Paul Doumer

Shot on 6 May 1932 at a Paris book fair by Paul Gorgulov; the president of France died the next day.

Overview

Doumer, a veteran republican of the Dreyfus era, governor of Indochina and finance minister, was elected president in 1931 and presided with dignity over the final years of the Third Republic calm. Opening a veterans book fair, he was approached by Gorgulov, a Russian emigrant doctor of obscure politics calling himself a poet of Greater Russia, who fired repeatedly with a revolver; Doumer died the following morning. Gorgulov was guillotined after psychiatrists found his mystic writings those of a paranoiac responsible for his acts. The murder closed the era of presidential assassinations in France; Doumer successor Albert Lebrun served until 1940. Gorgulov knife-edged motives, resentment of the Bolshevik regime and of French inaction, made him one of the interwar most puzzling lone assassins.