Robert Boulin

[citation needed] Boulin's first ministerial position was as refugee minister in 1961, when France was winding up the Algerian war preparing to repatriate more than a million French settlers.

The release of letters found in his car and that he had mailed from a Paris suburb on the day of his death threw fuel on the flames of controversy, as he apparently posthumously accused his fellow Gaullists, especially Justice Minister Alain Peyrefitte of "obvious collusion" with those who were out to destroy him, whom he named as Henri Tournet, an "ambitious" investigating magistrate and "certain political circles from which my own political friends are, alas, not excluded" and implied that the then parliamentary majority was, in Boulin's phrase, "a basket of crabs."

Shortly after his death, the Boulin family declared that they did not accept the verdict of suicide and began waging a campaign in the press and the courts to re-open the case, which they believed was murder.

The irregularities of the case were widely covered: that the lake in which he allegedly drowned was apparently nowhere more than 48 centimetres (19 in) deep; that Boulin's face had been badly battered and a cheek bone fractured, which went unmentioned in the official autopsy report; that the local doctor who signed the certificate was only allowed a hurried glimpse of the body which had already been transferred, on orders by high officials, to a waiting helicopter; that the jars containing Mr Boulin's lungs, necessary to confirm a death by drowning, disappeared mysteriously after someone broke into the laboratory fridge.

At a press conference on 17 January 1984, the family accused the Versailles prosecutor of "wanting to hide the real cause of the death of Robert Boulin" and of "shielding the assassins from the law".

In September 1991, the Paris Public Prosecutor announced that he was closing the dossier opened in 1983; the family continued to accuse the Gaullist party of a cover-up, and possible implication in Boulin's death itself.

On 21 June 2007, shortly after Jacques Chirac, also a Gaullist, handed over power to Nicolas Sarkozy, the Paris Public Prosecutor met with Boulin's daughter, Fabienne Burgeat, and announced that he was considering re-opening the investigation as "new evidence" had come to light.