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.
Announced in 1947, the first five-year plan had two aims—by 1950 attain the level of production of 1929, which was the highest in the prewar years, and by 1952 surpass it by 25 percent. The plan’s emphasis was on coal, electricity, steel, cement, and tractors. It concentrated on the industrial north, where the most fertile land was amalgamated to increase the production of cereal crops. Sugar beet production was intensified and dairy farming encouraged. Southern France was largely neglected, so small peasant holdings were doomed. It was an imaginative and comprehensive scheme, but it was difficult to see how, given the parlous state of French finances, these ambitious goals could possibly be achieved. Salvation was achieved chiefly by means of the Marshall Plan, through which France received about $2.5 billion. This was enough to plug the dollar gap and to maintain the value of the franc, which had steadily lost value since 1945 due to both an alarming rate of inflation caused by a tripling of nominal wages between 1945 and 1948 and a decline in purchasing power by a third. These problems were further compounded by the successful reorganization of northern agriculture. It led to a bumper wheat harvest in 1948, resulting in overproduction and a sharp decline in agricultural prices as the glut replaced scarcity before bottoming out in 1951.
The Marshall Plan marked the break with the Communist Party and the real beginning of the Cold War. The times were difficult. As elsewhere in Europe, employees were called upon to work long hours for wretched wages. Thorez and four other communist ministers were expelled from the provisional government. Some of this backfired. The Communist Party posed as champions of French culture, which the party claimed was under attack from sneaking Americanization, thanks to Hollywood and the Marshall Plan. Initially this stance brought the party some additional support, but in the long run the Stalinist toady Thorez, who had endorsed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and who had deserted to Moscow during France’s greatest danger, could hardly pose as the savior of France’s cultural independence. Nor were the communists able to form an independent peasant movement despite all their appeals for an alliance between the peasantry and the working class. Sharp divisions on the land among agricultural entrepreneurs, independent peasants like Gaston Dominici, sharecroppers such as Paul Maillet, and agricultural laborers were compounded by the industrial workers’ innate aversion to the peasantry.
Yet despite all these problems, France had made significant progress. By 1949 wages were rising faster than prices and rationing was abolished.9 By 1952 the goals of the five-year plan had been largely met. The problem of inflation remained severe, but in 1952 the center-right government of Antoine Pinay began to get the situation under control by drastically cutting back public investment. The government was also helped in that since 1950 the United States paid 80 percent of the cost of its proxy war in Indochina.
From 1945 to 1973, when the world economy was shattered by the oil crisis, industrial production in France rose 4.5 times, or at an annual rate of 5.9 percent. France had ceased to be essentially an agricultural country, with 40 percent of the population classified as “farmers and peasants,” and was now an industrial society with a mere 8 percent working on the land. Agricultural prices steadily declined relative to those in industry. The drop had begun in the 1870s with the mass influx of grain and meat from the Americas and was further exacerbated until prices were offset by the subsidies of the European Commission’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was agreed upon in 1960 and came into force two years later. CAP sustained moribund sectors of the agricultural economy at enormous expense and with dubious political and ethical consequences.10 Prime Minister Georges Pompidou made no bones about the role of the CAP in restructuring the French economy. The Treaty of Rome initially only created a common market for industrial goods that left France unable to compete with the overwhelming superiority of German industry. CAP offered compensation, whereby subsidies from other member states provided remunerative outlets for French agriculture. The state was thereby relieved of the burden of supporting the farming sector and could concentrate on lightening the burden weighing on industry.11
The world of Gaston Dominici was doomed by the forces of modernity. A smallholding such as the Grand’ Terre, which sat between a main road and a railway and would soon be joined by an expressway—all signifiers of the forces that were to destroy it—could not possibly survive. Capital for mechanization and modernization, subsidies, tax relief, and price supports were only lavished on the big sugar beet and grain producers of the north. Peasants such as Gaston Dominici also could not compete with the wine, fruit, and olive oil producers of southern France, where the market was already glutted. Small peasant farmers were thus barely able to struggle on at the subsistence level. Agriculture still exists in the region because the European Union provides subsidies and the French government wants to avoid other violent protests against its proposals to further rationalize agriculture, a program that involves closing down uneconomical farms.
