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When the Guillotine Fell
The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791â"1977
By Jeremy Mercer St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2008 Jeremy Mercer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3608-8
CHAPTER 1
October 1971
THE FIRST THING PEOPLE noticed about Hamida Djandoubi was his looks. He was dead handsome: dark eyes, thick hair, and a smile that danced between playfulness and seduction. Women would actually turn and stare after him when he passed on the street. One writer even compared him to Harry Belafonte.
Hamida was Tunisian by birth, the eldest of seven children. The family was raised in Carthage, the city so famously razed by the Romans, which by the mid-twentieth century had become just another poor suburb of Tunis. His father, Hédi, worked odd construction jobs and ran a black market veterinary clinic. He didn't have a license, but he did have a knack for healing cattle.
As a teenager, Hamida dreamed of Europe. The adventure, the money, and, yes, the women with such liberal reputations. When he finished high school, he took a job selling advertisements for a local business magazine. It took him almost a year, but he saved enough to make the voyage.
France was the obvious destination. Like Algeria and Morocco, Tunisia was a former French colony. Although it had gained its official independence in 1956, the two countries maintained close diplomatic ties, including a guest worker program. Hamida qualified for a visa and received his passport shortly before his nineteenth birthday. In September 1968 he booked his passage from Tunis to Marseille, the major port on the Mediterranean Sea and main entry point to France for North Africans.
MARSEILLE IS THE anti-Paris. Lodged among the rocky cliffs on France's southern coast, it is a brash and sun-scoured city. Instead of the refined culture and polished façades of the capital, this sweaty port exudes a raw humanity difficult to find in the north. There is little of the wealth of Paris and none of the rush; in Marseille, it is still custom to take a siesta in the afternoon and to spend the early evening sipping apéros under the cooling sky.
For centuries, Marseille was the most important port on the Mediterranean and, at one point in the nineteenth century, the fourth-largest port in the world after London, Liverpool, and New York. At the height of the French Empire it was also one of the most prosperous cities in Europe as colonial riches poured in from Indochina, the Caribbean, and Africa. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas describes the city's main street, La Canebière,, as so luxurious that even Parisians were jealous. And when Mark Twain visited Marseille in 1867, he too was awed and recounted the event in his travel diaries: "On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations of gas burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the sidewalks — hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation, and laughter everywhere!"
But by the second half of twentieth century, most of this glory had faded. France had renounced or lost most of her colonies, and instead of ships laden with spices and fabric, it was boatloads of colonial refugees that were docking in Marseille. When the main port was moved to an autonomous tax-free zone outside the city, the local economy faltered. Unemployment crept higher and the crime families became entrenched. With the release of the Gene Hackman movie The French Connection in 1971, Marseille became synonymous with heroin and corruption.
But if Marseille had lost its European luster, it remained the destination of choice for North Africans. For a young man growing up in Oran or Rabat or Tunis, the easiest route to Europe was a ferry ride across the Mediterranean to Marseille. In the decade after the Second World War, with so much labor needed to rebuild the country, the influx of immigrants from the Maghreb was so great the city became a peculiar hybrid of French café and Arab souk. In the rest of France, Marseille started to be called, often with a hint of derision, "the most northern city in Africa."
THIS WAS THE MARSEILLE that greeted Hamida Djandoubi when he descended from the ferry on September 10, 1968. Thanks to an Italian contractor he met in Tunis, he had the address of a Marseille couple who had once lived in Tunisia. Vincent and Katherine Comandés owned a grocery store in the city's sixth arrondissement, an affluent residential neighborhood just a few miles south of the Old Port. As four of their five children had already left home to study or start their own families, the Comandé took in guests for the companionship and for help with their business. There was a bedroom in the back of the grocery store, and Hamida was invited to live there and eat with the family in return for stocking the shelves and minding the till a few hours every day.
The grocery store was on rue Christophe Colomb. Christopher Columbus street. A new world for Hamida to explore.
So his life in France began. He studied law for a term at the local university. He courted women in the discos. He played soccer on weekends. He took holidays across Western Europe.
By that fated fall of 1971, Hamida had left the grocery store and was living in a men's residence close to the Pointe-Rouge beach. He was twenty-two years old and worked full-time for a landscaper named Désiré Boyer. But this was only a temporary position. His plan was to move to Paris, get his license for heavy trucks, and then drive rigs around Europe. He'd already given his notice, and his last day on the job was scheduled for October 15, 1971. He'd bought a ticket on the train that left for Paris the very next day.
As it happened, it was a good time for a young Tunisian man to be leaving the south of France. Two weeks earlier, one of the most atrocious crimes of the decade had been committed outside Nice by a group of four Tunisian laborers. The men broke into a farmhouse in search of money and ended up slitting the throat of a seven-year-old girl and stabbing a pregnant woman in the womb. The depravity of the crime left the region stunned. Suddenly young Arab men, already accustomed to a certain discrimination, were treated with a little more scorn, greeted with a little more fear.
