The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  On their way back, they noticed the outline of another body, completely covered by a blanket, near the English car. On the other side of the road, they also saw an overturned camp bed. Again they did not take a closer look. Clovis and Boyer mounted their bicycles and pedaled back to the Grand’ Terre to join Gustave; his young wife, Yvette; and his mother, Marie. Roure went back to the bridge, where he had parked his moped, and pushed it along to join the others.

  Roure’s detail was scheduled to begin work at the Lurs railway station at 7:00 a.m., so he ordered his men to move on. They all left, except for Clovis, who was anxious to find out what had happened on the family farm. Having given his men their orders, Roure headed to Peyruis to inform his SNCF superiors that all was well. He also told the telephone company (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) that some branches had fallen on the telephone wires and that they needed to be removed.

  Roure, who had been active in the communist partisans (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français [FTPF]) during the war and was the secretary of the Peyruis cell of the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français [PCF]), also reported the incident at the Grand’ Terre to Roger Autheville, secretary of the Departmental Federation of the PCF and thus head of the party in the Basses-Alpes. He was also a journalist.4 He had been the commander of the Fifteenth Company of the FTPF in Sigonce, a particularly violent outfit in which Gustave Dominici had served. Gustave’s role in the Resistance was far from glorious. He joined on 15 August 1944, the day the Allies landed in southern France. He seems to have done little, apart from taking part in the victory parade in Forcalquier, where he proudly displayed his armband to a local photographer.

  Autheville arrived on the scene of the crime very early in the proceedings, both in search of a good story and to keep an eye on the local party militants. Paul Maillet, the local secretary, was the Dominicis’ friend. Yvette Dominici’s father was a member of the party’s Departmental Federation. Her brother-in-law Clovis was a member of the Peyruis cell as well.

  All locally prominent figures in the Communist Party visited the Grand’ Terre. They included Mr. Emmanuelli, the director of the communist newspaper La Marseillaise, and Mr. Bonnaire, alias “Noël,” who was a former colonel in the FTPF. The communist Sunday newspaper, Humanité-Dimanche, sent a special correspondent to investigate. He later wrote, “Lurs has witnessed two scourges: the killer and the police. As a result two families have been afflicted: the Drummonds and the Dominicis.”

  The Communist Party had good reason to frustrate the efforts of the police. After the liberation of France, there had been a series of what the minister of justice had called “executions without a judicial guarantee,” or executions in what amounted to something like a civil war between “collaborators” and “resisters.” It has been estimated that roughly the same number of people, 160,000–170,000, were on each side, with the Resistance being minuscule until June 1944.5 Contrary to legend, the Resistance concentrated more on killing other Frenchmen than on disposing of Germans. Regardless of whether the victims were compatriots or occupiers, the communists saw it all as part of a glorious “struggle against Fascism.”

  It is hardly surprising that we know very little about the Dominicis between the armistice in 1940 and the end of the war. This was a particularly troubled period in French history, a time of betrayals and shameful compromise, of extraordinary heroism and base opportunism, of the vicious settling of accounts, of cover-up and deceit. There were active resisters, collaborators, the indifferent, and those who waited to see which way the wind would blow. The lines were seldom clearly drawn and were often crossed.

  Until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the PCF, true to the spirit of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, offered no resistance to the Germans. Only in November 1942, when Vichy France was occupied, did it become active in the south. The local group based in Sigonce was then commanded by “Capt. Della Serra” (alias Manuel Lopez). The group’s reputation was far from honorable, for it was generally regarded as an unruly bunch of robbers and assassins. This assessment was definitely not the result of intense anticommunist sentiment among conservative peasants. At that time the communists were extremely popular, and the party did everything it could to attract rural support. The FTPF’s activities, however, rendered them so unpopular that the PCF sent Roger Autheville to try and bring them to order. He did his best, but his mission was unsuccessful. After the war Roger was a frequent visitor to the Grand’ Terre. He and his friend Paul Maillet would both be expelled from the PCF, however, when the local leadership felt that their involvement with the Dominicis reflected badly on the party.

