The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  The commissioner and his associates returned to Paris to prepare their report for the minister of justice. They had heard a hundred witnesses, had asked ten thousand questions, and had traveled nine thousand miles. Their report was nine hundred pages long. Although they had gleaned a mass of material, they had precious little in the way of hard facts. On 25 February 1956 Chenevier submitted it to his superior, Director General of the Judicial Police Castaing. His conclusion was that the investigation against “Unknown” should be continued. He suggested that the next phase should begin with a confrontation between Gustave and Périès to establish whether he would continue to denounce as false the record of the interrogation that a respected examining magistrate vouched to be true.

  Pierre Carrias took nine months to reply to Chenevier’s request to continue the investigation. He was a man of exceptional probity, open-mindedness, and sound judgment. His reticence was due to his disgust at the role the press had played in the entire affair; to his concerns about Chenevier’s detestation of Sébeille, the reason for which he was unable to discover; and to his concern for due procedure. He also began to have some doubts about the case. He established that Gaston could not possibly have seen Gustave and Zézé in the alfalfa field if he had been standing in the courtyard as he claimed. Carrias was also worried about the lack of a credible motive for the crime. The contradictions in the Dominicis’ testimonies were glaringly obvious. He asked himself why Gaston claimed to have fired only one shot at Lady Drummond and why he said that he had hit Elizabeth just once with the butt of the M1. He was astonished that the essential clue of the trousers left hanging out to dry on the morning of the crime had not been pursued. Furthermore, as he wrote in his reflections on the case: “The shadow of the resistance and the liberation hung over the enquiry.”20 But none of this, nor anything in Chenevier’s report, persuaded him that anything could be gained from another hunt for accomplices. Gustave was obviously a liar, but in the magistrate’s view none of his lies had established any connection with the crime.

  Carrias was contemptuous of Chenevier’s approach, accusing him of bias. He charged him for failing to accept Sébeille’s explanation of the photograph showing Gaston pointing to the upper shelf, rather than the lower one, where Gustave and Clovis had clearly shown that the carbine had been placed. Sébeille had said that the police had been obliged to take several pictures. Gaston had grown impatient and had waved his cane too high in the air. Carrias also dismissed the notion that the pool of blood near the sump indicated that Elizabeth had been killed there and then carried to the bank of the Durance. Sir Jack had been shot in the liver and had bled profusely, so he had been virtually drained of blood by the time he collapsed on the other side of the road. Carrias remained convinced that the evidence of the trousers drying in the courtyard was further indication of Gaston’s guilt. He felt that the dossier also served to exculpate Zézé, whose insolent attitude toward his grandfather and Uncle Gustave was evidence that he did not fear any damaging revelation on their part. He suspected that Gustave might have been involved, but the evidence against him was not strong enough to open a further investigation.

  The public prosecutor’s office in Digne concluded on 30 October 1956 that there was insufficient evidence that anyone aided Gaston in his crime, so there was no reason to pursue the case.21 On 13 November 1956 Carrias signed a document dismissing the case against “Unknown.”22 This judgment of nonsuit confirmed Gaston’s guilt. The Dominici case was thus closed. Only a confession by a guilty person could now overthrow this final judgment.

  The Times summed up this strange case: “It was not merely that the victims were distinguished or that the crime was so senseless and mysterious. There was also the dark background of a region of France where life is still primitive and passions are unchecked.” The article paraphrased Jean Giono, who said of the region: “One of long-settled, much in-bred immigrant stock, living in a primitive world with its harsh simplicities and savage hatreds, incapable of telling the truth, many of these people seem a survival from another age.” It was a region where sons accused fathers, who in turn execrated their sons. Statements were withdrawn, denied, contradicted, or altered, apparently without a second thought. The article ended on an understandable note of puzzlement: “Any ordinary English reader studying the evidence that was published day by day could well be excused for feeling that he would never know where the truth lay.”23

