Louis had moved into Jean's apartment by the end of March, and seems to have remained there for some months. As Myrtle wept onto her letters to René, promising to stay away from Louis if he would only send money for Baby, Louis, back in the bosom of his family, was once again under the influence of his mother, and God had begun to feature in his thoughts. At this point in his spiritual rebirth Louis Darquier was dismissive of Maurras, as he was of all the other leaders of the leagues he was to dally with, for lacking “the spiritual.” His language and aspirations took on an elevated quality, in keeping with his mother's thoughts—“What is to be done? We must always think of others first.” This change of mood was sensible, because Louise was now supporting him with an allowance of between twelve and fifteen hundred francs a month (£500 to £600 at today's values). When in this mode Louis would write to René: “The will of the Almighty is accomplished above our heads and very often, it is from worries, sadness, sufferings and depths that you find the source of happiness and of so many other things.”1 This is the language a Catholic child learns at its mother's knee.
As an institution the record of the Catholic Church in Europe towards fascism was, generally speaking, a wretched one. Freemasonry, the older enemy of the Church, had already been proscribed, but after the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Vatican confronted another godless, worldwide, authoritarian rival, communism, which was also closely associated with the Jews who contributed so much to it—Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg. The words “communist” and “Jew” became synonymous. As it had done before, the Vatican reacted to this new threat by turning to European dictators as Defenders of the Faith. It was in this context that Louis Darquier began his new career.
Charles Maurras was not physically gifted by the gods. He was a short man with a goatee and a stutter, and his deafness made him squint. He was stern, authoritarian, and though a man of violent words, never took action himself. Others did his dirty work. His young activists, the Camelots du Roi, were past masters at riots, disturbance and physical battering, and it was in their company that Louis Darquier took his first step towards the recognition for which he longed.2
At the time that Louis returned to Paris in March 1933, Charles Maurras addressed a large banquet for Action Française organised by the medical fraternity, including Dr. Jean Darquier, by now a member of Action Française.3 In France there was a long tradition of medical involvement in politics, locally and nationally. Léon Daudet was a failed medical student; Maurras' eulogised younger brother was a doctor. There was an Action Française medical review, Le Médecin, and the movement held banquets all over France, those in Paris sometimes attended by over a thousand medical men. Most French doctors traditionally belonged to the Radical Party, but in the 1930s, following the rise of Hitler, many students from other European countries came to the great French medical schools to study, and remained to take clinical appointments. French doctors, resentful of this new competition, became fertile ground for Action Française.
Cadurcien contemporaries admit that Jean Darquier was “openly anti-Semitic. He accused the Jews of blocking his advancement in the hospitals of Paris. He truly believed this.”4 His mother agreed, and claimed to have heard Jewish doctors openly plotting about medical appointments and promotions, favouring Jews and letting in only the odd Christian. Louise thus contributed to the belief of two of her sons that the prospects of true Frenchmen were being ruined by encroaching hordes of foreigners.
In April 1933, beautifully printed copies of Maurras' speech were made available to the doctors present at the March banquet. Jean Darquier was a carefree fellow, an “antisémite de salon.” It was what Louis read— Maurras' words—however, that was perfectly attuned to his needs. Now that his England of aristocrats and peers had failed him, Maurras' call for
Maurras' March speech to the medical fraternity of Action Française, published April 1933 (Paris: Presses de Guillemot et de Lamothe pour “Les Amis des Beaux Livres”)
France to be ruled by “the natural hierarchy of talent or birth” transformed Louis' hatred for his native land into a passionate attachment to it.
Soon it was not his mother or God whom Louis invoked, but Maurras; he borrowed his nationalism, his insistence that France was being “betrayed, occupied, exploited by an internal enemy”; the disgusting republic, “la gueuse,” ruled by “British, Jewish, Bolshevik and German” foreigners—many of whom were Freemasons, or Protestants, or crooks. For nationalists, parliamentary democracy was the “république des camarades”—the republic of Masonic cronies, each of them scratching one another's backs. What Myrtle made of Maurras' hit list of groups, to so many of which she or her family belonged, is unknown—her father and her brother Vernon were prominent Freemasons.
