Not all French fascists were anti-Semites, and many Catholic fascists—Pierre Taittinger and Colonel de la Roque, for instance—chose communists and Freemasons as their preferred demons. But however much these “semi-fascists” averred before, during and after the Occupation that they were not anti-Semitic, they worked, marched, congregated and voted with a revolutionary right of leagues which were dominated by that sentiment.
Many men of the Street passed happily from one league to another, but their leaders were rivals, and their followers often followed suit. These turbulent factions could never submit to a Mussolini or a Hitler, and they failed later to unite under one of their own, Marshal Pétain. Among them were many who used the word “socialism” in their rhetoric, and who had their roots in the socialist and communist left. For both the left and right, it is somewhere in their shared fear of the Bolshevik terror that the binding threads of French fascism can be found. The close bonds with Catholicism which shaped French fascism saved Vichy from the worst excesses of Hitler's version, but also cast a veil of authoritarian and religious approval over terrible deeds.
By the end of 1933, however wretched Louis was in the élysées Hôtel, events had begun to move in his favour. After the fall of Daladier's government in October, and a three-week interregnum when yet another government fell, the Radical politician Camille Chautemps, a Freemason particularly loathed by Léon Daudet, was asked to form a cabinet. Chautemps' crisis-ridden government was soon floored by a scandal insubstantial in itself, but which acted like a match to paraffin. Just after Christmas, Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a small-time swindler with good connections, was revealed to have defrauded the public of two hundred million francs by issuing fake bonds on the municipal pawnshop and loan office in Bayonne.
Action française leapt onto the revelation. Stavisky was a Ukrainian Jew, though a naturalised Frenchman, but better, his involvement with prominent members of the Radical government, many of them Freemasons, including Chautemps, meant that his previous imbroglios had never come to court; attempts to bring cases against him had been adjourned nineteen times in the previous six years. The rage of the public, suffering all the miseries of the Depression—unemployment, high taxes, reduced incomes—and now presented with a government which not only could not govern, but which also seemed thoroughly corrupt, hardly needed incitement by the press to come to boiling point.
First, the Comédie-Française staged Shakespeare's Coriolanus; its passionate denunciation of political leaders was interpreted as anti-parliamentary. This brought Action Française members to the theatre in force to cheer every word. In early January 1934 the defamations of Léon Daudet and Charles Maurras reached their apogee. In Action française Shakespeare was invoked in every revelation about the Stavisky scandal. His words were used to attack democracy and to hurl accusations of villainy, corruption and decay at the republic and its parliament. The circulation shot up—as did that of all the right-wing press of the time which took up the story and ran with it. Action française urged “the people of Paris to come in large numbers before the Chamber of Deputies, to cry ‘DOWN WITH THE THIEVES’ ”—adding, “Instructions will be sent in due course.”19
Then, on 8 January, the police came for Stavisky in Chamonix, where he had fled, and found him dead. The press accused the police of murder and cover-up; the Radical Party, Freemasons, the government, cabinet ministers, judges, newspaper magnates and bankers were all implicated. Stavisky, it was alleged, had been “suicided.” Throughout January, led by Action française, the scandal raged in the press, on the streets, outside the Chamber of Deputies and inside, within the government.
Anatole de Monzie's tentacles were by now even more firmly entwined in French affairs. He had just begun his work on the Encyclopédie française, and his friend Henry de Jouvenel—who acquired fabulous wealth in 1933 by marrying the widow of Charles Louis-Dreyfus, the brother of King Two Louis—had become French ambassador to Rome. That year de Jouvenel, and so of course de Monzie, had been deeply engaged in negotiations with Mussolini to sign a Four Power pact between Germany, Britain, France and Italy which would act as a deterrent, outside the League of Nations, to another European war. De Monzie was caught up in the Stavisky affair as lawyer to two of the directors involved. Then another deputy, Philippe Henriot,20 a cohort of Taittinger's, let loose in the Chamber of Deputies and accused de Monzie of consorting with Stavisky's mistress before she became his wife. De Monzie retaliated by threatening a duel, and fainting. The Chamber of Deputies was in uproar, while outside de Monzie's “godson” Louis Darquier, so meek in his presence, was preparing to bring the house down.
