1878–1940
✕ Killed when aircraft was shot down
The Paris prefect of police, hard on the left and indulgent to the leagues, whose dismissal lit the fuse of 6 February
'Then I shall be in the street', on the telephone with Daladier as he was removed, 3 February 1934. The right-wing press read it as notice that he would take to the streets; Chiappe said he had meant only that he would be out of a job
A Corsican from Ajaccio who rose through the police administration and served as prefect of police of Paris from 1927 to 1934. He had a standing reputation for severity toward left-wing demonstrations and indulgence toward the street actions of the far-right leagues, and was popular with the right-wing press and the veterans' associations. When Prime Minister Édouard Daladier removed him on 3 February 1934, the right read it as the republic striking down its own policeman, and three days later the Place de la Concorde erupted. He remained a central figure of Paris right-wing politics after his dismissal, and died in 1940 when the aircraft carrying him to take up the Vichy post of high commissioner in the Levant was shot down over the Mediterranean.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1878Born at Ajaccio in Corsica
- 1900년대–1926Rises through senior posts in the police administration
- 1927–1934Prefect of police of Paris
- 1934.02.03Removed by Daladier; refuses the residency-general in Morocco
- 1935–1940Remains a central figure of the Paris right
- 1940.11Appointed Vichy high commissioner in the Levant; shot down on the way
Related historical events
Political career after dismissal and the turn to Vichy
Even after his removal from the Paris prefecture on 3 February 1934, Chiappe remained at the centre of French right-wing politics. On 24 June 1935 he was elected president of the Paris municipal council, and in the 1936 legislative elections his victory in the Ajaccio constituency was invalidated, but he was elected deputy for the Seine and joined the conservative Indépendants républicains group. The record that had made him the policeman of the left as prefect, close to André Tardieu, to Charles Maurras's Action française and to the royalist Camelots du roi, underpinned his influence on the right after he moved onto the parliamentary stage.
On 10 July 1940 Chiappe did not take part in the vote granting full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain. On 25 November of that year Pétain appointed him high commissioner of France in the Levant in succession to Gabriel Puaux, and on 27 November Chiappe left Marseille-Marignane for his new post in Beirut. The Air France four-engined Farman carrying him, piloted by Henri Guillaumet and Marcel Reine, was caught in an engagement between Italian and British naval forces over the Mediterranean near Sardinia, machine-gunned and shot down, and Chiappe, the head of his private office and all aboard were killed. Responsibility for the shoot-down was not settled, and a claim of British fire was also advanced at the time. No body was recovered, and he was left recorded as lost at sea, the office he had travelled to assume being one through which the Vichy regime's Levant policy was carried on.