  Another resistance movement, based on the Ganagobie plateau, was commanded by “Capt. Claude” Renoir, the youngest son of the painter Auguste and brother of the movie director Jean Renoir. Nicknamed “Coco,” he often served as his father’s model, notably in Claude Renoir en clown. He trained as a ceramicist and worked in the film industry as an actor, an assistant director, and a director. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the resistance medal for his wartime activities. His group comprised some twenty-five men; most were former policemen, army officers, or civil servants who refused to serve the Vichy regime. They were in direct contact with London and received parachute drops of arms and money, which were used to build up the resistance movement in southeastern France. At the Ganagobie monastery, Father Lorenzi gave them his enthusiastic support, helping to hide them when unwanted visitors arrived. The Germans never discovered their hideout.

  A third group, the Secret Army (Armée secrète), was established in 1943 by the resistance hero Jean Moulin. It was the most highly disciplined and effective of all the resistance movements. In the south it was made up of the amalgamation of two groups, Combat and Libération Sud. On 1 February 1944 the FTPF theoretically joined them to form the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI), and in June Gen. Marie-Pierre Koenig, the hero of the Battle of Bir Hacheim, took command. But cooperation was never close because of serious ideological differences.

  That Gaston, who was already in his late sixties during the war, played no active part in the Resistance is hardly surprising. He tended his flock, dabbled in the black market, and kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut. He often hinted that he knew what Gustave had been up to while in the FTPF and that he would use it against him were that necessary; but quite what that was we shall never know. The Communist Party actively supported the Dominicis in the early stages of the murder investigation and did what they could to frustrate the efforts of the police, but here again the party’s motives are obscure. Neither Gaston nor his son Gustave were ever party members.

  In France after the Allies landed, some 10,000 people were killed in extrajudicial proceedings as “resisters” settled scores with “collaborators.” Within a radius of nine miles of Lurs there were a number of such “executions,” and Gaston and Gustave were certainly aware of them. One such instance was the assassination of the mayor of Peyruis François Muzy. A former gendarme, he had served as mayor for twenty-five years and was elected as departmental councilor. He was also a member of the Radical Party, a staunch republican, and an outspoken anticommunist. His wife was a schoolteacher who worked for a time at the tiny school in Ganagobie. She knew Gaston, as did her husband, who had given him a Gras rifle.6 Muzy was gunned down in his own home on 29 June 1944 by two young men who accused him of denouncing members of the Resistance. As a man who was widely liked and respected, his death came as a terrible shock.

  A number of communists had been arrested at the beginning of the war on orders from the Édouard Daladier government. They were released after the armistice thanks to the Germans, who until 22 June 1941 were allied with the Soviet Union. The authorities in the Basses-Alpes asked Muzy to keep a close eye on the activities of two communists who had recently been released from a detention camp. Much to the disappointment of the prefect, the mayor absolved them of any defeatist sentiments.7 In spite of Muzy’s positive report, on
e of these men, Pierre Puissant, was arrested and eventually interned in Algeria, where he was liberated by the Allied forces in November 1942. He died fighting with the Free French at Monte Casino, Italy. The other, André Jouval, was seldom seen and soon joined the Maquis.

  Muzy was certainly no hero but simply an ordinary man caught up in terrible times. On the one hand, he did nothing to help the Jews in Peyruis, even though rumors of their fate were circulating. They emanated from the mistress of the Gestapo boss in Sisteron. On the other hand, he helped save known communists from the Germans. One of these men was to become his successor.

  With Muzy out of the way, Peyruis became the only commune in the Basses-Alpes controlled by the PCF. The elections of 1945 witnessed some bizarre maneuvers by the communists. Three candidates ran for the communal elections: a communist, a socialist, and an independent.8 The communist failed to get an absolute majority in the first round of elections, whereupon the socialist withdrew from the race. The communist was duly elected councilor but soon afterward was found dead (presumably poisoned), and his house was burgled. It was widely believed that he possessed a list of fourteen people in Lurs who were to have been killed by the FTPF group of which Gustave was a member.

