What Have I Done

On February 24, 1954, a policeman was shot dead in the center of Paris. Jean Vergne was off duty, strolling in the second arrondissement, when a commotion in the street alerted him. He saw a young man running fast, pursued by a crowd of people shouting for him to stop. The fugitive had just attacked and robbed a money-changer, Alexandre Silberstein, at his shop in the Rue Vivienne, leaving the shopkeeper bleeding heavily. The robber was also bleeding, having fired his gun and injured his own finger. Vergne joined in the chase. The young man ran until he came to the open door of 9 Boulevard des Italiens, then an apartment building. He made his way through the courtyard to the rooftop, where he waited for several minutes before slowly descending the stairs once again. Thinking that he had eluded his pursuers, he strode calmly to the gate. But Vergne had him cornered. The fugitive pulled a gun and fired once, hitting the policeman in the heart and killing him instantly. Fesch then ran on wildly up the boulevard towards a metro station, where he was apprehended by a retired inspector of the Paris C.I.D. Thus it was that the name of Jacques Fesch first entered into French public consciousness.

This squalid crime, like something from the pages of one of Georges Simenon’s Maigret books, captured the imagination of newspaper readers. The murdered man was a widower with one daughter; now she was an orphan. The policemen’s union, Syndicat Indépendant de la Police Nationale (S.I.P.N.), and an outraged public demanded retribution.

Behind the tragedy of the dead policeman there was another tragedy, that of Fesch himself. He had been born in 1930 in the Paris suburb of Saint Germain-en-Laye. His parents, Belgian by birth, were solidly bourgeois; his father was the president of a bank and a strident atheist, autocratic and harsh. His mother was a housewife and seems a rather indistinct figure, someone who found it difficult to achieve and sustain intimacy. Fesch had three siblings, but they seem not to have been close.

Fesch went to a Catholic school in Saint Germain but was not an exceptional student. He left at eighteen and went to work in his father’s bank. The job held little appeal for him, and his banking career was anyway interrupted by National Service in the French Army, which was then obligatory. His parents separated. Fesch, now twenty-one, met a young woman, Pierrette Polack, also from Saint Germain. They had a love affair. Pierrette became pregnant, and Fesch married her. A little girl, Veronique, was born.

Fesch’s father-in-law owned a coal business based in Strasbourg, and he offered Fesch a job in the firm. For a few months Fesch, his wife, and the baby lived together in Strasbourg, but this interlude of domesticity was brief; neither Jacques nor Pierrette was mature enough to sustain a marriage, and they split up. He returned to live with his mother, and she moved back to her family home in Saint Germain. Fesch soon began spending time with other friends in Paris; he had other girlfriends, one of whom also became pregnant. It is easy to imagine how Fesch was overwhelmed by desperation and hopelessness. In this state of mind, he conceived the crime that determined the course of his short life.

Fesch came up with the escapist idea of buying a boat and sailing around the world. To translate this hare-brained scheme into reality he needed two million francs—hence the robbery. At his trial, the prosecutor stressed the amount of forethought involved: Fesch had gone to his father’s house and taken a pistol and ammunition; he went to Silberstein’s shop armed with the gun and a hammer. It was easy to portray him as a ruthless and calculating criminal. There was never any real doubt about his guilt—the circumstances of the crime and his arrest were obvious—and he was duly convicted of murder. The only real question was whether or not he should be executed. The S.I.P.N. urged maximum severity, and his chances of escaping the guillotine were slim.

And so Fesch, twenty-four, found himself in solitary confinement inside the forbidding walls of La Santé prison in central Paris. He was sentenced to death, but the legal appeals process ensured that he would stay alive for nearly four more years. It is from this unpromising starting point that a remarkable story of redemptive grace unfolds.

