Not simply
a tragedy
Richard
King
Carmen
Callil
BAD FAITH: A FORGOTTEN
HISTORY OF FAMILY AND
FATHERLAND
Jonathan Cape, $32.95
pb, 614 pp, 0224078720
In
1978 the French weekly
L’Express
published an interview
that sent a shockwave
through the French collective
conscience. The subject
was Louis Darquier de
Pellepoix, the wartime
Vichy government’s
Commissioner for Jewish
Affairs. Having escaped
at the end of the war
to the safe haven of
Franco’s Spain,
he was now an octogenarian,
enjoying some prestige
as the official translator
of the Caudillo’s
speeches. Darquier had
been condemned to death
in absentia by the Liberation
courts, but never extradited.
He was not the only
Nazi collaborator to
have escaped punishment,
but what most profoundly
perturbed the readers
of L’Express
was that his virulent
anti-Semitism was still
completely intact, as
was his refusal to believe
that the Shoah was anything
other than a Jewish
fabrication. In the
late 1970s France was
at the beginning of
the long process of
self-examination and
self-remembering whereby
it would seek to come
to terms with one of
its history’s darkest
periods. For Charles
de Gaulle, whose presence
had dominated so much
of the two decades after
World War II, the Vichy
government was an illegality,
and its leaders traitors.
After de Gaulle’s
death in 1970 began
the slow and painful
process of acknow-ledgment
that the experience
and behaviour of the
French during the Occupation
was more complex than
the Gaullian vision,
and much more shameful.
Louis Darquier was a
living reminder of that
shame, and according
to Serge Klarsfeld (the
French historian who,
more than any other,
has laboured to bring
to light the truth of
France’s treatment
of its Jewish population
during the war), the
‘Darquier affair’
was the trigger that
allowed cases for crimes
against humanity to
be mounted against Paul
Touvier, René
Bousquet and Maurice
Papon. As with the trial
of Klaus Barbie, the
German ‘butcher
of Lyon’, the trials
of Touvier and Papon
(Bousquet was assassinated
before his could take
place) were the most
public face of the immense
French effort of reappraisal,
which has produced many
hundreds of books, films
and television programmes,
and which reached a
form of culmination,
if not closure, in President
Chirac’s 1995 public
acknowledgment of French
guilt in the Shoah,
and the equally public
act of penitence by
France’s Catholic
bishops in 1997.
Carmen Callil came to
this story in a deeply
personal and extraordinary
way. When she first
arrived in England in
1960, she suffered a
period of depression
and found her-self under
the guidance of a young
female psychiatrist,
Anne Darquier. Ten years
later, Anne Darquier,
by then a good friend
of Callil’s, died
of a probably unintentional
overdose of the drugs
she used for self-medication.
To Callil’s surprise,
she was buried as Anne
Darquier ‘de Pellepoix’.
Shortly thereafter,
Callil saw the famous
Marcel Ophüls documentary
about the French Occupation,
The Sorrow and the
Pity, and was confronted
with images of Louis
Darquier de Pellepoix
shaking hands with Nazi
Germany’s security
chief, Reinhard Heydrich.
The coincidence set
her seeking connections,
and as she began to
find them, she was drawn
into the vortex of France’s
historical disarray.
Anne turned out to be
the daughter of Louis
Darquier and his Tasmanian
wife, née Myrtle
Jones, who had left
home for a career in
acting in the early
1920s. Bad Faith
is at once the result
of Callil’s attempt
to honour the memory
of the psychiatrist
who became her friend,
and a passionate yet
clinically careful dissection
of the people and forces
that had so negatively
weighed on Anne’s
destiny. Never able
‘to think of Anne’s
story simply as a tragedy’,
she felt compelled to
break through the silence
to which Anne’s
milieu and times had
condemned her.
The stories of Anne
and Myrtle are skilfully
woven through Callil’s
narrative. As a child,
Anne was abandoned by
her parents to the care
of an English nanny
who, despite the rarity
of maintenance payments,
seems to have done a
sound job. Sound enough,
anyway, for Anne to
beat the tide and study
medicine at Oxford.
Myrtle, daughter of
well-to-do farmers,
was a mythomaniac who
not only imagined herself
as an heiress and an
aristocrat, but actually
believed it. With her
first husband, a Gilbert
and Sullivan singer
named Workman (whom
she may never have divorced),
she paraded around Europe
as Lady Workman-Macnaughten
of Belfast. Myrtle’s
appearances across Callil’s
narrative are tragicomic.
Beaten and abused by
Darquier, whom she nonetheless
idolised, reduced to
begging from his and
her own families as
the effects of the Depression
bit, she always had
enough money to keep
herself in a permanent
alcoholic stupor, and
she earns some sympathy
through her rejection
by Darquier’s snobbish
family and her unstinting
support for the British
in the fascist salons
of Occupation Paris.
But it is Louis Darquier
himself who is Callil’s
chief focus, and target.
Her account of how this
marginal misfit became
a man of evil power
is the backbone of her
book and the mirror
through which she examines
what it was, in interwar
France, that allowed
such an itinerary to
occur. Born in 1897,
Darquier was the attention-seeking
middle child of an ambitious
mother and a successful
father. The gall with
which he appropriated
noble ancestry (something
which suited ‘baroness’
Myrtle down to the ground)
was matched by his ingrained
dishonesty and laziness.
