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| Alps killings fuel French soul-searching | Alps killings fuel French soul-searching |
| (30 days later) | |
| Beyond the cold horror of each emerging detail of what happened in that forest car park – of the strangely clinical nature of the killings and of a small girl huddled for hours mute under her dead mother's skirt – another dread question is twisting French stomachs. Why do they have to be English? | Beyond the cold horror of each emerging detail of what happened in that forest car park – of the strangely clinical nature of the killings and of a small girl huddled for hours mute under her dead mother's skirt – another dread question is twisting French stomachs. Why do they have to be English? |
| Contrary to popular belief – and what they themselves would often have you believe – the French are unusually sensitive about what foreigners think of them, obsessively comparing themselves with their neighbours, particularly the British, whom they see as their eternal opposites, forever soliciting the views of correspondents in Paris on the obscurest of subjects. Much of the coverage of the killings is focused on what the English media are saying about crime, and how France is faring in that. | Contrary to popular belief – and what they themselves would often have you believe – the French are unusually sensitive about what foreigners think of them, obsessively comparing themselves with their neighbours, particularly the British, whom they see as their eternal opposites, forever soliciting the views of correspondents in Paris on the obscurest of subjects. Much of the coverage of the killings is focused on what the English media are saying about crime, and how France is faring in that. |
| Yet there is no hiding a profound and collective feeling of guilt, not just because it took gendarmes eight hours to find the girl trembling at her mother's feet, but that this should have happened at all, to people holidaying in France. As a colleague opined apologetically this morning, the murder of foreigners like this on French soil, particularly en famille, offends something deep in much-wounded French pride. "Yes, we still have that moral sense of pride, and this hurts it." These people were guests, on that most French of all institutions, the camping holiday. | Yet there is no hiding a profound and collective feeling of guilt, not just because it took gendarmes eight hours to find the girl trembling at her mother's feet, but that this should have happened at all, to people holidaying in France. As a colleague opined apologetically this morning, the murder of foreigners like this on French soil, particularly en famille, offends something deep in much-wounded French pride. "Yes, we still have that moral sense of pride, and this hurts it." These people were guests, on that most French of all institutions, the camping holiday. |
| It is interesting to note how there was no equivalent national soul-searching after the gruesome torture and murder of two French students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, in New Cross, south-east London, four years ago. Shit happens in big cities was as far as reflection generally went. | It is interesting to note how there was no equivalent national soul-searching after the gruesome torture and murder of two French students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, in New Cross, south-east London, four years ago. Shit happens in big cities was as far as reflection generally went. |
| All day on French TV and radio, journalists and sociologists raked around in the dark corners of the national woodshed asking which awful family secret had emerged to shame them now: was it the drug gangs in Marseille who have been merrily massacring each other all summer, the serial killer operating north of nearby Grenoble, who police are only now realising may have been killing for two decades (unlikely), or some homegrown Breivik or lunatic plouc with a grudge against foreigners? | All day on French TV and radio, journalists and sociologists raked around in the dark corners of the national woodshed asking which awful family secret had emerged to shame them now: was it the drug gangs in Marseille who have been merrily massacring each other all summer, the serial killer operating north of nearby Grenoble, who police are only now realising may have been killing for two decades (unlikely), or some homegrown Breivik or lunatic plouc with a grudge against foreigners? |
| But with the English, of course, there is always a history. A history that also began in the Alps, a little further south at Lurs, when the renowned chemist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife, Lady Ann, and their 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, were murdered in their tent on the edge of a forest 60 years ago last month. Both adults had been shot and Elizabeth was found a little way away, her skull smashed by two blows from some awful agricultural implement. A bungled police investigation, rumours of secret service involvement and a series of shambolic murder trials worthy of Clochemerle ended shrouded in as much mystery as they began. | But with the English, of course, there is always a history. A history that also began in the Alps, a little further south at Lurs, when the renowned chemist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife, Lady Ann, and their 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, were murdered in their tent on the edge of a forest 60 years ago last month. Both adults had been shot and Elizabeth was found a little way away, her skull smashed by two blows from some awful agricultural implement. A bungled police investigation, rumours of secret service involvement and a series of shambolic murder trials worthy of Clochemerle ended shrouded in as much mystery as they began. |
| The case of the Drummonds, or l'affaire Dominici, as it is known in France, still fascinates, with books and documentaries either condemning or exonerating the wily peasant patriarch Gaston Dominici, who led the authorities on a merry dance after confessing and then denying the killings before being spared the guillotine and eventually released by De Gaulle. | The case of the Drummonds, or l'affaire Dominici, as it is known in France, still fascinates, with books and documentaries either condemning or exonerating the wily peasant patriarch Gaston Dominici, who led the authorities on a merry dance after confessing and then denying the killings before being spared the guillotine and eventually released by De Gaulle. |
| It and subsequent tragedies inspired a strain of dark humour exemplified by a cult 1980s pop song, Les Anglais en Vacances, which ends with a macabre reference to the Drummonds in its final refrain. | It and subsequent tragedies inspired a strain of dark humour exemplified by a cult 1980s pop song, Les Anglais en Vacances, which ends with a macabre reference to the Drummonds in its final refrain. |
| It was not meant to be expressly anti-English – French humour is just like that, nothing if not black, and, where possible, méchant.But however nasty the French can be about the English, they can never – and more importantly, would never – match the British press. Despite his pink linen jacket, the mayor of Chevaline, Didier Berthollet, had the sympathy of the nation having to field 10 calls an hour from British journalists – each trying to "propose a theory, one more outrageous than the next: al-Qaida, the IRA … " But as he gamely tried to slip in the virtues of his commune, whose very name is so evocative of butchery, little did he know that it is the ones who don't ever bother to dust down their school French that he ought to beware most wary of. | It was not meant to be expressly anti-English – French humour is just like that, nothing if not black, and, where possible, méchant.But however nasty the French can be about the English, they can never – and more importantly, would never – match the British press. Despite his pink linen jacket, the mayor of Chevaline, Didier Berthollet, had the sympathy of the nation having to field 10 calls an hour from British journalists – each trying to "propose a theory, one more outrageous than the next: al-Qaida, the IRA … " But as he gamely tried to slip in the virtues of his commune, whose very name is so evocative of butchery, little did he know that it is the ones who don't ever bother to dust down their school French that he ought to beware most wary of. |
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