  In 1957 President Coty commuted Gaston’s death sentence to life imprisonment. In March 1960 the journalist Jacques Chapus, who had covered the case for France Soir, and a television crew visited Gaston at Les Baumettes to make a film titled “Dominici: To Die in Prison.”24 The program attracted a large audience, which tended to sympathize with the decrepit old peasant. A number of newspapers now argued that he should be released, regardless of whether he was innocent or guilty. On 14 July that year, at eight thirty in the morning, on President de Gaulle’s instructions, Gaston was released from prison.25 Despite widespread public protests against his returning to live in the Basses-Alpes and although French law did not permit a convicted murderer to reside in either the department where the crime was committed or any adjacent department for five years, he was allowed briefly to stay with his favorite daughter, Clotilde Araman, in Montfort, where her husband was now a level-crossing keeper.26 The Times reported that he appeared to be in reasonably good health for an eighty-three-year-old. The writer added, “His cantankerous nature tended to add to the mystery and to give a general atmosphere of dark intrigue.”27

  The local people were up in arms when they heard of Gaston’s release and that he was once again living in the Basses-Alpes. They made various attempts to have him banished. Most of his family wanted nothing to do with him. The people in Lurs voted to boycott him. Local councilors intimated that at the next meeting of the Council of the Basses-Alpes they would ask why, contrary to the law, he was allowed to return to the area where he had committed such a terrible crime.28

  Poor Clotilde found life with her parents intolerable, because Gaston’s temper was as vile as ever and he still treated his poor wife in an insufferable manner. Clotilde felt obliged to move to a smaller house so that they could no longer live with her. Gaston then moved to a retirement home in Digne, where, prompted by the clairvoyant Reine Ribot, he unsuccessfully launched an appeal against his conviction.

  Miss Ribot, who styled herself as a private detective, was one of the most persistent rumormongers, insisting that she had a photograph in her possession showing Sir Jack Drummond giving the secret Maquis sign that involved placing three fingers on a lapel. She clinched her argument by saying that the Maquis in the Basses-Alpes was known as “Drumont,” a French pronunciation of “Drummond.” The lady was a mythomane well known to the Paris police and to the mental health services in the capital. Incorrigible conspiracy theorists took the fact that she was not called as a witness at the trial, even though mention was made of the raincoat she had found at Lurs railway station, as proof that the British government did not want the link between Sir Jack and the Resistance to be so clearly established.29

  Gaston died on 4 April 1965. He lies buried in Peyruis. Gaston’s wife, Marie, died on 2 January 1967. Yvette and Gustave divorced in 1967. She was reputed to have been having an affair with a gendarme at the time of the investigation, and Pollak attributed it to the machinations of Captain Albert, who hoped thereby to extract some inside information. Yvette remains a staunchly outspoken champion of her former father-in-law’s innocence and is always ready, for a consideration, to make yet another revelation to a hungry press.

  12

  Reception

  One of the most fascinating aspects of the Dominici affair is the marked change in public opinion regarding Gaston. At the time of his arrest, journalists outdid one another in vilifying the “wild boar of the Basses-Alpes,” thus enflaming the public and making a fair trial almost impossible. Once he was convicted, the security police had to be called in to save him from a
lynching. Even though people had serious misgivings about the police investigation, the way in which the confessions were obtained, and the conduct of the trial, only those who subscribed to the most fantastic conspiracy theories felt that he was not guilty. The question then was simply whether he had acted alone. Meanwhile, the Dominici family was totally ostracized, the Grand’ Terre was cut off from the rest of the community, and the region was traumatized by the horrific events that had brought it into such ill repute. As a child Gustave’s son Alain lived like an animal in the zoo but with people throwing rocks at him rather than peanuts. He claimed that he later was refused a place at the high school in Digne because of his name.1 As noted previously, widespread protests arose on Gaston’s release from prison in 1960 because he had been allowed, contrary to established practice, to reside in the department that he had disgraced.

  The Grand’ Terre was an accursed place that was soon left abandoned. One Monsieur Belmont tried to tend the fields, but as he was constantly bombarded with questions and insulted by passersby, he gave up the attempt. One enterprising soul tried to run the place as a restaurant, but it was not a success. It has now been transformed into a charming family home, with the violent past having been exorcised and the owner building anew on the century-long association with the monastery at Ganagobie.