Fesch was lucky in at least two regards. First, he had a Catholic lawyer, Paul Baudet, a compassionate and dedicated man. Second, the prison had an attentive chaplain, Father Jean Devoyod, who ministered faithfully to Fesch and became a confidant and trusted guide. Early on, he suggested that Fesch write an account of himself. It is a revealing document. He wrote, “People have often said to me, ‘You had everything to make you happy. It is hard to understand how a boy like you, from such a fine family, could end up like this.’” These same people, Fesch continued, then described him in unflattering terms: He is “lazy” and “insatiable” and “always wanting more.” “How untrue these explanations are,” he wrote, “as if the crime did not have much deeper roots!”

He then described himself as “naturally weak,” “wayward,” “lethargic,” and “easily led.” The deepest cause was his home life, which was without respect or love: “My Father, full of charm when with strangers, was, in truth, sarcastic, proud, and cynical,” he confessed. “An atheist, he felt a disgust with life, which, in spite of his professional success had brought him nothing but disappointment and disillusion. From my earliest years I fed on his maxims.” Fesch added that he shaped himself to his father’s character, resulting in his own “cynicism, amorality and scorn for humanity.”

He explained that his sense of failure gave rise to his dream of escaping by sailing around the world and how that dream led in turn to his imagining the robbery. He wrote that he became obsessed with this desperate scheme and recorded his panic-stricken flight in its aftermath. The only thought pounding through his head was What have I done? What have I done?

Initially, Fesch was unreceptive to his lawyer’s and the chaplain’s talk of religion. He insisted he was an atheist. But during his first eight months in prison, his attitude changed. Alone in his cell, bereft and hopeless, he pondered his life. The following year, in a letter to his mother-in-law, Marinette Polack, to whom he became devoted while in prison, he recounted the beginnings of that change of heart: “Little by little I was led to change my ideas. I was no longer certain that God did not exist. I began to be open to Him, though I did not, as yet, have faith. I tried to believe with my reason, without praying.”

By March 1955, when he had been in La Santé for a year, he wrote of a significant change in his attitude and the sudden overwhelming knowledge of God’s existence and of His love:

A powerful wave of emotion swept over me, causing deep and brutal suffering. Within a few hours I came into possession of faith with absolute certainty. I believed and I could no longer understand how I had not believed. Grace had come to me. A great joy flooded my soul and, above all, a deep peace. In a few instants everything had become clear. It was a very strong, sensible joy that I felt. I tend now to try, perhaps excessively, to recapture it; actually the essential thing is not emotion, but faith.

For the next two and a half years, until his execution in October 1957, Fesch wrote many letters. His main correspondents were Marinette Polack and “Brother Thomas,” a Benedictine monk who had been a childhood friend of Pierrette Polack’s in Saint Germain. In these letters, he described the highs and lows of his conversion, his life in prison, and his feelings, wishes, and regrets. And on August 2, 1957, when the appeals process neared its end, he began to write a journal for his little daughter Veronique, then aged six.

This document was recently translated into English by an Oratorian priest in Oxford, Father Rupert Allen, and will be published by Our Sunday Visitor Press in October. In Fesch’s own words, the journal is intended to be his legacy and a guide for his daughter to understand the man he was and the one, through the grace of God, he became: “I would like to be able in these pages to make you experience as visibly as possible the manifestation of divine will which, by its impenetrable ways, leads a soul to the light of life.”

The journal follows several themes. Among them is one which, I think, must be the universal experience of Christians. Those moments when we most fully believe, when we have absolute certainty about the existence of God and His love for us, are often followed by periods of disillusion and spiritual aridity. There are days in the journal when Fesch was ecstatic and others full of spiritual heaviness and disappointment. On August 3, he scaled the heights with “joy, joy, joy and thanks be to God,” adding, “for the second time in my life the scales fall from my eyelids and I know how sweet the Lord is.” In that same entry, he described to Veronique his conversion:

It was one evening in my cell three years ago. Despite all the catastrophes that had come down on my head in the past few months I was still a convinced atheist, and even tried, for fun, to convert my lawyer to deny all spiritual life outside of the body. . . . Anyway that evening I was in my bed, eyes open and I was suffering, really for the first time in my life with a rare intensity from what had been revealed to me concerning certain family matters, and it’s then that a cry sprang from my chest, a call for help: “My God,” and instantly, like a violent wind which passes without anyone knowing where it comes from the Spirit of the Lord took me by the throat. . . . It was an impression of infinite strength and sweetness which hasn’t left me since. I believed, with an unshakeable conviction . . . I began to pray. Everything seemed to me to be easy, warm and light. . . . When the Lord takes possession of a soul he does not do so sparingly. . . . He marks His possessions in an indelible way so that in moments of trial and apparent abandonment we can continue our efforts on the momentum that this first impulse gives us.