The day in question, October 9, 1971, was a Saturday. The weather was typical of the south of France in early fall, that is, nearly ideal. It was sunny and warm enough for the beach, the air scented with sea and pine. But, this being Marseille, there was the wind.
The mistral is a violent wind that swoops southward from the center of France and along the Rhône valley. It torments the Mediterranean coast, particularly the stretch between Toulon and Marseille. It shakes windows, it steals laundry from clotheslines, it tears clay tiles from roofs. The people of Marseille like to say the mistral even causes temporary insanity.
That morning, Hamida was driving a tractor with an industrial tiller hooked to the back. The company was installing an irrigation canal and landscaping the adjoining banks. An iron plate had been left on the construction road, and the wind quickly covered it with a thin layer of dust and dirt. Hamida never saw it. The tractor's wheels skidded and slipped when they hit the metal. In an instant, the tractor overturned and Hamida was pinned underneath. His leg was sucked into the tiller's churning blades. He blacked out.
When he came to, everything was numb. Blood dripped into a pool beneath the tiller. He could see a piece of his foot. It made him think of hamburger meat. He blacked out again.
Firefighters spent more than two hours trying to extract the shreds of his leg from the rototiller. It couldn't be done. They were going to have to cut.
Hamida woke up at the Hôpital de la Conception that evening. His right leg had been amputated at the knee.
CHAPTER 2
6500 B.C.
TO BEST UNDERSTAND how primitive human beings conducted their daily affairs, one must spend a great deal of time sifting through pottery shards or spelunking through caves.
Some of the most important clues have come from the African nation of Tanzania. Here, at the Laetoli site, there are footprints preserved in volcanic ash that are 3.7 million years old — the first evidence of bipedalism, that fateful moment when our hominid ancestors first thrust their heads into the air and rose up onto their hind legs. A few dozen miles north is the Olduvai Gorge, where a two-million-year-old hand axe was found, a discovery so remarkable that Arthur C. Clarke chose to drop his black monolith at this very spot in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In terms of social conventions, the indicators date from more recent times. Near Nice on the Côte d'Azur, for example, a prehistoric village known as Terra Amata was home to a group of homo erectus roughly 380,000 years ago. It was used as a base camp to hunt the elephants and meadow rhinoceroses that once thrived in the south of France, and the arrangement of foundation stones suggests there were communal fire pits and other shared amenities.
As for the less tangible aspects of Stone Age culture, these require yet another leap forward. The first cave paintings date from roughly thirty-five thousand years ago. Drawn with charcoal or red ocher, these paintings show animals, hunting rituals, or, often, someone's fascination with their own handprint. Among the more celebrated samples of this work are the Lascaux caves in southwestern France, a World Heritage Site since 1979, and the Altamira caves in Spain, grandly known as the Sistine Chapel of cave painting. An especially spectacular cave was discovered beneath the Calanques, the cliffs that jut into the Mediterranean Sea just outside Marseille. In 1985, the deep-sea diver Henri Cosquer swam through a labyrinthine underwater tunnel and surfaced inside a cave. The walls were decorated with paintings of penguins and seals. The work dated back thirty thousand years, before the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted and the Mediterranean waters rose to cover the cave mouth.
But perhaps the most curious of all cave paintings are to be found at Cingle de la Mola Remigia, on the eastern coast of Spain. It was the German researcher Hugo Obermaier who brought the extraordinary news to the world in the 1930s. Four paintings here, dating from 6500 B.C., depict what appear to be organized killings. In the most vivid, a single man is shown lying in the foreground, his arms and legs bound with rope. His body is riddled with arrows. Behind him, a group of seventeen other men raise their bows in exultation.
Whether the dead man was a captured enemy or a member of the tribe who had run afoul of communal rules is impossible to know. What is abundantly clear is that it wasn't an ordinary killing. It was a prehistoric execution.
CHAPTER 3
October 1971
ELISABETH BOUSQUET'S friends and family thought of her as naïve or inexperienced or perhaps a little slow. Others were less generous. They called her a simplette, a simpleton.
One of the reasons for these characterizations was her appearance. As a little girl, she wore thick glasses that magnified her already large eyes, and her heavy lips caused her to speak with a slight lisp. But a better reason had to do with her upbringing. It was, to put it mildly, sheltered.
Elisabeth was the youngest daughter of Alphonsine and Pierre Bousquet, a small-town couple from the southern interior of France. They married in 1944, when Pierre was twenty-one years old and Alphonsine was twenty-five. It was a typically fruitful Catholic union at a time when birth control was still illegal. There were seven children, although three died as infants. That left Jean-Pierre, Marie-Josée, Roland, and Elisabeth.