  Della Serra’s FTPF group was involved in a number of heinous crimes disguised as acts of resistance, and the members were determined to cover them up in the postwar years. Ten minutes after Muzy was shot, the local justice of the peace, Mr. Itais, was gunned down in his garden, with an entire magazine emptied into his body. His only apparent offense was that as a royalist and anticommunist, he was clearly in the reactionary camp. He had been involved in judging a murder case concerning a woman who was said to have been of German or Lorrainian origin and rumored to have been the mistress of a German officer. The murderers were never discovered, but it was assumed that they were from the FTPF. The case had been closed by the time of the justice’s death. One link with the Dominicis was that the woman concerned lived about 100 yards from the farm owned by Gustave’s father-in-law.

  Also in Peyruis Mr. Amalrie, the local head of the FFI, which was also known as the “Fee-Fee,” was gunned down. At Saint-Auban two brothers of a miller by the name of Queyrel were shot. This turned out to have been a mistake, obliging “Noël” to apologize to the unfortunate miller. Across the Durance at Mées, a young hairdresser, Miss Colette, paid the highest price for having offered comfort to the enemy. A married couple who ran a tobacco shop at Mallefougasse were killed, as were a farmer and his entire family in Pierrerue. An eighty-year-old antiquarian at Valensole, Jean Mille, was shot. At La Motte-du-Caire Dr. Ciamborrani was killed and his gold tooth removed.

  The most spectacular of these murders in the neighborhood occurred directly across the Durance River from the Grand’ Terre at the Château de Paillerol, where a married couple, the Cartiers, lived with their grandson and Monsieur Cartier’s mother. They had a daily cleaning woman, who lived in the village, while a local peasant looked after the grounds. During the war they received regular visits from the Maquis, who demanded food and money. These demands were so excessive as to amount to extortion, so Cartier began to protest. One morning the cleaning woman, Miss Gal, arrived for work to find the door locked. The elder Mrs. Cartier was hanging out of a second-floor window, screaming for help. Some neighbors arrived on the scene and managed to break down the door. They found Mr. Cartier lying on the floor, shot through the head. Mrs. Cartier’s body was found on the first-floor landing. She had also been shot in the head. Their bed was unmade, and they had obviously been awoken in the middle of the night. Mr. Cartier’s office had been turned upside down. His safe was open and empty.

  The grandmother said that she had heard voices at about ten o’clock the previous evening. There had been a furious dispute and sounds of physical violence. The inquest concluded that since the door had not been forced open, the Cartiers must have known their assailants. The investigation was put into the hands of Commissioner Stigny from Nice. He had hardly begun his inquiries when he was rudely interrupted by FFI members while eating his dinner in his lodgings in Forcalquier. He was asked to follow them. His body was later found in a ditch a short distance from Paillerol.

  It later transpired that a colleague in the Nice police department had denounced Stigny as a collaborationist. He had been executed on orders from “Serge,” the departmental head of the FTPF, who in civilian life was a bookseller from Paris named Schulz. After the war Schulz was amnestied. Lamontre, the policeman who had denounced Stigny, was given a ten-year jail sentence but was soon set free. A direct connection between the murders of the Cartiers and Stigny was never established, but whatever the case, they were both the work of Della Serra and his men.

  Another inexplicable murder was that of André Gras, a photographer from Forcalquier. He had not been a member of the Maquis, but he had rendered the FTPF service on a number of occasions. In August 1944 four young men entered the tobacconist’s shop run by his parents and asked to see him. He was led away, and nothing was heard of him for two years. His bones were found in the cemetery in Forcalquier. His gold bridgework, wedding ring, and watch had been removed. Neither any apparent motive nor the murderers were ever found. A wall of silence surrounded the crime, as was the case in so many other inexplicable incidents during these troubled times.