Between these blessed interludes, Fesch often found his spiritual journey difficult. On August 15, he confessed that when he felt joy from God he promised to himself that he would be strong. “But when nightfall alone extends over my soul I immediately begin to moan and cry out for the guiding light,” he wrote. “I cannot help but think, when this perceptible joy leaves me, that the Lord no longer loves me. Why was He there just then and not now? I wonder in vain.” Later, on August 18, he had another bad day: “Things are getting worse and worse today. I feel empty, without any desire, and I have the impression that everything is in vain. I’m going round in circles like a caged animal and I’m bored to death.” But Fesch came to see these vicissitudes as the cross Christians must bear: “We can be assured that this period has great value in the eyes of God. He measures us by this test and prepares great graces for us if we resist faithfully. After each abandonment we find the grace of God with unsuspected amplitude. We are lifted to a higher peak and then enjoy the fruits of our efforts in peace.”

As his final hours approached, Fesch scaled those higher peaks. “The most exquisite peace has flooded my soul since this morning,” he wrote on September 25, less than a week before the end. “Jesus carries me beyond time, anguish and beyond my four walls. Springs of living water flow in my soul which nothing disturbs. How happy I am!” On the very last night, September 30, in his last entry, he wrote, “I have said my prayers and I am flooded with peace and strength. In His infinite love Jesus heard my prayer and answered me. Jesus I love you!”

Fesch was well aware that some people would view these ecstasies with skepticism. His own family did not understand his newfound religious conviction. “What is depressing is that they all seem to consider my faith as an auto-suggestive phenomenon amplified by the exceptional present moment I am going through,” he wrote on September 17. “They view my exaltation with suspicion and when I write that I am going through a period of abandonment I feel they are a little more reassured. They haven’t understood anything at all! God uses this means of raising me higher and higher in successive stages to purify me internally.”

There is evidence that Fesch’s spiritual progression left an impression on his fellow prisoners. “I had good news this morning,” he wrote on September 18. “I was told that a comrade, with whom I had spent several months, has just been baptised and received the host in these past days. It seems that it was my conversations with him that gradually led him to meditate on his life and to convert! I am happy to have been able to serve as an instrument of the Lord for such a laudable purpose. We suspect nothing and then the seed of the gospel that we throw to the four winds sprouts and bear fruit.”

His imprisonment also reconciled Fesch to his wife. In many of the entries he agonized over her lack of faith and often mentioned the fact that he urged her to prayer and the sacraments. His efforts bore fruit, for Pierrette did return to the Church. Fesch sought permission from the authorities for a religious marriage ceremony. This was never granted, but in the days before his execution, Fesch and Pierrette, simultaneously, though they were physically separated, underwent a Catholic marriage by proxy: she in church with a priest; he in his cell, reading the Nuptial Mass.

Fesch’s remarkable conversion also reached a wider public. In the final stage of the appeals process, his lawyer sought clemency from the president of France, René Coty. It was within Coty’s ability to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment, but, possibly because of pressure from the S.I.P.N. and public opinion, he decided he could not do so. After hearing about the young prisoner from Baudet, however, Coty sent him the following greeting: “Tell Jacques Fesch that I shake him by the hand for what he has become.”