French society was being rapidly transformed at a time when the country was to face a series of humiliations and defeats. The ignominy of 1940 was hardly offset by the exaggerated contribution of the Resistance, whose 160,000 members—most of whom were very late arrivals—roughly equaled the full-time collaborators. The year of Gaston’s trial, 1954, also saw France’s defeat in Indochina and the beginning of the Algerian revolt, which would lead to a shattering humiliation and leave the country on the brink of civil war. The Suez crisis of 1956 was a further embarrassment but was overshadowed by the Battle of Algiers that began that same year. The lesson that de Gaulle drew from Suez was that France’s future lay not with a close relationship with les Anglo-Saxons in Britain and America but in Europe, where the country could aspire to leadership. Thus, from 1958 he began his quixotic schemes to restore to la grande nation something of its former glory.
The modernization of French society bore a high price tag. The average citizen was better off and enjoyed the benefits of a consumer society, but the gap between rich and poor grew ever wider. The movement from the countryside to urban centers caused overcrowding and a severe pressure on essential services. With the Algerian war ending in a crushing defeat, France was faced with the integration of the Harkis, or those Algerians who remained loyal to France, as well as the colonial French Pieds-Noirs (French citizens of Algeria). Immigration from North Africa and the former French colonies created further problems that the government addressed inadequately. Violence and racism spiraled. Mounting social tensions placed an intolerable pressure on the generous French model of the welfare state, while entrenched interests made any fundamental reform an intractable problem.
In such an atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that there was a widespread hankering after the good old days when it appeared that life was simpler, values more secure, and people more honest and authentic. The search began for a mythical France profonde (Deep France), otherwise known as la douce France (sweet France), la bonne vielle France (good old France), or la France éternelle (eternal France). “Peasantism” and “agrarianism,” two widely used if inelegant neologisms, are deeply engrained in France, a country where people are exceptionally proud of their peasant ancestry; and that sensibility served to make their adjustment to the industrial age all the more difficult. As Nobel Laureate François Mauriac put it, France is a country where “Cybele has more disciples than Christ.” There was a lingering feeling that there was something in the physiocrat François Quesnay’s dictum that “the earth is the sole source of wealth” and that the peasantry was the only truly productive class.12 Once this transformation became irreversible a sentimental attachment to the rustic, both on the left and on the right, began to express itself in terms of a search for “authenticity,” the “natural,” and “community.” In time of uncertainty and change, the appeal of a sentimentalized version of a rural past is hard to resist. It can be found in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770), Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” (1853), Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (1886), and Jacques Brel’s “C’est comme ça” (1954) to name but a random few.
This romanticized vision of French rural life was far removed from the brutal depictions of the peasantry by Balzac and Zola. Even the peasant world as presented in the popular works of Émile Guillaumin—a man who had five years of schooling, farmed 3 hectares (7.4 acres), and won the Prix Goncourt in 1904—was fearful, superstitious, and wretchedly subjected to harsh treatment by the more fortunate. Gradually the vanished world of the clog maker, the charcoal burner, the hedger and ditch digger, the itinerant worker, and the tinker was seen as embodying inestimable human values, and its loss was the cause of much that was wrong with the modern world. This distorted vision was reinforced by the myth that the French Revolution had led to a radical redistribution of landed property that, in turn, made the peasants the heirs of the republic, the embodiment of the essence of France.
Nouville: Un Village Français, the first of many books that awoke a renewed interest in a way of life that was rapidly disappearing, was written by two outstanding ethnologists Lucien Bernot and René Blanchard in 1952. The next year saw the publication of a collection of papers on rural and urban life edited by the sociologist Georges Friedmann. Laurence Wylie’s study of a village in the Vaucluse, published in 1957, soon became an established classic and was widely read in France.13 The 1960s witnessed a growing interest in social history, cultural studies, and popular culture. In 1967 Henri Mendras published his study of the demise of the French peasant.14 This interest led in the following decade to the astonishing international success of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou; the publication of Georges Duby and Armand Wallon’s multivolume history of rural France, whose last volume of is titled La Fin de la France paysanne (The end of peasant France); as well as Michel Foucault’s analysis of medical, legal, and national discourses on language, rurality, and state power as illustrated by the parricide case of Pierre Rivière. Foucault’s work was greatly influenced by Jean Giono’s meditations on the Dominici trial and by Roland Barthes’s semiological approach to the case.15 There was much talk in such intellectual circles of violence as a dialectical response to the imperialism of language and as the sole means by which the voice of the dispossessed could gain a hearing. Was Gaston Dominici’s violent character the means by which a barely literate person, unable to express himself in intelligible and unambiguous French, an expression of revolt against a capitalist economy that was gradually strangling him? Was not his position analogous to that of the developing world’s peasantry, whose violent struggle against imperialist exploitation was fervently endorsed by the intellectual left?
