The Assassination of Rašín

JAN 01 1923 · 12:00

The state funeral of Alois Rašín, his catafalque in front of the National Museum on Wenceslas Square, February 1923. Place: Žitná street 10, in front of Rašín's apartment · Vinohrady Hospital Figures: Alois Rašín, Minister of Finance · Josef Šoupal, 19-year-old anarchist communist · Karel Engliš, his successor On the morning of January 5, 1923, Rašín leaves his apartment on Žitná street to walk to the Ministry, three blocks away. He has been Minister of Finance again since October 1922, in the second Švehla cabinet, and has been pushing a hard deflationary line that has already cost twenty thousand jobs. Outside the front door, a young man steps from the doorway opposite and fires three times with a revolver. Two bullets hit the spine. The shooter is Josef Šoupal, 19, son of a Brno carpenter, briefly a member of the Communist Party and currently of an anarchist circle who have decided that capitalism must lose its leader. He is arrested on the spot. The minister is carried back into the building and then to Vinohrady Hospital. He is paralyzed from the waist down.