  Gradually attitudes began to change. A 1973 film L’affaire Dominici (The Dominici Affair) starring Jean Gabin as Gaston Dominici and the young Gérard Depardieu as Zézé Perrin painted Gaston in a more favorable light. The 2003 television film starring Michel Serrault was based on conspiracy theories, which had gained new currency as the details of the affair faded and explanations, however fantastic, were sought to explain this senseless crime. These theories were fanned by Gustave’s son Alain, who is still seeking to absolve his grandfather. He is supported by William Reymond, who has managed to convince himself that the Drummonds were the victims of a murder squad in which Wilhelm Bartkowski was involved.

  The rehabilitation of Gaston Dominici, at least in terms of local opinion, must be seen within the context of profound changes within French society during what the economist Jean Fourastié called les trente glorieuses (the glorious thirty)—that is, the thirty years of astonishing economic growth between 1945 and 1975 that resulted in a revolutionary transformation of French society.2 This was the culmination of a lengthy process. For two hundred years progress in France meant the gradual elimination of the peasantry.3 If France were to continue exporting agricultural goods to maintain a positive trade balance, then peasant farming à la Grand’ Terre would have to disappear and make way for large-scale agribusiness. It was a brutal process in which some three-quarters of the peasantry had to adapt to a different way of life. The peasantry was demoralized and confused, unable to support any one political party, and less likely to become involved in electoral politics than other occupational groups were. It was a situation that the Communist Party sought to exploit to its advantage.

  At first sight this seems extraordinary. Karl Marx wrote of the “idiocy of rural life” and in volume 3 of Das Kapital predicted that small farms would be gobbled up by large capitalist estates. This was confirmed in a letter on the agrarian question written by Friedrich Engels to the French communists. In referencing policy changes and innovation, the French Marxist Jules Guesde’s aphorism that “the only way to make peasants fecund is by rape” was widely quoted. But the French Communist Party succeeded in gaining considerable support in the countryside among the peasantry, as can be seen in the Dominicis’ immediate entourage and the support that the party gave them in the early stages of the police investigation.4 After World War I, in a major rupture with orthodox Marxism, the French communists reconsidered their policy toward the rural population by suggesting that smallholdings might prove to be centers of resistance against capitalism and that an alliance between the peasantry and the industrial proletariat might be feasible. This policy shift was ideologically suspect and did nothing to overcome the antagonism of the industrial working class toward the peasantry, whom the former regarded as petit-bourgeois reactionaries who were largely responsible for the high cost of food.

  Provence had always been an area of radical peasantry. Its people supported the radical republican Montagnards in 1849, went with the socialists in the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International) and the Partie Communiste Française in the 1930s, and helped maintain the communists’ share of the vote between 1947 and 1952. Theirs was essentially a protest vote without any ideological underpinnings. No one thought of quoting Marx’s musings about whether the Russian village commune offered an alternative route to socialism, in which he overlooked the awkward fact that the mir was little more than a form of collectivized serfdom.

  The victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 came as a profound shock to the French bourgeoisie. Some sectors reacted by moving to the extreme right, adopting slogans such “Better Hitler than Léon Blum.”5 The more considered response was the attempt to kill two birds by one stone by means of corporatism on the Italian fascist model. They hoped thereby to overcome the class struggle in the industrial sector as well as ending cutthroat competition between enterprises. As far as the peasantry was concerned, a host of writers chanted eulogies to the eternal verities and values of rural life, conjuring up a vision of a France frozen in a romantic past. It was a popular literature, aimed at a broad audience and widely disseminated. The most eloquent of the theoreticians of this corporatist vision was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, a militant Catholic syndicalist who saw Marxism as a direct result of unbridled economic liberalism and as a mortal threat to the peasantry as the pillar of rural civilization. He preached a form of rural corporatism, defending the peasants against the encroachments of neo-feudalism. He served as the minister of agriculture in the Vichy government until he resigned in protest when the Germans forced French workers into labor service. He then joined the Resistance but remained true to his corporatist ideals until his death in 1988.6

