Alexandre Ier de Yougoslavie

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Monument to Alexander I of Yugoslavia with Peter I of Serbia and Maréchal Franchet d'Esperey
by Maxime Real del Sarte, 1936
Place de Colombie
Quartier de la Porte-Dauphine, 16th arrondissement
Paris, July 2012

See also: Maréchal Joffre

“A cameraman happened to be at exactly the right spot when King Alexander, in Marseilles at the beginning of a state visit to France, was being driven through the streets in a car with Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. He was only a few feet away when a gunman jumped out of the crowd and shot both the king and the chauffeur dead. The car stopped, with the king slumped in the back, while the cameraman continued filming. Louis Barthou was shot, too, and mortally wounded, possibly by mistake by a French policeman in the general confusion. The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was struck down with a sabre by a French mounted officer and beaten to death by the crowd or shot by the police or both, according to varying accounts. He was a 36-year-old Bulgarian who belonged to a Macedonian revolutionary organisation, which wanted to secede from Yugoslavia, and was allegedly in league with Croatian separatists, the Ustashas, who were backed by Benito Mussolini’s Italy.” (Alexander I of Yugoslavia assassinated, History Today)