There was a touch of
the thug about him —
he was a big man and
not averse to brawling
— and he loved
to party; but he was
a boring speaker, and
even his own family
found him untrustworthy.
In other times, he might
have remained a frustrated
nonentity.
His single passion was
his hatred of Jews.
This phobia, sustained
by his complete faith
in the notorious forgery
The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion,
enabled him to navigate
his way up through the
French nationalist right
during the multiple
French crises of the
1930s — despite
being widely ridiculed
as a fool and a failure.
On a more sinister note,
from the mid-1930s,
Darquier was receiving
money from Germany for
his anti-Semitic propaganda,
and these contacts would
be crucial when, during
the Occupation, he became
Commissioner for Jewish
Affairs. Many historians
have neglected the impact
in France of Goebbels’
pre-war propaganda machine,
but Darquier is a prime
example of its effectiveness.
If it was the residual
anti-Semitism of the
French traditionalist
and nationalist right
that gave him his foothold
in politics, it was
his adoption of the
racist and lethal Nazi
version that assured
him the power he acquired
during the war.
Darquier was not a success
for his German masters.
The wealth he disposed
of as Commissioner only
exacerbated his pleasure-seeking
habits and his tendency
towards corrupt dealings.
He was distrusted and
scorned by his Vichy
colleagues, and after
a couple of years even
his strongest German
supporters were plotting
to get rid of a man
whose erratic and unprincipled
modes of operation were
bringing their murderous
policies into dis-repute.
Nevertheless, he did
inflict horrendous evil
on the Jewish population,
over seventy thousand
of whom would be sent
to their deaths. He
was responsible for
the compulsory wearing
of the yellow star,
and then for the explicit
iden-tification of Jews
on their identity cards.
He also, with German
backing and against
the will of the Vichy
government, imposed
a denaturalisation law
by which Jews who had
acquired French nationality
after 1927 lost their
citizenship (thereby
facilitating deportation).
His heaviest and most
enthusiastic role was
in the so-called ‘Aryanisation’
programme by which Jewish
property was expropriated
and sold to ‘true’
French buyers. Here
again, as well as filling
his own pockets, Darquier
served Germany rather
than France in the struggle
over who should benefit
most from the process.
One of the most breathtaking
stories in Callil’s
book details Darquier’s
unscrupulous part in
the Nazi pillage of
the Schloss collection
of art, one of France’s
finest, and much of
which has never been
recovered.
Bad Faith is
brilliantly written
and eminently readable.
It offers a wealth of
information about France
during the interwar
period and the Vichy
years, and Callil’s
angles of approach are
highly original, meaning
that even those familiar
with the period will
find plenty of interest.
Callil demonstrates
outstanding scholarship,
combining the very best
of existing sources
with many dozens of
personal testimonies
and exhaustive archival
work in several countries.
The erudition is not
in the least heavy-handed,
and the narrative, both
lucid and firmly personal,
unfolds effortlessly.
The index and system
of notes are clear and
helpful. The generous
illustrations serve
both to evoke the climate
and style of the period,
and in some instances
(especially the photos
involving Anne and those
portraying the Jews
in the Drancy concentration
camp) keep the reader
mindful that history
cannot — or should
not — forget individual
stories.
A book so passionately
inspired is bound to
provoke controversy.
Historians will question
Callil’s view that
the French experience
of World War II can
be best explained by
seeing France as having
been in a state of continuous
civil war since the
revolution of 1789.
This is a dramatic assertion,
but it does not account
for the complexity of
France’s long process
of democratisation.
A tendency to be overly
categorical crops up
in various ways throughout
the book. It is most
evident in the overt
anti-Catholicism: although
there are passing references
to good deeds committed
by Catholics, Callil’s
portrayal of the Church
as a monolithic and
completely compromised
institution needs to
be balanced by accounts
such as those of W.D.
Hall’s Politics,
Society and Christianity
in Vichy France
(1995) and by the work
of French historians
such as the Bédaridas
and Fouilloux.
Callil’s message
is broader than the
story of Louis Darquier
and the disasters that
he visited on his family
and the world. Her conclusion
is, in this respect,
telling:
As
I wrote this book,
people constantly
asked me how I could
bear to write about
such a villain and
about such terrible
things. In fact, horrors
from the past did
not deter me. What
caused me anguish
as I tracked down
Louis Darquier was
to live so closely
to the helpless terror
of the Jews of France,
and to see what the
Jews of Israel were
passing on to the
Palestinian people.
Like the rest of humanity,
the Jews of Israel
‘forget’
the Palestinians.
Everyone forgets,
every nation forgets.
Remembering
has to do with justice,
and as there is no
justice, acknowledgement
has to do.
The
fact that Louis Darquier
de Pellepoix died peacefully
in his bed in 1980 (and,
ironically, was carried
to his grave by communists)
would seem to confirm
Callil’s pessimism
about the lack of justice
in life. But in a very
real sense, her own
book brings Darquier
and all he represented
to justice in a way
as effective as any
legal process. It is
also a powerful demonstration
of the thoroughness,
integrity and humanity
such an achievement
requires.
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