The sentimental attachment to rural France—encouraged by environmentalists, local politicians on the lookout for juicy subsidies, peasants struggling to make ends meet, and the wealthy concerned about the bucolic surroundings of their holiday homes—has had some strange results. Most noticeable is the extraordinary tolerance displayed in the face of violent manifestations of rural discontent. Roads are blocked with burning tires, streets are barricaded with surplus fruit, tractors bring traffic to a standstill, and the easily aroused Frenchman shrugs the whole business off with a tolerant reference to the hard lot of les paysans.16
The most astonishing example of such forbearance was the popularity of José Bové, a California-bred draft dodger, former hippie, and prankster, who bears a striking physical resemblance to the comic book character Astérix. He led colorful campaigns to smuggle Roquefort cheese into the United States, to outlaw genetically manipulated crops, to legalize marijuana, and to protest globalization and agribusiness. He achieved international fame in 1999 when he led a group of protestors who demolished a McDonald’s restaurant at Millau, an act that he compared to the storming of the Bastille. He received a very modest sentence for this action.
Bové’s half-baked ideology—a potent mixture of undifferentiated anti-Americanism, French chauvinism, and protectionism disguised as antiglobalization and anticapitalism—ensured him widespread popularity that was symptomatic of a fundamental change in attitudes toward the countryside and the peasantry since the 1950s.17 When Gaston Dominici repeatedly said during his trial, “Je suis franc z’loyal. Je suis un bon Français,” he was reacting to the stereotype of the French peasant as sly, sneaky, secretive, and unpatriotic.18 With the critiques of the capitalist state, anti-imperialism, Third World liberation, ecology, subsidiarity, regionalism, and the discovery of the countryside as an oppositional space, the typical peasant was increasingly seen as a frank, loyal, and good French person. The “wild boar of Lurs” became the victim of the colonization of the countryside, a hapless being living in a world saturated by signification but with no access to meaning and trapped at the intersection of disparate discourses.
In the interwar years, successive French governments faced the intractable problem of how to address the issue of the peasantry. Should the system be preserved in the interests of social stability or drastically modified to increase productivity, lower costs, and ensure increased exports? The problem was essentially one of the distribution of land. In 1929 there were one million dwarf farms of less than 1 hectare (2.5 acres) and three million farms of less than 10 hectares (25 acres), into which category the Grand’ Terre would have fallen. Another statistic showed that 10 percent of farmers owned half the agricultural land, and the remaining 90 percent of farmers tended the other half. Even as late as 1975, 62 percent of French farms were still less than 20 hectares (49 acres).19 Eighty-eight percent of peasants owned the land on which they worked.
Farmers, great and small, did well during the war and the immediate postwar years due to food shortages, rationing, and a thriving black market. But agricultural prices collapsed in 1948. Production barely increased compared with 1938, whereas industry had grown by 40 percent. Only 5 percent of public investment was earmarked for agriculture, most of which went to large estates. The country faced a “scissors crisis,” where industrial prices rose ever higher than those in agriculture, resulting in widespread discontent on the land.
