After thirty years, the fight ends here. The Court of Cassation rejected, this Tuesday, October 15, the request for judicial rehabilitation of Jacques Fesch, sentenced to death and guillotined in 1957 for the murder of a police officer during a failed robbery, filed by his son Gérard Fesch. A decision that cannot be appealed.
On June 6, during a hearing in June, filmed for the historical archives, the Court of Cassation looked into this singular destiny. Gérard Fesch, represented by Me Patrice Spinosi, defended the judicial rehabilitation of his father, Jacques Fesch. This procedure, which is neither an amnesty nor a review, would have corresponded to an erasure of the sentence on the record, a sort of “secular pardon”.
This Tuesday, the highest court rejected the request, finding that “the elements analyzed taken as a whole do not constitute sufficient guarantees of amendment”.
A spectacular conversion
On February 25, 1954, Jacques Fesch, son of a good family, attempted to rob a gold changer on rue Vivienne in Paris. At 23, the young man wants to buy a sailboat to reach Tahiti. But the operation goes wrong. In his escape, he shot, injured several people and killed a police officer, before being overpowered.
During his trial, despite his confessions and apologies, Jacques Fesch was sentenced to the death penalty. His appeal for cassation was rejected, as was his appeal for clemency. Even petitions don’t change anything. On October 1, 1957, the young man was executed at the Santé prison in Paris.
During his three years in prison, Jacques Fesch changed and began a spectacular conversion. “Lazy and boastful” by reputation, this man, who had stolen from his father-in-law and bought a sports car with the money lent by his mother to found his business, “brutally” discovered the Christian faith in detention, he wrote -he.
A spiritual path that he puts on paper, filling hundreds of pages. His writings, published posthumously and translated throughout the world, have enjoyed great success. A school now bears his name, and a “beatification trial” has begun for this “model of redemption”, as Mr Patrice Spinosi, Gérard Fesch’s lawyer, recalled before the Court of Cassation.
“Remember that everyone can repent”
Aged 69 today, Gérard Fesch, entrusted to Public Assistance from birth, never knew his father, nor his mother, who requested anonymity by abandoning him. It was only in 1994, at the age of 40, that Gérard Fesch discovered the identity of his father by chance. In 2008, after several years of efforts, Gérard, to whom Public Assistance gave the surname Droniou, officially became Gérard Fesch.
“I believe in it,” responded Gérard Fesch to AFP. “Obtaining the rehabilitation” of his father is not “erasing what he did”, but rather “remembering that everyone can repent and redeem themselves”, he explained.
But at the hearing last June, the attorney general was not convinced. Jacques Fesch had certainly been blameless in detention but had not “provided” anything for society; and nothing, he said, established that he had compensated the victims. As for his “religious elevation”, it mainly concerns the intimate sphere, he said. And if Jacques Fesch became a model for others after his death, it was “independently of his will”. He therefore decided in favor of rejecting the request – a first because it has only recently been possible, and probably the last.
“You can recognize this right to forgiveness”
Based on the idea of forgiveness, the rehabilitation procedure is a “benevolent measure”, making it possible to “erase” the conviction once the sentence has been served – provided that the convicted person proves his “good behavior” for five years.
A delay which, by definition, cannot exist for a person sentenced to death. The law was modified in 2020 thanks to the fight of Georges Fesch, to create a specific remedy open to the beneficiaries of a person sentenced to death, “tendering towards the restoration of their honor based on the guarantees of amendment that they were able to provide “.
“The decision you are about to make is historic,” Mr. Spinosi declared at the hearing. And beyond Jacques Fesch and his son’s fight, it is the opportunity “to pronounce a symbolic decision against the death penalty”. “Rehabilitating Jacques Fesch means that, if he had lived, he could have shown that he had changed, that is to say that he was greater than his crime,” he argued. “You can recognize this right to forgiveness.”