Throughout the summer of 1933 Louis, wilting at the rue Jouffroy, and Myrtle, living from hand to mouth in London, began to crawl surreptitiously back towards each other; in June they met in Belgium. Myrtle nagged plaintively from London, and Louis whimpered, “I have Sandra on my back all day.” In August they went together to see René. He had been heroic before; he now achieved sainthood: a weekly stipend was agreed upon for each of them. It seems that René took on the responsibility for Myrtle and Baby in England, and the Darquier parents took on Louis in Paris; they were not permitted to live together.
In 1933 France was about to join the rest of the world in economic crisis and decline. It began its descent into the Depression later than other countries, but also continued it for much longer. Succeeding French governments refused to devalue the franc, weakening the nation economically while troubles multiplied at home and abroad. Louis, ever the victim of fate, fell in love with his native land just as its governments, its economy and its ancient political schisms erupted in turmoil.
While Louis had been in London, conservatives, including Pierre Laval, a former socialist and pacifist, had dominated French governments, but neither right nor left could rule without the Radical Party in coalition. The Radicals were, in a sense, the government of the Third Republic. Then, in 1932, with the Socialist Party, the Radicals won a handsome majority—which brought Anatole de Monzie back to cabinet office as Minister of Education.
Periodic crises and scandals were endemic in the Third Republic, but the 1930s were its sorriest decade, and were to end in its demise. Fear of Russia and the spread of communist revolution was as strong in France as it was in all the established governments of Europe. This concern moved the parties of the right, and their supporters in the press, to frenzied attack. Terrified too by the advent of Hitler, conservatives feared a German population with a birth rate twice that of France, blossoming under a fascist leader, while France withered under an unstable parliamentary republic. The nation was united in fury that Germany was not paying its war reparations, while France was required to pay its own war debts to the United States.
Unsupported by Britain and America—which then, as now, made their own political and financial arrangements—France struggled to keep Germany to its treaty commitments. It feared German rearmament, feared fascism, feared communism, feared war. The Radical and Socialist parties could not agree on economic policies. There were nine government ministries from 1932 to 1934, and while unemployment never reached the depths seen elsewhere, there were beggars in the streets, protest meetings and disturbances throughout the country. A quarter of a million people were out of work, and Louis Darquier was once again to join their number.
On his return, however, Louis found others more unfortunate than himself. By 1930 there were three million foreigners living in France, three times as many as before the First World War. Many immigrants came as labourers, to make up the shortages that followed the war— Polish, Spanish, African, dozens of different nationalities. The Lambert law of 1927 significantly relaxed French naturalisation procedures.5 This provided men like Maurras and Louis Darquier with their métèques— foreigners and undesirables. First among these were Jews, particularly those claiming to be French, then refugees from fascist It
aly. And when Hitler instigated his first Jewish boycott in April 1933, followed in May by Goebbels' ceremonial burning of books, and in June by the opening of Dachau concentration camp, German refugees—political, Jewish, communist, socialist—began to seek safety in France too.6 One of them was the great Austrian writer Joseph Roth, a Catholic and a Jew, the most feared métèque of all.
Action Française was the first to raise its voice against these hated immigrants. Others followed. Although Jews comprised only fifty-five thousand of the influx, Maurras and his followers magnified this small number into swarming Jewish millions bent on destroying France. When de Monzie arranged to offer Albert Einstein a chair at the Collège de France, the perfume magnate François Coty, legendary financier of numerous fascist groups and movements in the twenties and thirties, accused de Monzie of being a communist, a Soviet agent, a Jew-lover, a Marxist, and a militant Bolshevik. This did not affect the relationship between de Monzie and Maurras: in 1935, when Maurras published the names of—and threatened with death—over a hundred deputies alleged to favour sanctions against Italy over its invasion of Abyssinia, it is said that de Monzie prepared the list for him.
