Man's crusade for identity leads to guillotined robber

By Catherine Field

PARIS - His was a story that gripped France. On February 25, 1954, Jacques Fesch, a wayward 24-year-old son of a wealthy banker, carried out a holdup at a foreign exchange shop in Paris' financial district, killing a policeman at point-blank range as he tried to run away.

The public outcry was such that Fesch, who would otherwise have been given a 30-year prison term, was sentenced to be executed. At dawn on October 1, 1957, the convicted murderer climbed the steps to the guillotine. But he was hardly the same man.

In the final months of his life, Fesch had undergone a profound conversion to Christianity that moved and inspired all around him. As time ran out before his meeting with the guillotine, he hurriedly wrote a memoir about his spiritual odyssey, In Five Hours, I Will See Jesus, that was later published and became a huge best-seller in Italy and France. The Vatican endorsed his conversion as genuine and, in 1987, formally launched an inquiry to see whether he was fit for beatification - the first step on the road to sainthood.

Now, more than 42 years after his execution, Fesch is once more back in the news, with the equally compelling tale about a man who believes he is his son.

Gerard Droniou, a 46-year-old trumpeter and father-of-three, was abandoned by his mother immediately after birth and raised in a state orphanage. All his life, he tried desperately to find out who his parents were. His mother's first name was Therese, but she gave the authorities a fake surname in order to make it difficult to track her down. His father's name was not given.

In 1994, there came a break. A friend of Droniou read an article in a weekly magazine and was struck by the likeness between Droniou and Fesch. Even more striking was a reference to a diary by Fesch in which he referred to a son, called Gerard, who was also born in October 1954.

Droniou set out on an obsessive crusade to find out more. He eventually tracked down the Catholic clergy who, decades earlier, had helped Fesch's conversion. It appeared that Droniou was conceived as the result of a brief liaison with a woman named Therese Trognon, just a month before the holdup.

Now an apparently conclusive document has come to light - a letter that Fesch wrote on the eve of his execution, formally acknowledging his son, Gerard.

"May he know that, if he has not been acknowledged as my son in terms of the law, he is my flesh and blood, and his name is engraved on my heart. May he be blessed and may his cup overrun with grace, and I await the happy day when I will be given the possibility of knowing him in God, to keep him forever," wrote Fesch.

Armed with the death-row letter and other testimonies, Droniou has now filed a legal suit to change his name to that of Fesch.

There is a final twist to the story but it is not such a happy one.

Droniou's detective work has enabled him to find his biological mother - ironically, living just a short metro ride away from him in Paris - and turn up a half-sister who he never knew existed.

Neither has acknowledged him. Droniou believes they may suspect he wants a share of the family fortune, which has been swollen by royalties from the book - whose sales could leap again if Fesch is ever beatified.

"I swear that my request to bear the family name of Fesch has nothing to do with money or any desire for revenge," Droniou says. "All I want to do is regain my identity and respect the wishes of my father on the eve of his execution. After all, he's the only one who has not rejected me."