ground for an agreement between France and Italy.

The King and his enemies

Alexander had reigned since 1921, and from 6 January 1929 as a dictator. After the killing of the Croatian peasant leader Stjepan Radić, shot in parliament in June 1928, he suspended the constitution, dissolved the parties, renamed the state the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and divided it into banovinas without regard to the historical boundaries of its lands. This was supposed to create a single Yugoslav nation, but many Croats saw the dictatorship as Serbian hegemony in disguise. The most radical of them followed Pavelić, who in exile had founded the Ustaše organisation and declared that an independent Croatia would be won by violence. The Ustaše had training camps in Italy and in Hungary, on the Janka Puszta estate near Nagykanizsa. Mussolini supported them because the break-up of Yugoslavia would open the way for Italy to the eastern shore of the Adriatic. The Hungary of Miklós Horthy hoped to recover the lands lost at Trianon.

The King’s second enemy was IMRO. The organisation was fighting to detach Vardar Macedonia, which it regarded as Bulgarian land, from Yugoslavia, and from 1929 it cooperated with the Ustaše and trained their fighters. Its leader, Ivan Mihailov, lent the Ustaše one of his most capable assassins. Chernozemski, whose real name was Velichko Kerin, had taken part in armed raids into Yugoslav Macedonia and committed two political murders in Bulgaria, for which he had been convicted. From 1932 he had lived in exile and worked as an instructor in the Ustaše camps.

In the early 1930s the Ustaše planted bombs on trains, and in 1932 they attacked a gendarmerie post in the Velebit mountains. In December 1933 preparations for an attempt on the King’s life were uncovered in Zagreb. Alexander knew he was a target. He is also said to have remarked that anyone who wanted change in Yugoslavia would have to kill him.

Why the King was going to France

France was Yugoslavia’s most important ally, and in 1934 its foreign policy was directed by Barthou, a minister in the government of Gaston Doumergue, formed after the 6 February crisis. Barthou regarded Adolf Hitler’s Germany as the main threat. In April 1934 he rejected British proposals that would have legalised German rearmament, and then toured France’s allies: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. He proposed an Eastern Pact, a mutual assistance treaty involving the USSR, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, backed by Franco-Soviet guarantees. Germany rejected it in September, followed immediately by Poland. His other undertaking, however, succeeded: on 18 September 1934 the USSR joined the League of Nations.

Barthou also wanted to win over Italy. After the murder of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in the July Putsch, Mussolini had sent divisions to the Brenner Pass and seemed a natural partner in defending Austria against Hitler. The obstacle was the Italo-Yugoslav dispute. Barthou therefore invited Alexander to France in order to sign an agreement with him before his own journey to Rome and to obtain his consent to a rapprochement with Mussolini. The King was wary. He knew that the Ustaše who were hunting him lived in Italy.

The visit and the shots

Alexander left Belgrade on 4 October. Travelling through Montenegro, where he visited his family’s town of Cetinje, he reached the Bay of Kotor and sailed for France aboard the destroyer Dubrovnik. He did not want to travel by train through Italy, and Queen Maria travelled separately, by rail through Switzerland. The assassins were already in France by then. Chernozemski and three Croats, carrying false Czechoslovak passports, had come from Hungary via Switzerland. They were led by Dido Kvaternik. Chernozemski and Mijo Kralj went to Marseille; the other two stayed in Paris, where they were to make an attempt if Marseille failed.

On 9 October, shortly after 4 p.m., the King stepped ashore on the quay of the Old Port. He was welcomed by Barthou and by General Alphonse Georges, a member of the Supreme War Council. They sat in an open car and set off towards the prefecture, preceded by a platoon of mounted guards. Security was poorly organised. The motorcade moved slowly, the mounted guards rode in front of the car rather than alongside it, and the crowd stood right at the edge of the road. Chernozemski leapt on to the running board and fired at the King and everyone around him. Lieutenant Colonel Jules Piollet struck him with his sabre from the saddle, policemen opened fire, and the crowd threw itself on the fallen man. The assassin died that evening without uttering a word. He was carrying a Czechoslovak passport in the name of Kelemen, and had a skull and the letters VMRO (IMRO) tattooed on his arm. His identity was established only after several days. Kralj, who was to throw a grenade if necessary, escaped in the confusion.