In the ten years since Anatole de Monzie had become a friend and admirer of Charles Maurras, the latter had entered into his personal kingdom. The front page of Action française was now required reading. The two columns on the left, written by “le gros Léon” (big Léon), Léon Daudet, were the most popular. Daudet was a man with a big appetite and a murderous pen, ebullient, vicious, inventive and scurrilous—and poisonously anti-Semitic. So was Maurras, who issued forth his credo daily in his large column in the centre of the page, “Politique.” Despite the fact that he was a repetitive monologist, Maurras' violence and certainty seem to have cast a spell over his readers. The paper also concentrated on the activities, deaths and funerals of the kings and queens of Europe, and the duc de this and the duchesse de that.
In October 1933 the French government, led by the Radical édouard Daladier,7 was brought down by the socialists' refusal to accept salary cuts in the public services. From that date demonstrations began in the streets of Paris. By November Louis had moved into another hotel in rue la Boétie, the élysées, only a five-minute walk from the offices of Action Française in rue du Boccador. Here he wrote that he was “living a very terrible existence…but I have a very firm hope and that suits me perfectly.”8
Louis found himself in the middle of Paris with nothing to do. The headquarters of the Camelots were on the second floor of an old town house at 33, rue St.-André-des-Arts, near place St.-Michel, off the boul' Mich' and boulevard St.-Germain. There Louis attended Action Française meetings with other young militants and the many literary figures of the time who wrote for the paper. At the cafés nearby they would discuss into the night the contents of the daily newspaper and the books of Daudet, Maurras and Jacques Bainville, the deluded but illustrious historian of the royalist cause. Louis was now thirty-five, but the appearance, optimism and absolute self-assurance of these younger men of Action Française were exactly the qualities to which he aspired. As was their love of banquets. The Camelots with whom he dined and drank in the Latin Quarter had an air of the Household Cavalry about them, sporting canes, wearing gaiters and decorations.
Louis often denied being a member of Action Française—and they agree. After the war Maurras' movement changed its name, tarred by association with Vichy, to Restauration Nationale. Today, with dark and dusty offices at 10, rue Croix des Petits-Champs in the 1st arrondissement, its website opens to the accompaniment of a medieval French jingle. The current director, Pierre, son of Maurice Pujo, one of the leading figures of Action Française, is categorical that no one of Louis Darquier's tenor could have been a member of the movement. “We thought of him as a lunatic, a dropout,” says Pierre Pujo;9 by “we” he means his father and Charles Maurras.
Like many of Maurras' followers, Louis had no longing for the return of a king, but he “was unquestionably an Action Française man.” It may be that he did not pay his annual subscription, but despite his later denials—and theirs—he remained an active and public supporter of Action Française until 1939. Amongst the Camelots he met in 1934 was the swaggering young Henry Charbonneau. In 1999 Charbonneau's former wife Jeanne, by that time widow of the leader of the Belgian fascists, Léon Degrelle, insisted that Louis Darquier had been cradled by Action Française. “My first husband knew him very well, because they were in Action Française together. They used to meet on evenings, to talk in a café on the place St.-André-des-Arts, because the headquarters of Action Française was in that street. They used to talk, to read the newspaper, to discuss the news for hours… they were young, and had ideas and values.”10
Maurras ensured the survival of his movement by refusing to permit it to change, or to move beyond incitement to revolution. Action Française did not become a political party; its power was intellectual, its ethos entirely anti-parliamentary.11 A number of Maurras' followers demanded direct political action. After 1926, when Action Française came under papal interdiction, many Catholics had left it for the Fédération Nationale Catholique, the FNC, whose numbers swelled to two million members. Even earlier, in 1924, as a reaction to the leftist government elected in that year, the Cartel des Gauches, others had fled the nest to form parties and leagues of their own. A paramilitary right grew up, of dissident nationalists obsessed with what they saw as the decadence of France and the paralysis of its parliamentary democracy. Their leagues fought for national renewal and an authoritarian government which would end class warfare and prevent the growth of international communism.