The peasantry was renowned for its hostility toward the authorities in Paris, an attitude known as incivisme (lack of civic-mindedness). Many lived a wretched life of heavily indebted penury and were never able for lack of capital to rise above the subsistence level. They were resentful of bureaucratic regulations and others’ apparent lack of concern with their plight. It was a situation that the Communist Party skillfully exploited. Once the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the party had adopted the slogan of “Democracy, peace, and France” and posed as champions of the antifascist struggle. With the onset of the Cold War and the expulsion of the communists from the government, the party placed renewed emphasis on the class struggle. A quote from Stalin was unearthed that provided highest sanction for a bid to win support among the peasantry within a new political situation. As the Soviet dictator prepared to send millions of peasants to their deaths in his collectivization program, he had cynically announced that the aim of his policy was “to transform the peasantry from the reserve of the bourgeoisie into a reserve and ally of the working class.” This sounded well and good in theory, but there was little chance of it ever working in France. It was highly unlikely that a fétishisme paysanne (peasant fetishism) would soon match the party’s fétichisme ouvrière (factory worker fetishism). Industrial workers regarded peasants, even the most wretched among them, as “egoists,” “rich men,” and culturally backward. In turn, peasants thought of industrial workers as having a “soft life” as a result of “coddling” by indulgent governments eager to win their support.20
A grand alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry was thus never in the cards, as rural society was characterized more by internal conflicts than by cooperation. But the communists pointed to the gross inequalities in the distribution of land and fanned resentment against agribusiness and government inaction in the face of a mounting crisis. Slogans such as “There is land to distribute” and “The land belongs to those who cultivate it” found widespread resonance. The peasantry had no desire for a Soviet France or for being herded into collective farms, but the people saw the communists as useful allies against a government that showed little concern with their plight. They agreed that the Marshall Plan had done nothing to help agriculture, they saw the Council of Europe’s agricultural plan as a direct threat in that it removed protective barriers between member states, and many felt a strong affective attachment to a Communist Party that seemed to be upholding the traditions of peasant radicalism. The peasantry had deep feelings and resentments that were not carefully analyzed, but the Communist Party was able to articulate them clearly and without ideological obfuscation. Party cells in rural areas provided a sense of community, cooperation, and purpose that was otherwise lacking, and the rigid Stalinist party hierarchy ensured that they were not troubled with ideological or political decision-making. Peasant communism was thus affective rather than intellectual. It provided a means of expressing their wounded pride, their jealousy, their mistrust, and their ambitions. Some French intellectuals dreamed that an alliance between the peasantry and the industrial working class could be forged, one that would lead to a new society, but the divisions between the two factions and among themselves, compounded by the profound individualism of the peasants, rendered such a dream utopian.21
The philosopher Raymond Aron, writing roughly at the time of the Drummond murders, argued that the conservatism of French politics was due to the votes of women and peasants, and the maintenance of a strong agricultural population was a necessary barrier to communism and Marxism. Within twenty years this barrier was lowered by more than 50 percent, and the Left increased its representation correspondingly. Thus, the dwindling of the peasantry strengthened the Left. This may very well be true in aggregate, but the case of the Dominicis proved different. We saw how successful the Communist Party was in specific areas of rural France and how the party supported the family members until they were finally denounced by the local party secretary, who in turn was dropped when he was compromised by the police. By that point, only the Italian communists still championed the Dominicis, with their party newspaper, L’Unità, cooking up the outlandish tale that the Drummonds had been assassinated on orders from the U.S. government.
The discourses of the occupation of France and the Resistance were intertwined with that of the Dominicis to the point that the Communist Party initially stylized the police attack on them as an attack on the antifascist struggle, a desecration of the memory of the “85,000 shot,” and a sinister shift to the right. Once it could no longer be denied that the Dominicis were at least implicated in the crime and when the local party organization became seriously compromised, the party no longer openly supported them. The Dominicis’ defense team, however, comprised prominent communist lawyers, and the party did everything it could to counter the conspiracy theories suggesting that the Drummonds were the victims of a Soviet-instigated assassination. Gaston’s claim to be franc z’loyal and the association of the Dominicis with the Resistance are part of the reason why his reputation underwent a sea change from sadistic brute to maligned patriarch.
The radical politics of certain areas of rural France stem in large part from opposition to Paris rather than any carefully considered ideology. Thus, at the time of the Dominici trial, the communists, with 28.8 percent of the popular vote in the 1946 election, were the largest party. They were popular first and foremost because of their close association with and significant role in the Resistance after 22 June 1941. Even in 1951 they dropped only 2.8 percentage points and were still the largest party due to their stand against the Americanization implied in the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the rearming of Germany. The party’s quixotic stand against modernity had much appeal in backward and declining areas such as Lurs. Little attention was paid to the party’s bizarre denunciation of refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners as dehumanizing, because such key items in the new consumer society were unknown in rural France. The drug-addicted, alcoholic novelist, playwright, and essayist Roger Vailland, who joined the party in 1952, gave literary expression to this view but delighted in driving around in a Jaguar in pursuit of libertinage. Similarly, the party’s robust antifeminism and the denunciation of birth control as “bourgeois” were perfectly acceptable in this chauvinist and fecund society. Party leader Maurice Thorez, an unabashed Stalinist who was denounced Nikita Khrushchev for his 1956 speech attacking the great man and who in the same year spoke of “Hungarian fascism,” was a serious, intelligent, cultured, charming, and immensely popular figurehead.
