The Dominici Affair: Murder and Mystery in Provence

In August 1952, the distinguished British scientist Sir Jack Drummond, alongside his wife, Lady Ann, and their ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was brutally murdered on a roadside in rural France. Sir Jack, a well-known nutritionist who modernized the classification of vitamins and helped devise UK rationing in World War II, was on holiday with his family in the French Riviera when they stopped to make camp just off the road near a farm called La Grand'Terre in Provence. The family was found murdered the following morning. Gaston Dominici, the illiterate, seventy-five-year-old patriarch of the nearby La Grand'Terre was accused, convicted, and condemned to death by guillotine soon after. When Dominici was first convicted there was general agreement that the ignorant, pitiless, and depraved old peasant had gotten what he deserved. At the time, Dominici stood for everything backwards and brutish about a peasantry left behind in the wake of France's post-war transformation and burgeoning prosperity. But with time perspectives changed. Subsequent enquiries coupled with widespread doubts and misgivings prompted President de Gaulle to order his release from prison in 1960, and by the 1980s many in France came to believe--against all evidence--that Gaston Dominici was innocent. He had become a romanticized symbol of a simpler, genuine, and somehow more honest life from a bygone era. Reconstructing the facts of the case and setting it against broader social, economic, and historical currents in post-war France, The Dominici Affair sheds light on one of the most puzzling and notorious crimes of 20th Century France, illuminating an entire Rorschach of social dynamics in the country.