photographed with Stavisky at a nightclub; Georges Simenon reported on the affair and Stavisky's ex-bodyguard threatened him with physical violence; Colette, referring to the alleged inability of any of Stavisky's important friends to remember him, described the dead con-artist as "a man with no face". A trial of twenty people associated with Stavisky began in 1935. Printed charges were 1200 pages long. All of the accused, including Stavisky's widow, two deputies, and one general, were acquitted the next year. The amount defrauded was estimated to be the equivalent of $18 million at then prevailing exchange rates plus an additional $54 million that came within months of being attained. The location of Stavisky's wealth is still unknown. The Stavisky Affair left France weakened internally. The country remained divided politically for the rest of the decade, but the political weaknesses it exposed and exacerbated were not confined to France. The Affair was emblematic of a more general decrease of popularity of democratic values and institutions in Europe during the Great Depression. Popular culture French movie director Alain Resnais told the story in the 1974 movie Stavisky, featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo with the title role and Anny Duperey as his wife Arlette. In Forces occultes, a movie commissioned in 1942 by the "Propaganda Abteilung", a delegation of Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry within occupied France, Stavisky was presented as both a Freemason and a crook. Hollywood released a depiction in 1937 with Stolen Holiday, featuring Claude Rains as Stavisky's fictional counterpart, Stefan Orloff, and Kay Francis as his wife. Stolen Holiday asserted unequivocally that Orloff was shot by police and his death made to look like a suicide. The affair also forms part of the background of the events in J. Robert Janes "Kaleidoscope", one of the Kohler & St. Cyre mystery novels. See also Interwar France Straperlo, a 1935 scandal with one of its locations in San Sebastián that scandalized the Second Spanish Republic. Bankruptcy of FTX, a 2022 scandal involving cryptocurrency and center leftist politicians that similarly provoked anti-Semitic rhetoric. Notes Sources Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 3: 1871–1962 (1965). Penguin Books. (No ISBN) Janet Flanner (Genêt), Paris was Yesterday, (1972), articles from The New Yorker, 1925–1939. Paul Jankowski, Stavisky – A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue, (2002) Large, David Clay, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (W. W. Norton: 1990) pp. 24–58, a scholarly account