Presumably, in 1935 Louis needed René's money to pay for the expenses of his election campaign, but he was also supported by Bailby and his newspaper and a twenty-six-man committee, of whom Jean Darquier was one. Jean even raised ten thousand francs for his brother by borrowing from medical colleagues, who also joined Louis' electoral committee. The campaign leaflet Louis produced was the first public statement of his political life, and he began as he intended to continue. Under the banner of the Comité d'Union et de Rénovation Nationale (Committee for National Union and Renewal) he presented himself to the public as secretary-general of Le Jour and president of the Association of the Wounded of 6 February. His photograph is rigid with aristocratic hauteur. In Napoleonic mode, jaw jutting forward, pose patriotic, the image takes up more than half the front of the four-page leaflet, giving physical presence to the fantasies which absorbed Louis' days. The text delivers, for the first time, some of the vast number of lies he was to continue to tell about his past life.
Mr. L. Darquier De Pellepoix was born on 19 December 1897.
He comes from a family from the South-west which has given France
many soldiers and scientists (the astronomer Darquier de Pellepoix, member of the Academy of Sciences, Colonel Darquier of the Grenadier Guards, Commandant Darquier of the 51 Infantry etc.). Mr. DARQUIER DE PELLEPOIX is a Catholic, married and a father.
His academic and military failures glossed over, his “good humour and courage” described, he transmutes his sticky end in the wheat business into a resignation on the grounds that during the recession his company “had come under the control of international finance.” The two latter words meant Jewish ownership in the patois of the Front National. Louis also attributed Myrtle's lost Tasmanian inheritance to the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on the Australian wheat industry.
Claiming for himself “superior administrative qualities… vitality, independence and idealism… fearless patriotism, strong intelligence,” Louis turned his years in London into a period of international travel. His previous hatred of France disappeared into a misty spray of heroic prose about “the renaissance of France” as “an inviolable Credo and the only reason for living.” The demands he issued included stronger authoritarian government, a more aggressive foreign policy, national defence as agreed by Marshal Pétain, the reduction of taxes, electricity, gas and water rates, the revision of naturalisation laws, reorganisation of everything to do with foreigners, repatriation of unemployed foreigners living on public relief, the suppression of trade unions, Freemasonry, monopolies, class warfare, parasitic organisations, and the defence of the birth rate and the family.16
The Salle Wagram in the avenue of that name in the 17th arrondissement is a vast meeting place, a Second Empire Parisian version of the Albert Hall in London. This was the venue for Louis' next success, a resounding speech about the glory of France and the men of 6 February. Jews were rarely mentioned in his discourse during this election campaign; he fought solely as a nationalist and a “man of 6 February.” It was Parliament, the left, socialism and communism that were the enemies in May 1935; this antagonism was exacerbated when, just as Louis was standing for election, Pierre Laval, then Foreign Secretary, was required to sign a pact of mutual assistance between France and Russia, a fearful coupling to anti-communists, of whom Laval was one.
In the council elections throughout the country the Radical Party lost heavily, while the left made great gains, as did some of the nationalists of the extreme right, Louis among them. In the first round of voting, held on 5 May 1935, Louis led the list, and in the second round, though only three hundred ahead of the republican candidate of the left, he won with 2,803 votes. He was now a councillor of the Paris city council and a councillor-general of the Department of the Seine, which in turn had a vote in the election of the upper house of French government, the Senate.17 How long he maintained his position at Le Jour is not known—Louis never referred to the reasons for his departure, although gossip had it that Bailby got rid of him for putting his hand in the till and offending female visitors. It was said that no woman was safe in his presence.
In May, Louis, with Maurras, Pujo and the devout Catholic writer Henri Massis,18 addressed a banquet for the Students of Action Française, and the trio appeared together again in June before over four thousand supporters at the Salle Bullier, this time joined by Charles Trochu instead of Massis. Action française celebrated with brio Louis' success and that of the extreme right in its pages, and continued to do so regularly, day after day, reporting all Louis' interjections, objections and speeches at the town hall, the Hôtel de Ville.