  Charles Tillon and André Marty, two militant communists who had been expelled from the party hierarchy in 1952 after being denounced as police spies, sought refuge in the region at Montjustin. They had been charged with being police informers and for ideological heterodoxy. Tillon had been a prominent figure in the FTPF and after the D-Day landings had tried to organize a communist revolution in France, but Joseph Stalin ordered the party’s leader, Maurice Thorez, to rein in this headstrong revolutionary. Forced to undergo a process of intense self-criticism, he had retired to the Basses-Alpes, where his faithful henchmen kept the press and photographers at bay with clubs and rocks. Marty had been on the secretariat of the Communist International (Comintern) and had played a controversial role as the inspector general of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.9 In 1943 he represented the PCF in Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government and soon rose to be number 3 in the party hierarchy after Maurice Thorez—whom he detested—and Jacques Duclos.

  Jean Giono, the local writer and member of the Académie Française, said that the war and the Resistance had resulted in an appalling transformation of the region. With staggering exaggeration, he told a British journalist:

  During the war and during the liberation the people of the country, who were normally law-abiding and kind, in appearance at least, became beasts: women are known to have torn young boys who could have been their sons into pieces with their bare hands. A young man I know, who seemed quite harmless, after raping a woman, poked out her eyes, cut off her ears and otherwise mutilated her with a kitchen knife. His excuse was that she spoke with a German accent. She was in fact a Frenchwoman from Alsace. Practically all the population did something for which they could easily be blackmailed. That atmosphere still hovers over us. Their hatred of the Germans has now been turned against English speaking foreigners, particularly Americans.10

  Giono seems to have forgotten that in 1942 he had told the German consul in Marseille that he had “more faith in the task of bringing France and Germany closer together, for which end I have been working ever since 1933,” and that he had asked the well-known journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce, “What is Hitler—the man—if not a poet in action?”11

  Thus, with still a lot of unfinished business, that the locals would be loath to talk or assist in a local murder investigation is not surprising. Most of them still possessed weapons they had obtained during the war, despite the authorities’ efforts to collect them. The Dominicis were also known to be violent. One night in 1946 two truck drivers had stopped outside the Grand’ Terre. Clovis had welcomed them with a burst of machinegun fire. He later told the gendarmes that he had thought they were burglars. Two yea
rs later Gustave had a pistol stolen. The robber, Sube by name, was arrested. He testified that he had seen a military weapon in the Grand’ Terre. The gendarmes investigated and found a Mauser rifle. Gustave was fined 6,000 francs and given a suspended sentence.

  Back at the Grand’ Terre, the next person to arrive on the morning of 5 August was Jean Ricard. He was a thirty-six-year-old traveling salesman from Marseille who had been camping and visiting Father Lorenzi, a lone monk who lived in the nearby monastery at Ganagobie.12 He came upon the scene of the crime shortly before 7:00 a.m. He had walked down from the hilltop on which the monastery is situated to catch the bus for Marseille. The bus stop was about 100 yards past the Grand’ Terre. Noticing the incredible shambles around the car, which he saw had GB number plates, he assumed that there had been some sort of accident. Since there was no one around, the Dominicis having gone back into the farmhouse, he decided to take a closer look. He saw an overturned camp bed at a distance of between 5 and 7 feet from the car, with a person sleeping on the ground rather than on the camp bed; but anxious not to miss the bus, he did not stop to investigate further. The bus soon arrived and took him home.13

  Meanwhile the motorcyclist, Jean-Marie Olivier, had arrived at the gendarmerie at Oraison at about 6:15 a.m. and reported the incident to the duty officer, Fernand Gilbert. Olivier told him that he had been stopped by a peasant, whom he knew by sight, on the main road near Lurs. The man had told him to report to Oraison or to telephone the gendarmes in Forcalquier that he had discovered a dead body. The man had pointed in the direction of the Durance. Olivier claimed that the man, who turned out to be Gustave, had said someone who seemed to be dead was lying on the slope down to the river and that “there must be some other dead bodies.” Olivier also stated that he had seen two women—presumably Yvette and Marie Dominici—on the lookout, standing near the farmhouse.