The most important of these new groups was Croix-de-feu, launched in 1928 and funded by François Coty. By 1931 its president was the Action Française dissident Colonel François de la Roque.12 A decorated soldier, la Roque turned Croix-de-feu, originally only a veterans' group, into a paramilitary organisation. Though supposedly neutral on the subject of religion it was marked by rigorous Catholicism, military discipline, impressive public rallies and parades. In their black leather jackets, wearing the medals so many of them had gained in war, Croix-de-feu became immensely popular: in 1937, by then a political party, it had three-quarters of a million members, more than the French Communist and Socialist parties together.
One of the earliest leagues to follow in the footsteps of Action Française was the Jeunesses Patriotes, founded in 1924 by Pierre-Charles Taittinger, a right-wing entrepreneur of considerable wealth who bought the champagne company which bears his name in 1931, and also a newspaper editor and owner with aristocratic and business associates of the kind Louis Darquier most favoured. Taittinger was a war veteran too, a cavalryman who like Louis had fought in the Champagne area during the First World War. Under him the Jeunesses Patriotes became a Catholic league, noted for violent skirmishes with communists, sometimes with fatal results. Taittinger's son Claude, who heads the champagne firm today, considers his father to be “un homme politique unanimement estimé,” “a universally admired politician.”13
A deputy since 1919, Taittinger belonged to the right-wing parliamentary group Fédération Républicaine, many of whose deputies were members of the paramilitary leagues. Taittinger was thus an anti-parliamentary parliamentarian, an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler, if not of Germany. He praised Hitler in 1932 for “the constant development of racism in all classes of Germans, and the enthusiasm of [his] troops for a leader who makes their heart beat under their brown shirts.”14 In 1936 Taittinger was elected to the Paris city council, based in the Hôtel de Ville, the town hall, which became a centre of power for the extreme right. At its peak, membership of the Jeunesses Patriotes numbered about a quarter of a million, mostly young men derided at the time as “dandies in gaiters and monocles, grouped together to defend their daddies' dividends.”15
Action Française, Croix-de-feu and Jeunesses Patriotes cover the political passage of Louis Darquier, though he also joined the Union Nationale des Combattants—the Nati
onal Union of War Veterans. Initially Jeunesses Patriotes was as important to him as Action Française. The latter satisfied his aristocratic aspirations, provided the words he would use and the enemy he would fight for the rest of his life, but the former gave him a political platform and a political career, and its Catholicism was more in tune with his “spiritual” vision of France.16 Also Taittinger was a dynamic, expansive fellow, with a certain charisma and a fine oratorical talent, more attractive to Louis than the insignificant Maurras, or the Olympian chilliness of la Roque.
Many of the ultra-conservative leaders of these groups were bankers or industrialists, and a surprisingly large number of them made their money out of perfume, cosmetics or wine. The talcum powder and scent of the omnipresent financier François Coty eventually enabled him to pay for his own league, the aggressively anti-Semitic Solidarité Française, and his own right-wing newspapers, including Le Figaro. Eugène Schueller,17 founder of the l'Oréal beauty empire, and Jean Hennessy and his brandy were other sources of funds. These men could buy followers, and they provided Louis with his first inspiration as to how he could make his way, and make money in doing so.18
There is endless quibbling about the fine-tuning of these nationalist leagues, including Action Française. Were they fascist? In the 1930s France was surrounded by fascist dictatorships, but they were by no means fascisms of the same kind. In France, what emerges from a cloud of over-analysis is what each organisation had in common. The words used to describe the leagues at the time still seem accurate—they were called fascists, or nationalists, and their multifarious movements were known as the French “fascist leagues,” the parties of “the Street.”
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