The elaborate Hôtel de Ville of Paris was built by the Third Republic to replace the original, burnt down in 1871 during the Paris Commune. Louis spent much of the next seven years in this ornate, turreted and curlicued edifice. The handsome council chamber was now his playground, and he soon acquired a secretary, Paule Fichot,19 who was to remain with him throughout his Vichy years. Today the council chamber has a plaque in honour of the Paris city councillors who were executed in the Resistance, but no testament to the men of the right who so dominated the chamber until the end of the Second World War.20 Jean Chiappe was its president in Louis' first year there, and Taittinger and Trochu controlled it throughout the German Occupation.
Of how Myrtle lived, and how she was, during these great changes in Louis' life, there is only a police record of a time in a Paris hospital, where she was treated by Jewish doctors whom Louis, only beginning his career as a professional anti-Semite, thanked for their care of her. The two continued to move from one hotel to another. The police followed Louis first to 1, rue du Four, in the 6th arrondissement, on the Left Bank, very near the stamping ground of Action Française. Jeanne Degrelle, married to Henry Charbonneau for many years, remembered: “Darquier at that time loved drinking, eating, laughing and partying… But he was always broke. He never had any money… [Charbonneau] told me this anecdote at least ten times: one night, Darquier could not pay for his drinks, at the end of one of these big discussions in the café. He had to pay by leaving his coat to the barman.”21 Later, others recorded Myrtle taking part in such jollities, but not in these early years. By now Louis and Myrtle had moved to the Hôtel Windsor étoile at 14, rue Beaujon in the 8th arrondissement. From here Myrtle wrote her last letter to René. This was a cut above their usual abodes, but by now Louis had met the professional anti-Semite Henry Coston, and was also pursuing other financial sources of support.
If by night Louis was living high, by day he made himself felt immediately in the council chamber, giving voice to “Bravos” and his opinions. He liked to display himself as a citizen of the world, informing the council about circumstances in Australia or England, pretending to have lived in the former, though never the latter—the opposite of the truth. He had a rather piping voice, blustering but insistent, and he loved to hear it; public speaking, as much as journalism, became his chosen métier. Uncompromising, intransigent, vulgar, long-winded, he would interject, play the jester, cause a stir whenever he could; but until 1936 it was always the money which he needed so desperately—the compensation he demanded for the widows and wounded of 6 February—that was his prime concern.
Throughout 1935, both sides of a divided France were gathering strength, facing each other across a widening chasm, made worse in October when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and, by demonstrating the impotence of the League of Nations, sent Europe into disarray. The slump and unemployment now affected the living standards of all. Earlier, in 1934, as the threatening shadow of Hitler grew longer, Stalin had permitted the French Communist Party to make an about-turn from revolutionary and anti-militarist isolation and to join with the socialists in defence of the republic against fascism. By June 1935 the French Socialist and Communist parties had agreed on a closer working union. Vast rallies were held. Writers and intellectuals—André Gide, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Georges Bataille, André Malraux—publicly entered the fray against fascism and
in support of the republic. On 14 July 500,000 marchers rallied at the stadium of Buffalo de Montrouge in a mass parade from place de la Bastille to place de la Nation. This was a turning point in the birth of the Front Populaire, the Popular Front, because the Radical Party joined with socialists and communists. The political structure of a new parliamentary group began to take shape, and this was their pledge:
… to remain united to defend democracy, to disarm and dissolve seditious
leagues, to place our freedoms out of reach of fascism. We swear,
on this day which reincarnates the first victory of the Republic, to
defend the democratic freedoms conquered by the people of France,
to give bread to the workers, work to the young, and to the world a
great and human peace.22
In the latter part of this year Louis busied himself in public with the pursuit of Eugène Frot, the Minister of the Interior, whom he and Action Française considered to be the government's executioner on 6 February. Wherever Frot went throughout France, speaking on behalf of the Popular Front, he was pursued by Camelots who would leap upon him and slap his face. Rows, arrests and disturbances were recorded daily, as were letters of congratulation and gratitude from Louis Darquier—“courageous gesture…moving act of justice… health of the fatherland.”23
Since the riots of 6 February the previous year the dissolution of the anti-parliamentary leagues had been much discussed, inside and outside the Chamber of Deputies. On 5 December the Basque deputy Jean Ybarnégaray, speaking in the chamber on behalf of la Roque, offered to comply, and to disarm his paramilitary troops. Louis Darquier, outraged by this act of submission, ended the year in a blaze of glory by resigning from Croix-de-feu with a much-quoted diatribe in which he called la Roque a “rosewater dictator.” La Roque always counselled moderation by saying, “Dogs bark, but the caravan passes by.” Louis' riposte was: “Yes, but if the leader of the caravan gets diarrhoea he is dropped in the first watering hole.” Maurras, envious of la Roque, loudly praised Louis for these outbursts, while la Roque dismissed Louis as a “snob and lounge lizard.”24
Rural France had now begun to match the near civil war in Paris as its “time of hatred” too set in.25 Henri Dorgères' Chemises Vertes (Green shirts), a peasant militia he founded in 1935, never missed an opportunity to blame peasants' sufferings on Louis Louis-Dreyfus. All these strands began to come together for Louis Darquier in early 1936, moving him from the extreme right to its outer fringes.