  Le Roy Ladurie had a redoubtable amanuensis in Henri d’Halluin. Known as Dorgères, d’Halluin was an appalling rural fascist and strident demagogue who preached a form of peasant racism, denounced the system that was oppressing the people, and gave them a sense of empowerment. Distancing himself from the wealthy farmers, he developed a kind of rural poujadism, which he spiced with such slogans as “Civil servants are your enemies” (Le fonctionnaire, voilà l’ennemi) and denouncements of the typical village teacher as the agent of an alien world, serving the “school of deracination” (l’école du déracinement). This pied piper of Vichy corporatism had some success in the Vaucluse, but the neighboring Basses-Alpes with its radical tradition remained largely immune.7

  Vichy’s “National Revolution” harped at length on the agrarian theme, with Philippe Pétain styled as the “peasant marshal.” In one of his first speeches as head of state, he proclaimed, “The earth does not lie. It is your recourse. It is an embodiment of the motherland. A field that lies fallow is a part of France that dies. Fallow land that is cultivated is a part of France that is reborn.” For Pétain the peasant was the docile and obedient infantryman at Verdun, the embodiment of an eternal, preindustrial France. The Communist Party stoutly resisted the reorganization of French agriculture along corporatist lines. The clandestine newspaper La Terre published the following appeal: “French peasants! You have sacred duties towards the motherland! . . . Slow down thrashing and hide your harvests for Frenchmen. Do not give the Boches anything, get rid of the controllers . . . hide, help and arm the youths who refuse to be deported. . . . Take part together with the working class in the armed struggle against the invader.” The response to this appeal was particularly strong in southern France.8

  In 1945 all European economies were in ruins. The French gross domestic product was a mere 40 percent of its prewar level. The Provisional Government of the French Republic under the chairmanship of Charles de Gaulle was fully committed to a policy of
forced industrialization and economic growth. It was able to do so because of a strange marriage of convenience resulting from wartime alliances. The Communist Party, styling itself with breathtaking hyperbole as “the party of the 85,000 shot” in the struggle against fascism, was allied with the socialists in the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière and Georges Bidault’s Mouvement Républican Populaire, a Christian democratic-republican alliance. The two other main parties, the Radical-Socialistes (Radical Socialists) and the conservative Alliance Républicaine Démocratique (Democratic Republican Alliance), were discredited for their pusillanimous prewar policies and their support for the Vichy regime. Across the board it was agreed that only a determined cooperative effort and massive state intervention could put the country back on its feet. Management accepted that it would have to make short-term sacrifices to attain long-term goals. The trade unions in the Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labor), supported by the Communist Party, outlawed strikes. Maurice Thorez, the communist leader, announced that the government’s aim was to “win the battle of production.”

  The provisional government took advantage of this truce in the class war that had raged in the prewar years to nationalize entire sections of the economy. In part, as in the case of Renault, this was punishment for having collaborated with the enemy, but as with the nationalization of the coal industry, it was done mainly in the interests of forced economic growth. But the way ahead was blocked by massive debts, the shortage of capital, and the “dollar gap,” or the lack of foreign exchange. The situation was made all the worse because the Vichy government had handed over France’s foreign exchange reserves to the Germans. In 1946 Léon Blum, who had taken over the chairmanship of the provisional government, went to the United States to negotiate the annulment of at least part of France’s wartime debt, hoping that the Americans would be able to recover some of the foreign exchange that had gone to Germany. Blum was successful, but in return he had reluctantly agreed to open the French market for Hollywood movies, a concession that many in France saw as a direct assault on the very foundations of their national culture. In December 1945 Jean Monnet was appointed head of the Plan de Modernisation de l’Équipement (Modernization Plan). In January 1946 this organization was greatly expanded to become the Commissariat Général du Plan (General Planning Commission). Monnet’s appointed task was to coordinate the public sector so as to achieve the maximum rate of economic growth.