Until 1950 the couple lived in Estaing, a storybook village of about six hundred people tucked into a river valley a hundred miles north of Montpellier. It was unquestionably scenic and was even voted one of the most beautiful villages in France. It was also unquestionably eerie. A stone castle loomed over Estaing, dominating the tiny village houses like an ogre among schoolchildren. It belonged to the wealthy Giscard d'Estaing family, who, after a slight tweaking of their family tree, traced their ancestry back to one of the senior aides to Richard the Lionheart.
Pierre's parents managed a local hotel and restaurant, and after the wedding he worked as a waiter in the family business. Once the children began to arrive, Pierre and Alphonsine looked to improve their lot. In 1950 they moved to Marseille, the largest city in Provence and the second largest in France. Big cities have long lured youth in search of a better life, and, in the popular imagination, what Émile Zola wrote in Les Mystères de Marseille in 1867 remained true in 1950: "In Marseille, faced with several great fortunes earned in just a few years, there isn't a young man who doesn't dream of a parallel windfall."
Sadly for the Bousquets, they arrived in the city just as things were beginning to economically disintegrate.
MARSEILLE'S ECONOMY began to decline in earnest after the Second World War. There was a rash of strikes on the docks as the Communist-dominated unions clashed with more conservative police and political forces. Traditional sectors such as olive oil and soap making — the famous savon de Marseille — faced increased competition from Italy, Spain, and other Mediterranean countries. Then there was the hardship of absorbing the tens of thousands of men and women who were returning to France via Marseille as the troubles began to flare in the French colonies in North Africa.
Like the rest of Europe, Marseille also had to deal with the consequences of the war. At first, after the fall of Paris and the dawn of Vichy France in 1940, Marseille remained an essentially free city. The port was open, the city attracted a number of prominent exiles, including André Breton and the surrealists, and its narrow streets became home to a large Resistance network. There was even a lively business in providing passage to Jews escaping the expanding reach of the Nazis. The author Anna Seghers, who spent weeks in a dismal downtown hotel, described Marseille as the sewer that channeled the flood of lost European souls to the sea.
Once the Allies landed in North Africa in November 1942, the Nazis could no longer allow such a strategic port to remain free. With help from collaborationists in the local government, police department, and even organized crime, Marseille quickly fell under Nazi control. The Nazi elite regarded this motley city with open disdain. Karl Oberg, the SS officer in charge of police, announced: "This city is the cancer of Europe. And Europe cannot live as long as Marseille hasn't been purified."
And purify they did. After members of the Resistance launched a series of attacks against the occupying forces, including a bomb planted in a tramcar full of Nazi soldiers, the Germans attempted to tame the city. In January 1943, in what is known as the Battle of Marseille, close to six thousand people were arrested, and two thousand were shipped to internment camps. Then Oberg announced he would clean the city with "mines and fire." There was no more obvious target than Le Panier, the oldest neighborhood in Marseille, a locale where opium dens and legalized prostitution once flourished and where the Resistance made its headquarters during the war. In all, more than fifteen hundred buildings were dynamited in Le Panier, and thirty thousand people found themselves homeless.
Insult was added to injury when American bombers swarmed over Marseille in May 1944 and dropped 288 tons of bombs on the city. The newspaper Le Petit Marseillais called it part of the "aggressions de l'aviation anglo-américaine" (the Anglo-American air attacks), and the sorry result was more than two thousand dead and a dozen neighborhoods left in ruin.
This was the Marseille that greeted the young Bousquet family when they arrived in 1950, a grim city still recovering from its wartime wounds. But fate would make it even grimmer for the family, as they carried an extra burden: their very name.
In an unhappy coincidence, the head of police services for Vichy France and the man who came to Marseille to enthusiastically oversee the dynamiting of Le Panier was named René Bousquet. He was an ardent supporter of Nazi policies, surpassing their deportation quotas and lobbying to lower the age at which Jewish children could be sent to the camps. Such devotion led Heinrich Himmler to say he was "impressed" by Bousquet and declare him a "precious collaborator." But in Marseille, in the years following the war, the very mention of Bousquet brought a snarl to the lips and sent a spray of spittle to the sidewalk. Even though the two families were not related, the Bousquets couldn't have carried a more damning name as they embarked upon their new lives.
ONCE IN MARSEILLE, Pierre found another restaurant job, but the money was less than the family had hoped for. The couple rented a small apartment in the neighborhood known as La Plaine and struggled along with their first two children, Jean-Pierre and Marie-Josée. But life was so cramped that when their third child, Roland, arrived, he was sent to live with Alphonsine's parents in the town of Langogne, four hours northwest of Marseille by car. And when Elisabeth was born, on April 29, 1953, she too was sent away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When the Guillotine Fell by Jeremy Mercer. Copyright © 2008 Jeremy Mercer. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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