Tension mounted throughout January. While the Palais Bourbon and the deputies within were firmly guarded, nearby and on the place de la Concorde malcontents were tearing up iron railings and benches and smashing cafés and kiosks night after night. This culminated in a dress rehearsal for what was to come, when Action Française demonstrated in force on Saturday, 27 January. The police recorded Louis Darquier's participation. There were hundreds of arrests, which came to nothing under the benevolent eye of the powerful police chief Jean Chiappe,21 who was anyway implicated in the Stavisky scandal. Chiappe was a man of the right, a member of Croix-de-feu—he liked his police to beat up communists, but to tread softly on Action Française.
In the turmoil, the government fell again. Daladier returned with yet another Radical cabinet, including a former socialist, Eugène Frot, as Minister of the Interior. Chiappe was asked to resign. He refused. This was Sunday, 4 February, and on the following day the leagues and newspapers of the right called their troops to action: “Socialist anarchy… Masonic crooks… enough of this putrid regime.”22 Ministers received death threats. There was talk of tanks in the street.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, 6 February, while the investiture of Daladier's new ministry was taking place, the opponents of the Third Republic took to the streets. Louis Darquier was at the head of the fray. The riots continued with growing frenzy until midnight.23 By 8 p.m. the Palais Bourbon was surrounded by ex-servicemen's organisations of both right and left. All converged on the place de la Concorde, while nearby la Roque kept his Croix-de-feu in hand, singing the “Marseillaise.”24 Many of the rioters were young men; many infuriated citizens of Paris joined them. The police and mounted guards barricaded the pont de la Concorde; there were reinforcements. The mounted guards charged the crowd; buses and kiosks burnt.
The rioters used everything they could lay their hands on: iron railings, stones and bits of asphalt, barricades, fires, guns; they slashed the horses' legs or disembowelled them with razor blades attached to walking sticks, and threw marbles under their hooves. The Concorde was alight, the air full of the smell of burning rubber and the cries of forty thousand angry citizens. The police charged, using batons and fire hoses; firing started from the mob, and the police responded; blood flowed, and the rioters howled “Assassins! Assassins!” Some deputies and many members of the Paris city council were on the Concorde with the rioters, attacking their own Parliament. It was rumoured that Pierre Taittinger, who also took part in the riots, was to announce the formation of a dictatorial government from the Hôtel de Ville.
That day, 6 February, seventeen people were killed and nearly fifteen hundred wounded, three hundred of them hospitalised. Among them was Louis Darquier, who had been on the Concorde alongside his fellow Camelots.25 Another was Pierre Gérard, only nineteen but already a veteran of Jeunesses Patriotes and an habitué of the cafés of the boulevard St.-Germain. He was an insignificant-looking little fellow, short and dark and one-eyed, but like Louis he had been active in the January disturbances. On 6 February he went to the boulevard St.-Germain, found nothing going on there, and took the metro to the Concorde. By 7:30 p.m., with 150 others, he was about to break through the police vans barricading the pont de la Concorde and to storm the Chamber of Deputies, “to shout under its windows”—though worse than shouting was feared. Gérard was shot in the groin and taken to hospital,
where he was operated on by Robert, the brother of Marcel Proust. He was to join Action Française immediately after 6 February, and to spend much of the 1930s as Louis Darquier's closest sidekick. It was with men like Gérard that Louis stormed the barricades. Louis himself was shot in the thigh and, a wounded hero, was at last catapulted towards the fame he craved.
The riots of 6 February 1934 were the decisive event of Louis' generation, that of the “comrades of the trenches” of the First World War. At the time Louis said that his part in it happened by chance: “No wonder the Greeks put the God of Chance above all others. After many years about which the least we can say is that luck has not been on my side… I go to demonstrate with some fifty thousand others… I'm among the first thirty of those fifty thousand. It's like having a winning ticket in the lottery.” As for his injury: “I was lucky to find two AF guys who took me away and helped me towards a car.” He was taken to the Hôpital Bichat on boulevard des Maréchaux on the inner périphérique of Paris, and there he stayed for the next three months.