Alexander, hit in the chest, died soon afterwards in a nearby building to which he had been carried. General Georges was seriously wounded but survived. A bullet severed an artery in Barthou’s arm. The tourniquet was badly applied, and the wounded minister, taken to hospital, died from loss of blood that same afternoon. Several bystanders in the crowd were also killed by bullets from the assassin and the police, and more than a dozen were wounded; sources give differing figures. A ballistics report drawn up in 1935 but made public only in 1974 showed that Barthou had been hit by an 8 mm bullet from a revolver of the type used by the French police, not from the assassin’s weapon. The French minister was thus most probably the victim of chaotic shooting by his own security detail.

The assassination was one of the first in history to be captured on camera. A newsreel cameraman was standing a few metres from the car, and although he did not catch the shots themselves, he filmed the struggle and the dying King. The newsreels were shown in cinemas all over the world.

Investigation and politics

The French police quickly caught Kralj, and then the other two Croats, and established that the assassins had trained in Hungary and had received their orders from Pavelić and Kvaternik, who lived in Italy. France demanded that both be handed over. Italy refused, but it arrested Pavelić and disarmed and interned the Ustaše. In February 1936 an assize court in Aix-en-Provence sentenced the three captured conspirators to hard labour for life, and Pavelić, Kvaternik and Ivan Perčević to death in absentia. After France’s defeat in 1940 the Germans released the prisoners.

Neither France nor Yugoslavia, however, accused Italy. Barthou’s successor was Pierre Laval, who wanted to reach an agreement with Mussolini quickly and regarded the assassination as an obstacle best forgotten. Britain, too, did not want Rome to be blamed. Under pressure from its allies, Yugoslavia directed its complaint to the League of Nations against Hungary. In December 1934 the League Council adopted a compromise resolution stating that certain Hungarian authorities bore responsibility for tolerating terrorist activity and obliging Budapest to punish those responsible. Hungary closed the Janka Puszta camp. In January 1935 Laval signed an agreement with Mussolini in Rome. The Marseille assassination also hastened work on the first international agreements against terrorism. In November 1937 a Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and a convention on an international criminal court were signed in Geneva, but neither came into force.

The succession

The new king was Alexander’s eleven-year-old son, Peter II, who was then at school in England. In accordance with the late King’s will, power was exercised in his name by a three-man regency council, which took its oath on 11 October. It was headed by the King’s cousin, Prince Paul Karađorđević, and the other regents were Radenko Stanković and Ivo Perović. Alexander’s body was carried aboard the Dubrovnik to Split, and from there by train to Belgrade. Hundreds of thousands of people and delegations from all over Europe attended the funeral: France was represented by President Albert Lebrun and Marshal Philippe Pétain, and Germany by Hermann Göring. The King was buried in the Church of St George at Topola on Oplenac hill. Contrary to the assassins’ hopes, Yugoslavia did not fall apart; the King’s death if anything prompted a surge of solidarity. A few days after the assassination, on 15 October, Barthou’s friend Raymond Poincaré died in Paris.

Significance

The shots in Marseille killed the two men who in 1934 were most firmly committed to the system of alliances intended to contain Germany. Barthou was the only French minister of those years who had both a vision of such a system and the energy to build it. His successors, Laval and others, chose to come to terms with Mussolini and to make concessions to Hitler. The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was signed in May 1935, but without a military convention and without conviction, and a few months later Italy attacked Ethiopia. The failure to respond to Rome’s involvement in the assassination foreshadowed the policy of appeasement that France and Britain pursued right up to 1939.

For Yugoslavia the assassination marked the end of its boundless trust in France. Prince Paul and the Prime Minister Milan Stojadinović drew closer to Italy and Germany, to which trade bound Yugoslavia ever more tightly, and the Balkan Entente and the Little Entente lost their significance. On 25 March 1941 the Regent’s government joined the Tripartite Pact. Two days later officers overthrew the regency and declared Peter II of age, and on 6 April Germany and its allies attacked Yugoslavia. Pavelić, whom France had vainly sought to put on trial, then returned to the country and became head of the Independent State of Croatia. His regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma, among other places in the Jasenovac camp. The organisation that had killed the King in 1934 became, seven years later, the government of a state.