After he left Croix-de-feu in high dudgeon, Louis decided upon a new strategy. Most of his new bedfellows were veterans of the First World War, but Henry Coston, another significant figure in Louis' life, was thirteen years younger. He had been active in Action Française for years by 1934, when Louis Darquier probably first met him. Coston was above all a professional anti-Semite: “The number one enemy of France is not the French communist, it is the JEW.”26 Like Louis he was a journalist, and had been an activist against Jews and Masons since 1928, in which year he rescued and republished the famous nineteenth-century anti-Semitic newspaper of édouard Drumont, La Libre parole. “Darquier de Pellepoix!” he said, in the 1970s: “I taught him all he knew. When he came to see us after the riots of 1934 he knew nothing about anti-Semitism. It was I who gave him all the necessary books and pamphlets.”27 Coston visited Germany in 1934, and made contact with the Nazi Party and other anti-Semitic sources which enabled him, in January 1936, to set up a Centre de Documentation et de Propagande (CDP), a Centre for Information and Propaganda, in rue Guersant, in the 17th arrondissement, a street away from Louis' office at 20, avenue Mac Mahon.
After meeting Coston, Louis Darquier the novelist, journalist and defender of widows and the wounded disappeared in a puff of smoke, and turned his energy solely towards Maurras' and Coston's most loathed métèques, Jews. Not that Maurras and Coston agreed on the subject. Maurras insisted on the French quality of his anti-Semitism, based upon reasons of state, half nationalist, half Catholic, and accepting of old, French, “well-born Israelites.” Coston's anti-Semitism was more in the style of a French Nazi—he accepted no qualifications. For Louis Darquier, all species of French anti-Semitism were acceptable.
Louis had been showing signs of restlessness before he parted from Croix-de-feu. His perpetual problem was his debts: his bar bill alone was fifty thousand francs, an enormous sum (almost £22,000 today), most of it owed to the Brasserie Lorraine in the place des Ternes. The Darquiers loved nightspots, gambling and clothes. These pleasures, and eating every meal in a restaurant, could account for Louis' permanent state of near bankruptcy. But there is one other possibility, which is that Myrtle used drugs. When Anne Darquier was sixteen, she met her mother and dismissed her as a hopeless washout from both drink and drugs. If this was the case, it could account for the enormous sums they needed. Drugs would have been easily available, because Henry Coston's cohort at the CDP, Henri-Robert Petit, was a known trafficker in cocaine. Cocaine was the drug Anne mentioned.
Louis was a conspicuous figure now, and strangely enough, perhaps because he was rarely seen with Myrtle, but perhaps also because he had worked for Bailby—known to be homosexual—the first of many such accusations came his way. Voltaire, a satirical magazine, called the Association for the Wounded of “Pellepoix en monocle” “the Recovery League for the Arse-Kicked,” hailed him as the great “Hunter of the Circumcised,” referred to him by every French word for homosexual and suggested he adopted the habit “while shearing sheep in Australia.” The magazine laughed at everything he did and said; when a friend of Frot's slapped Darquier, Voltaire published a delighted cartoon of the monocled, red-cheeked councillor.