Louis had a bullet in his thighbone, and the wound was deep and suppurating. He was very pleased with himself, and two weeks later he was writing to René in Strasbourg. He was a changed man; gone forever was the entreating tone of his London years. He was now cock of the walk. He had almost brought down the government, “but we're not there yet. My feelings on that evening of the 6 February were overwhelming. For five minutes, I thought that we'd sweep everything away—and those bastards thought so too, hence what happened!”
Louis was looking for a new way, under the guidance of God. His path was to be “Nationalist, racial and more or less aristocratic.” Nationalism was the superior philosophy in every way, but the government might need “a series of kicks in the arse” to trigger off the final revolt against the republic. God would find a way. “I'm becoming more and more a mystic! How can it be otherwise? Difficult times, more than any others, bring us closer to God …”26
In all these months, and for some time afterwards, there is no sign or mention of Myrtle, though she seems to have been sufficiently upright to let Tasmania know that, while patriotically marching along the Champs-élysées, Louis had been shot in the leg by communists. It was in 1933 and 1934, her last years in London, during which she was a remittance woman of the Darquier family, that Myrtle lost to Elsie in the grim tug-of-war over the body of Baby. Elsie loathed Myrtle with the honest distrust of a labourer never paid for her hire, and with the particular vitriol women reserve for inadequate mothers. By the time Anne was four she was aware of the battles about money which marked the lives of the two women responsible for her.
In Paris, Pierre Darquier would not visit his son in hospital, but Louise and Janot were in attendance; presumably Myrtle's banishment was more acceptable to Louis in his new religious phase. Three days after Louis was wounded on the place de la Concorde, Myrtle's sister Olive married in Tasmania, an elegant wedding complete with “richly hued” gladioli and Hazel a bridesmaid in rose-pink chiffon velvet. The widowed Lexie wore black georgette and French lace, and the Jones tribe gathered at her brother's home for the event, dining on the sunny verandah. How Myrtle coped during this period is hard to imagine. On occasion Louis would say that alcoholism was a disease, not a vice, though he always saw it as the latter if Jews were involved. He took Myrtle to doctors for her alcoholism. Perhaps treatment, and not Louis' new belief in religious principles, explains her disappearance until mid-1934.
In the days following the riots, the parties of the left reacted, and republican and nationalist France began to line up for their final, epic struggle. February the sixth was a victory for the fascist leagues of “the Street,” but as a political coup it failed. Daladier resigned, civil war was avoided and the republic held on under a conservative–centre government of national unity, brought in to restore order. This was headed by a former president, Gaston Doumergue, a Radical Protestant Freemason, but a most conservative one, with Marshal Pétain as Minister of War.27
Louis missed nothing in hospital; he followed each succeeding scandal and disturbance, and pontificated in letters to René of extraordinary length. His wound would not heal, and a month later he had to be operated on again, with Jean at his side giving him the necessary anaesthetic. Perhaps it was the quantity of the ethers that affected his prose: “… they've taken out a serious bit of femur…I now have a hole as big as a fist in my thigh…When it was over, [the doctor] asked me: ‘is it painful? ’ ‘No, ’ I said, ‘but I thought you were about to come up with two doves as well!' ” Louis was disgusted with the aftermath of the riots: “And they all forget about the spiritual! That it's not Mussolini, Hitler, Frot, or Whoever who make revolutions, but the ascendance of the spiritual in each of us—And we must not delude ourselves, we don't have a great spiritual movement here in France at the moment, we have people who worry about money …” Money made him think of Baby: “I have good news from my kid whom I haven't seen for nearly two years. When you get this letter, can you send 10 or 12 pounds to the nurse?”
