World news This article is more than 23 years old'Saintly killer was my father'
This article is more than 23 years oldA long battle by a middle-aged Frenchman to be recognised as the illegitimate son of a guillotined murderer has been compromised by Catholic Church moves to canonise the killer.
When he went to the scaffold on 1 October 1957, Jacques Fesch, 24, black sheep of a wealthy banking family, pleaded with his executioners to take care of his son Gérard whom he had abandoned at birth three years before. But the child, Gérard Droniou, who was brought up in foster homes, was never told and has spent his adult life trying to overcome official obstruction to requests for his father's identity.
This week, Droniou, 46, a music teacher, will ask for a DNA test, to the embarrassment of the Church which has spent 12 years preparing a dossier to support Fesch's sainthood. Church leaders, including the Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, could be accused of defying a condemned man's last wishes in the interests of the doctrine of last-minute redemption.
Fesch, a playboy trum peter, is seen by some clerics as a modern equivalent of the crucified good thief whom Christ forgave as he hung on the cross. Fesch's own writings on his late conversion to Catholicism and his appeals for God's mercy are frequently used in sermons and are behind petitions to the Vatican for beatification - an intermediary step towards canonisation by the Pope.
Fesch's case is so well known in France that Droniou was fully aware of the criminal details long before he realised there was a possible paternal link after reading a magazine article in 1994 referring to the condemned man's appeal to look after his abandoned offspring, named as Gérard.
Fesch had been arrested in January 1954 following a failed armed robbery in Paris when he hoped the proceeds would pay for a yacht to take him and a girlfriend to the South Pacific.
In a shoot-out, a policeman was killed and a bystander wounded. In the months before Fesch was guillotined, the then President, René Coty, was torn between Church appeals to reprieve him as an exemplary Christian and police determination to see him die.
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