Conseiller Municipal Baron et Madame Baronesse Darquier de Pellepoix were to be found in the phone book of 1936, and by the time he had been on the Paris council for six months Louis had mouthed enough pomposities for the magazine to swoop upon him. Le Canard enchaîné and others soon followed suit. Jokes about his sexual habits and “strange friendships” proliferated, as did those about his name and the dubious origins of his title. He was often referred to as “Darquier sans Pellepoix.” Most of the rest of his nicknames were untranslatable, and most of them rude: “Darquier de Bellenoix” and his “Ligue des Dix Sous,” “Darquier de CarQuoi,” “Barbier de Pellepoix,” “Darquier de Pelleharicots,” “Darquier de Pelle Pouah,” “Darquier von Pellepoix,” “Darquoi de Quel Pied,” “Carquois de Quelpied,” “Cartier de Petitpois,” “Darquoy de Pelletier,” “Darquier de Montcuq.” Despite these splendid inventions, widely disseminated, Louis Darquier has maintained his assumed baronial name in the indexes of French history to this day.
The councillor for the Ternes was everywhere, busy as a bee, looked upon benignly in the council chamber for a rather humorous kind of eccentricity and vigour. Louis demanded that the name of the avenue des Ternes should be renamed after Queen Astrid of Belgium, killed in a motor accident in 1935, and he celebrated the second anniversary of the riots of 6 February with Taittinger in tow. Events like these meant he was beginning to enjoy the publicity he was itching for, but up to June 1936,by which time he had been in the council for a year, he had made no anti-Semitic interventions of any kind.
On 9 February 1936 the great Action Française historian Jacques Bainville died, and four days later Action Française staged a vast funeral, which Louis attended. Léon Blum, the leader of the Socialist Party, was driving down the boulevard St.-Germain when he came across the procession. He was recognised by the Camelots du Roi, dragged out of the car and severely beaten. Later, Louis Darquier was quoted as saying, “Well done, what the hell was he doing there?” but later rephrased this into “Yes, I publicly slapped Léon Blum, and I don't regret it.” This was another of his lies. It was the murderous Camelot Jean Filliol who beat up Léon Blum.28
When Maurras' office was raided after the attack on Blum, apart from Blum's hat and tie the police found a cup on Maurras' desk filled with coins and bearing the inscription “Pr
oduct of the sale of Baron Blum's glasses.” An outraged government dissolved Action Française; only its newspaper survived. This blocked one of Louis' outlets, but anyway he had already almost squeezed dry the events of 6 February 1934. He was looking to extend his range, and Jews were only one of a number of options. The attack on Blum provided an early opportunity when socialist militants took their revenge on an AF party office in rue Asseline, and seriously wounded a royalist doctor. Blum's blood was Jewish, one of these socialists was Jewish—and the blood of the doctor was French. When rewriting his history later on, Louis dated the beginning of his anti-Semitic career to the Asseline affair of February 1936.
The next day Louis was a star speaker at Coston's first public meeting, attacking Parliament and the Jews, while his letter about the events in rue Asseline was published in Le Jour. His words of abuse were more to the point now, directed against the “autocratic oligarchy swarming with newly naturalised Frenchmen, international Jews, cynical financiers, crooked métèques and all their clique of parasites.” The key words here are “international Jews” and “parasites.” This is the language of the world Jewish conspiracy and of Hitler's anti-Semitism, to which Louis added the French Catholic anti-Semitism with which he was already familiar: he referred to the Bishop of Lyon, Agobardus, who in 820 complained of “Jews practising usury, fraud, and white slave trading with Saracens.” It is also the language of a man who had now read—and believed every word of—the fantastical anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Sion, Henry Coston's bible and handbook for war against the Jews.
After appearing with Coston for the first time Louis came to the attention of the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisémitisme (LICA), the International League Against Anti-Semitism, and its paper Le Droit de vivre, The Right to Live. Jewish war veterans protested; Louis replied in Action française, and the story spread throughout sympathetic Paris circles. At this point, however, Louis was also testing other waters. In February 1936 the ratification of the Franco-Soviet pact caused further uproar— “The enemy isn't Hitlerism, it's communism.” A month later a paralysed French government glumly resigned itself to German reoccupation of the Rhineland.
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