On the night of 6 February, Charles Maurras had been at the office of Action Française, writing Provençal poetry. Many young men besides Louis Darquier were disillusioned by his cerebral reaction to political events: “What is terrible to see,” wrote Louis, “is most of the young men joining lots of Leagues, thinking that the achievement of power by force is the height of ambition and that when they put at the head a guy of their choice, this guy will automatically be virtuous… the League chiefs, they slither along. Maurras with his atheism and his breathless intellectualism, Daudet with all his denunciations and premonitions which make you feel he knows too much about things, Colonel de la Roque, an elegant leader of a regular army, and I won't talk to you about the others! A revolution with that? It would be much worse than the status quo and at the moment I am absolutely with Machiavelli who said that it's better to keep a bad Prince than to change him.” Bolshevik troubles, bastard German barons—Louis spared René nothing of his new concept of the sacred, except to add a postscript: “Don't forget my kid.”28
Despite his spiritual outpourings, on 9 February the wives of both Daudet and Maurice Pujo were at Louis' bedside, and on the following day Action française listed him as one of “Our Wounded.” Louis was a very happy fellow during these months. The more serious his wound became, the more he could make of it. He had his board and keep for the first time in years, he was coddled by the nurses, had cigarettes and wine and books to read. Janot brought him food, Jean looked after him, the family paid all expenses.
Since 1933 the Lightfoot ménage had been living in a tiny bungalow in Kidlington, mystifyingly named “Esquimault.” Kidlington was a jolly village, with a railway station and a cinema and a lot going on. Children could hear the Kidlington Silver Band play every Sunday evening in the Orchard Tea Gardens Restaurant, have a ride on Rosie the elephant or gaze at the red kangaroo and the flamingos and pelicans in Kidlington's Gosford Zoo—strange animals to find in any English village.
Few of these pleasures lingered in Anne Darquier's memory of her years with Elsie. Elsie barely subsisted: she had no paid employment, yet she was not officially unemployed. She could get no Public Assistance and could never submit to the Means Test, introduced in 1934; she could not apply for the dole. She was not Anne's legal guardian, and though there was no state system to investigate why Anne lived with her nanny, Elsie knew enough about the dubious Darquier parents to be obsessive about snoopers, and obsessively protective of Anne. Until 1943 Anne lived in Kidlington with Elsie and May, with Aunts Violet and Maud coming and going, supported by underpaid women for whom rural poverty was as bitter as it had ever been.
The disappearance of Myrtle from the Lightfoot family scene was underlined by the telegrams—“GRATEFUL HEAR BY RETURN LIGHTFOOT”—Elsie had to send to the Hôpital Bichat or Strasbourg to get enough money for Baby to survive. Louis' leg did not improve, though his circumstances did. On 10 May he received an official visit in hospital from the direc
tors of Action Française, Léon Daudet and Maurice Pujo, and its president, Admiral Schwerer. They brought him best wishes for his recovery from the Duc and Duchesse de Guise, the Bourbon Pretender and Maurras' chosen leader. The length of Louis' stay in hospital made him one of the select few, the seriously wounded. Action Française now gave him an entrée everywhere. He had been reported to the police for his unpaid bill at the Élysées Hôtel, but his parents paid up and he returned there on 20 May, limping but in tremendous spirits. The visit of Daudet and his comrades was only a beginning; God flew out the window: Louis at last saw how to make his way in the world. “I think I'm going to find influential friends now, as I'm a unique example (the others who were severely wounded are cooks, drivers and shop employees). I believe that I'm going to profit from the accident—I've decided to play this card for all it's worth and get in touch with all the heavyweight patriotic pimps. The republic really owes me that!”29
He wrote to Marshal Lyautey,30 the great colonial administrator, who had grown more and more reactionary in his old age, and in March 1934 had been elected honorary head of Jeunesses Patriotes. Lyautey replied with “a charming letter.” He also wrote to Charles des Isnards, vice president of Croix-de-feu and a conservative Paris city councillor. Des Isnards replied immediately, and Louis met him and joined Croix-de-feu. As to Action Française, the police recorded his membership in their files, and kept an eye on him. While pursuing these avenues Louis, like Myrtle, constantly dunned René for money for Baby. But by June 1934 Elsie was owed £44, and telegrams continued to come from Kidlington throughout the year. Louis was still wary of his parents, but his requests for money from René had almost become orders. His approaches had brought him “a lot of support” on the Paris city council. “I promise you that I'm on the move and if those chaps do not get me out of this mess I will play ‘the hero of 6 February’ with noisy dignity,” he wrote to René.31
Bad Faith Page 14