The Suspicious Death of Minister Robert Boulin
Robert Boulin, Minister of Labor, committed suicide. At least, this is the official, and hasty, conclusion of an investigation that was too quickly completed for no doubt and suspicion.
Minister of Labor and Participation in the government of Raymond Barre, Robert Boulin is a great state clerk whose ministerial career, the longest of the Fifth Republic, began in 1961 as Secretary of State for Returnees. He will subsequently be Minister of the Budget, Agriculture, the Economy, Health… A fine connoisseur of all the sensitive issues of the Republic, a reputedly honest politician that some suspect as the next Prime Minister, Robert Boulin would have put end to his days to spare his relatives the scandal. Because recently the press revealed that this irreproachable Gaullist would have strayed in a dark real estate affair. He is suspected of having illegally acquired land in Ramatuelle, a plot sold twice by his friend Henri Tournet, a businessman long linked to Jacques Foccart, eminence grise of the Gaullists.
A very strange "suicide"
On the morning of October 30, 1979, the body of Robert Boulin was found in the ponds of Holland, in the forest of Rambouillet. The thesis of suicide is immediately accepted, even before the opening of the judicial investigation; the press campaign which was unleashed against him will undoubtedly have pushed him to this gesture. The minister, as the autopsy report asserts, swallowed a heavy dose of barbiturates before drowning in a pool of ... 40 cm of water. A farewell letter addressed to those close to him confirms Robert Boulin's desire to end his life, crushed by the dishonor of soon being prosecuted by justice.
But another letter sows confusion, in which he accuses Alain Peyrefitte of having betrayed him ... This letter, however, is only a duplicate - a montage? - the original of which has never been found, nor the ribbon of Robert Boulin's typewriter. Was he the man to commit suicide for having been implicated in a case that was probably put together from nothing and aimed at discrediting him?
A meticulously… sabotaged investigation?
Carried out by the Paris Forensic Institute, the autopsy of the minister's body was obviously botched. Coming out of the pool, his face is not that of a drowned man: he is swollen, with a burst lip and a bleeding nose. However, "on the instructions of the public prosecutor, the examination of the skull did not take place", write the doctors responsible for the report. Four years later, a second opinion revealed two facial fractures "caused during the victim's lifetime". A policeman then swears that the head of the minister would have struck a stone at the exit of the pond… but a gendarme present on the scene maintains today that it is about a false testimony: “The body hit nothing, besides there is no stone in this place. Finally, the vials containing the minister's lungs and blood samples, the analysis of which would have undoubtedly verified the drowning thesis, disappeared in 1987. The counter-investigation would count no less than forty anomalies or improbabilities in the file forensic. Justice, however, concluded in 1992 to suicide ... "except to consider the existence of a vast conspiracy".
Did Boulin know too much?
If Robert Boulin was hurt by the Ramatuelle land affair, he was no less so by the deleterious climate that reigns within his political movement. His disapproval of Chirac's rallying to Giscard d'Estaing's candidacy in 1974 earned him a first disgrace when Jacques Chirac entered Matignon. And he did not find a wallet until after his departure, in 1976. That same year began the vast scam of "sniffer planes" against Elf, followed soon after by another, that of Social Security.
Between the two, a deputy closely linked to business circles, Jean de Broglie, was assassinated… Key figure of the State, Robert Boulin had files on these cases, and these files, they had taken them with him the day before his “suicide”. They have never been found ... Curiously, it is in this context that the Ramatuelle case is revealed to the press by anonymous sources. Robert Boulin, feeling himself the victim of a cabal hatched by certain political "companions", was he preparing to counter-attack with these sulphurous issues?
A disturbing counter-investigation
In November 2002, Fabienne Boulin, the minister's daughter, asked the Minister of Justice to reopen the case, on the strength of the information provided by Canal+ journalists who conducted their investigation. Interviewed by them, Juliette Garat, an expert stationed at the Forensic Institute at the time of the events, answered the question "Was this an assassination? ": "I can't help but say yes." It corroborates the conclusions of the legal experts in charge of the second opinion in 1983. Henri Tournet, exiled in Chile, affirms in front of the same cameras that "there was murder."
In 1988, the newspaper L'Humanité published the testimony of a "barbouze" of the SAC, the very muscular Civic Action Service of the Gaullist movement. This witness claimed to have witnessed the assassination of Robert Boulin. He even gave the name of the murderer, a certain Ernst Siegrist, who is well known to the police services but will never be questioned by Justice.
