Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, the first foreign minister of revolutionary Russia and founder of the Red Army, Stalin’s ally-turned-foe exiled from the Soviet Union, was the highest profile political refugee to seek asylum in France during the period between the two World Wars of the last century.

His presence led to predictable complications and inconsistencies for the French government. In 1932, the French authorities refused him admission, but in 1933 they allowed him to enter. They issued an expulsion order in 1934 but they took over one year to implement it. The same Minister of Interior, Camille Chautemps, a member of the Radical Party, first refused and then granted the permission for asylum.

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Albert Sarraut, also a Radical, later revoked it. Underlying the many strands in this bizarre story are the bilateral relations between France and the Soviet Union, and the Franco-Soviet rapprochement, which was initiated in 1931 and culminated in the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact of May 1935.

This pact necessitated France to accommodate Joseph Stalin’s implacable hostility towards Trotsky. The French Ministry of the Interior and police considered Trotsky a nuisance and troublemaker, and would have preferred that Trotsky was refused asylum from the start. When he arrived in France, the police was obliged to monitor his political activity, and his presence required protection from White Russians and Communists.

This was achieved to begin with by his living incognito and later under a police guard after his cover was exposed. The inconsistencies in the Trotsky case conflicted with the French Republican canon which laid down that France should provide asylum for political refugees. As an uneasy compromise, when the authorities eventually decided to expel Trotsky, they abided by the League of Nations resolution that urged governments not to deport refugees unless they had obtained permission for the deportee to reside in another country.

French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, a convinced Russophile, nevertheless declined Trotsky’s first application because he did not wish to upset Stalin by allowing Stalin’s enemy to reside in France. Edouard Daladier, Herriot’s successor, had no such qualms.

However, Trotsky inflicted damage to his cause by offending Leon Blum, President of the French section of the Workers International in accusing him, among other things, of being a cowardly bourgeois lacking in intelligence and foresight. Daladier’s government relied on Socialist votes, and Blum opposed Daladier’s sponsorship of asylum for Trotsky.

So why did Daladier risk a split with Blum by granting asylum? There are plausible theories to explain this decision. Trotsky did not himself apply for asylum in 1933. Henri Guernut, an influential politician and vice-president of the League of the Rights of Man and a Radical member of the French Assembly, made the application on his behalf, basing it on the Republican principle of moral justice.

Although such an application carried weight, it is not clear that this intervention was the decisive factor in the French decision to grant asylum, especially as Sarraut, a fellow member of the same League, was to later revoke it. Ruth Fischer, a German anti-Stalin communist then in exile in Paris, noted there was a rumour circulating among the expatriate Russian community that Stalin’s hold on power was tenuous and he would soon be overthrown.

Such a development would make probable Trotsky’s return to Russia and high position. The French government therefore wanted to secure Trotsky’s goodwill and gratitude by permitting him to stay in France, while simultaneously French diplomats were negotiating a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. However, it must be said that there is no mention of such rumours in dispatches from the French Embassy in Moscow, nor that the Foreign Ministry took notice of them in Paris.

The French diplomats in Moscow insisted that France should not appear weak and back down to Russia; they intended to use Trotsky as a bargaining chip by granting him asylum against Stalin’s wishes and then to expel him in return for concessions from Moscow.

However, the more plausible explanation is that Stalin actually consented to Trotsky’s exile in France. Oreste Rosenfeld, Russian émigré and editor of the newspaper Le Populaire, reported lengthy negotiations with Stalin about Trotsky coming to France. This is consistent with Stalin’s style of setting traps in the expectation that his opponents would compromise themselves ~ in Trotsky’s case, surveillance by Soviet secret agents would provide evidence of his plotting to overthrow Stalin.

But there is no evidence that either before the Mutual Assistance Pact in 1935 or during French Prime Minister Pierre Laval’s meeting with Stalin to sign it, that Stalin put pressure on the French to expel Trotsky, although by then he had accused Trotsky of engineering Leningrad chief Sergey Kirov’s murder. If there was any pressure, the French evidently resisted it. Following the cancellation of Trotsky’s residence permit, the French told Trotsky that he had to find another country willing to receive him.

Turkey refused to take him back and the British refused to take him in. By early 1935 his situation had become precarious and there were official threats to exile him to a French colony while his supporters planned for him to travel with forged documents to Belgium or Holland. A new Labour government then took office in Norway in March 1935 and negotiations for Trotsky to go there started almost immediately, with the Norwegians issuing permission for Trotsky three months later.

Trotsky wrote that Norway was not France ~ an unfamiliar language, a small country, off the beaten track, with delayed mail, but it was better than Madagascar. French governments of that period had graver preoccupations than dealing with Trotsky; economic recession, unemployment, reparations, debt repayments, disarmament, Nazi accession to power, financial scandals, the riots of February 1934 and political instability.

There is no mention of Trotsky in the biographies and autobiographies of leading politicians of that time. Trotsky’s wanderings abroad were important for Stalin, but only of subdued significance in France.

(The writer is a British historian specialising in French foreign policy)