The Dominici Affair

The spectacular murders of a distinguished British scientist, his wife, and their young daughter in the depths of rural France in 1952 prompted one of the most notorious criminal investigations in postwar Europe. It is still a matter of passionate debate in France. Sir Jack Drummond, with his wife, Lady Anne, and their ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, were on holiday on 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 next morning. More than two years later, the barely literate, seventy-five-year-old proprietor of La Grand’ Terre, Gaston Dominici, was brought to trial, convicted, and condemned to death by guillotine. When Dominici was convicted, there was general agreement that the ignorant, pitiless, and depraved old peasant had gotten what he deserved. At the time, he stood for everything backward and brutish about a peasantry left behind in the wake of France’s postwar transformation and burgeoning prosperity. But with time perspectives changed. Subsequent inquiries 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 Drummond murders, The Dominici Affair redefines one of France’s most puzzling crimes and illustrates the profound changes in French society that took place following the Second World War.

For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside. The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence. An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--

'A serious reinvestigation full of revealing background information that sheds additional light on what was then and now remains a shocking crime' Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking 'This riveting, eye-opening investigation of a 70-year-old murder mystery reads like a whodunit ... A true crime must-read' Dean Jobb, author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream 'As much social history as it is gripping true crime' Jeremy Craddock, author of The Jigsaw Murders 'A meticulously researched re-examination' Caitlin Davies, author of Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths 1950s France. A British establishment figure. A shocking crime. A miscarriage of justice. The search for truth. In 1952, in a peaceful corner of Provence, a farmer's son stumbled upon a terrible scene. Three bodies: a husband and wife shot dead, their ten-year-old daughter savagely beaten to death. They were all British. So begins one of the most notorious murder cases in French history. Sir Jack Drummond was a senior advisor to the British government, a household name who was respected and admired. His fame made the case a cause celebre in France and resulted in the swift conviction of a local farmer, but questions about Drummond's life and death remain unanswered. In this bold new investigation, Stephanie Matthews and Daniel Smith strip away the prejudice and propaganda to reveal a grave miscarriage of justice. A light is shone on Drummond's secret life in the shadows of the Cold War, painting a portrait of an enigmatic man who may not have been the innocent holidaymaker he appeared to be, and recasting one of the twentieth century's most notorious murders in a fascinating and important new light.

Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written, published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers, poems and prose fiction, these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time, their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture, including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric je, these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.

An Avant-garde Theological Generation examines the Fourvière Jesuits and Le Saulchoir Dominicans, theologians and philosophers who comprised the influential reform movement the nouvelle théologie. Led by Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu, the movement flourished from the 1930s until its suppression in 1950. It aims to remedy certain historical deficiencies by constructing a history both sensitive to the wider intellectual, political, economic, and cultural milieu of the French interwar crisis, and that establishes continuity with the Modernist crisis and the First World War. Chapter One examines the modern French avant-garde generations that have shaped intellectual and political thought in France, providing context for a historical narrative of the nouvelle théologie. Chapters Two and Three examine the influential older generations that flourished from 1893 to 1914, such as the Dreyfus generation, the generation of Catholic Modernists, and two generations of older Jesuits and Dominicans, which were instrumental in the Fourvière Jesuits' development. Chapter Four explores the influence of the First World War and the years of the 1920s, during which the Jesuits and Dominicans were in religious and intellectual formation, relying heavily on unpublished letters and documents from the Jesuits archives in Paris (Vanves). Chapter Five analyses the crises of the interwar period and the emergence of the wider generation of 1930-to which the nouveaux théologiens belonged-and its intellectual thirst for revolution. Chapter Six examines the emergence of the ressourcement thinkers during the tumultuous years of the 1930s. The decade of the 1940s, explored in Chapter Seven, saw the rise to prominence of the members of the generation of 1930, who, thanks to their participation in the resistance, emerged from the Second World War, with significant influence on the postwar French intellectual milieu. Finally, the monograph concludes in Chapter Eight with an examination of the triumph of French Left Catholicism and the nouvelle théologie during the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council. .