As the day of execution approached, Fesch contemplated the Passion of Christ. Among his reading material was a graphic, gut-wrenching description of what crucifixion actually entails. It is difficult to read; most readers would recoil from the explicit details of the pierced flesh, the sundered bone and nerve, the streaming wounds. For Fesch, who in a few days would lay his own head on the block to await the guillotine’s blade, these descriptions must have hit home with redoubled force: “My cross approaches . . . I can’t always stop my imagination from seizing on this thought . . . and yet, next to Jesus I am really suffering little. Physically I won’t suffer. But Him! Who realises all the torture that a crucifixion represents? The cruellest and most terrible torture.”

Elsewhere he wrote with humility:

Of course I am guilty and do not intend to compare myself to Jesus. Who understands crucifixion and all the pain it brings better than the Good Thief who hung from the tree next to his Saviour? And for whom did Christ come? We must not forget that the first of the Elect was a bandit, executed as such. . . . What does this mean? That you have to be a criminal to be saved? Not at all. Only, this same pariah who has sinned . . . will find in repentance and suffering and above all the knowledge of his wretchedness, a more direct path to the heart of Jesus.

Without trying to minimize his guilt, Fesch came to see his own death as a kind of sacrifice, where he could offer up his own life in expiation for his sins and those of others, particularly of his family. In his letters, Fesch referred to visits by his father, with whom he remonstrated about faith—to no avail, it seems. “There is a complete resurrection to be done in the family and when reparation has been made mercy will act and tears of joy will flow,” he wrote. “Reparation! Am I not making a beautiful one? Does my death, which I offer up, not have value in the eyes of the Lord? This is basically what my destiny was: to magnificently illustrate the consequences of the sins of an unbelieving family.”

Throughout the journal Fesch made clear his devotion to Mary. The pages are littered with references to his prayers and supplications to the Virgin. He said at one point that never fifteen minutes went by without his saying a prayer to Mary. In the early hours of his execution day, in his last entry, he expressed his absolute confidence in Christ’s promise: “I am calmer than before because Jesus promised to take me straight to paradise and that I will die as a Christian. I will recite a rosary on my knees, hoping to be able to keep my lucidity of mind. . . . [He says his rosary and continues writing] . . . What peace, what extraordinary lucidity of mind! I feel light, light and all fear is for the moment dispelled. I’m not alone, My God is with me. Only five hours left to live! In five hours I will see Jesus. How good is Our Lord . . . He is already drawing me very gently to Him, giving that peace which is not of this world.”

The final words of the journal read, “I think I’m going to stop this diary where it’s at since I’m hearing some disturbing noises. All I have to do is hold on. Holy Virgin come to me! Farewell to all and may the Lord bless you.”

Father Devoyod described Fesch’s final moments in a letter to Brother Thomas. He went to Fesch’s cell and found him calm: “I heard his confession for the last time. His communion, which followed, was very moving. His answers were calm, his peace profound. . . . I faced him when they bound his hands so that I might comfort him. The executioners had him mount the scaffold. At once Fesch said to me ‘The crucifix father, the crucifix’ and kissed it many times. These were his last words. It was very moving and those present were deeply touched. Fesch had offered his life for the conversion of his father, for those he loved, and for the man he had killed. There was not the slightest note of rancour, or even bitterness in his attitude. He died a great Christian.”

After his execution, interest in Fesch and his conversion slowly built and eventually caught the attention of Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, who championed his beatification. This was controversial, for obvious reasons; saints come in many varieties, but few of them are, I think, convicted murderers. Lustiger’s interest was probably piqued by hearing from priests who worked as prison chaplains. Fesch’s latest champion, Father Allen, was also previously a prison chaplain. Allen says that the campaign for beatification is fairly small but has some determined and passionate supporters; a school has been named after Fesch, and Allen is hoping that the publication in English of the prison diaries will give the movement renewed impetus.

Allen sometimes asks Fesch to intercede for people in difficulties. Last year he went on what he called a “personal pilgrimage” to the places associated with Fesch. The courtyard at 9 Boulevard des Italiens is still there. So is the money-changer’s shop. He found Fesch’s grave in the cemetery in Saint Germain, and there were fresh flowers and rosaries left on it—evidence that the story of this Good Thief has the power to inspire devotion.