As the Communist Party ossified and went into steady decline, it lost all attraction as a locus of inchoate protest. Its place was taken by such disparate movements as the ultra-right Front National (National Front) or various fringe groups of Trotskyites, Maoists, and ecologists. Anticommunism played precious little role in local politics. There were matters of more pressing concern such as the ukases from Brussels on the types of birds hunters were no longer permitted to slaughter, the closing of a local post office, or the building of subsidized housing for homeless Maghrebis. The association of the Dominicis with the Communist Party was thus no impediment to their rehabilitation. Gaston could be seen as yet another victim of Parisian arrogance and of the typically disdainful attitude of those on high who were utterly ignorant of his milieu. His world had disappeared and was now regarded with romanticized affection.
Meanwhile, cases such as that of Gaston Dominici that have not been fully explained provide rich humus for conspiracy theories, but even those that have been investigated still give rise to paranoid fantasies. Thus, the murders of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon have spawned all manner of exotic explanations. A horror as complex as the Shoah is explained away as never having happened. Delusional theories such as that of the world Jewish conspiracy or of a Masonic mafia are still afforded widespread credence or are transformed into an all-embracing anti-Americanism that serves to explain everything that is wrong with the world. These ideas are not simply the obsessions of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler or Stalin; they can also be the product of exceptional minds. The eminent Austrian orientalist Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall wrote a paper for the Austrian Academy in 1855 uncovering the Templars as a powerful secret society, thus providing rich material for further wild speculation and literary invention. Conspiracy theories provide fruitful material for the sensationalist press and radio talk shows, Hollywood movies, pseudo-scholarly books, best-selling novels, and even election campaigns.
This paranoid attitude of mind was deliciously satirized by George Farquhar in his play The Beaux’ Stratagem of 1707 in which Squire Sullen’s servant Scrub exclaims:
First, it must be a plot because there’s a Woman in’t; secondly, it must be a plot because there’s a Priest in’t; thirdly, it must be a plot because there’s French Gold in’t; and, fourthly, it must be a Plot, because I don’t know what to make on’t.22
Then, of course, for some, there is always the lingering suspicion that Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
In this case, for a conspiracy theory to have any credence whatsoever, Sir Jack Drummond—the distinguished scientist whose work was all in the public domain—had to be given a new persona. That he had worked at the government’s Porton Down Experimental Station on the decontamination of foodstuffs subsequent to a gas attack, about which he published a pamphlet, was converted into the fiction that he did extensive work developing poison gas. That a factory near Lurs had once been involved in manufacturing poison gas was taken as proof that he had been involved in negotiating a deal involving this weapon. That a British officer had parachuted into southern France during the war and had met with the Resistance was rewritten so that Drummond was the man in question. That he had gone behind enemy lines in Holland in the war’s final stages was evidence that he was in league with the Nazis. That Drummond had worked in Germany on nutritional problems was seen as proof that he had worked for Operation Paperclip, the secret recruitment of German scientists to work for the United States. (Paperclip was in fact a uniquely American operation that had been organized by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which created a Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency as an operational staff for the program. It was not in the least interested in questions of nutrition and did not require Jack Drummond’s expertise.) That the British government formally denied Drummond was ever an intelligence agent was taken as proof that he was indeed deeply implicated in clandestine operations. Secret agents are, after all, kept secret.
The most persistent of the conspiracy theories involved Bartkowski. His story fit the bill perfectly. Outsiders committed the crime. The perpetrators were in the service of the Soviet Union. British authorities hampered the police inquiry with their reluctance to admit that Drummond was in France on official business.
It is now hotly denied that a French peasant was capable of committing such a terrible crime as the Drummond murders. It must have been the work of outsiders. Once again this belief is contrary to some singularly unpleasant facts. In 1973, shortly after the movie L’affaire Dominici starring Jean Gabin opened in Paris, an Englishman and his son went camping at Pélissanne near Salon-de-Provence, where the father was hacked to death with an ax. His son, the poet Jeremy Cartland, was seriously wounded but survived the attack. This case provoked outrage in Britain.23 The French police suspected patricide, but the case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence. Again, unfounded rumors circulated that the sixty-year-old John Cartland had been a Special Operations Executive operative who had betrayed members of the Maquis.
In 1977 two Britons were shot while camping in a remote area in the Forêt des Maures near Saint-Tropez. The following year two Britons in Cannes were killed by savage blows to the head. Despite these appalling crimes, the myth of a peaceful and placid Provence lives on, and Gaston Dominici is now seen as the victim of a gross injustice, as a typical peasant, and as a member of a class still perceived as forming the moral foundation of eternal France. His life is now seen as reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Tithonus”: “Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.”24