National elections loomed, and with the Popular Front increasing its support, some of the intellectuals and student militants of the now dissolved Action Française—Thierry Maulnier, Robert Castille, a legal colleague of Xavier Vallat and leader of the Camelots—formed the Comité National de Vigilance de la Jeunesse, the National Youth Vigilance Committee.
Action française publicising Louis' Association of the Wounded and the Victims of the 6th of February next to Maurras' column, Politique, 22 January 1936
Intellectuals, nationalists and fascists joined the National Youth Vigilance Committee, March 1936—its headquarters, Louis' office (© Archives Nationales, Paris).
The purpose of the Vigilance Committee was to enlist young activists from the leagues to “rid France of parliamentary government,” and to prevent the war currently being arranged by international financiers, Moscow and Members of Parliament. The intellectual Jean-Pierre Maxence, a journalist on Gringoire, and other members of Coty's Solidarité Française were also on the committee, as was Henry Charbonneau. Louis immediately offered them his services and his office in the avenue Mac Mahon. Like Louis, Castille was the son of a doctor. He was a clever lawyer, fond of the table and a man who loved a fight. A close friend of Henry Charbonneau, he became one of Louis' most stalwart supporters. Louis moved further into the limelight when he chaired the Vigilance Committee's first meeting, alongside Maulnier, Castille and Henri Dorgères of the Greenshirts, on 14 March.29
Over a thousand people at the vast dance hall Magic-City applauded Louis' speech, in which he praised “the great figure, the great man of France, Charles Maurras,” and told them: “We do not want to go to war for Freemasons, for financiers, for the Soviets… the future is yours and your youth will save the country.” He attacked the Socialist Party, his name was blazoned on posters, and the legislative elections beckoned. At their next meeting Louis Louis-Dreyfus was not forgotten—Maxence accused him of destroying the French peasant, of buying government votes to import foreign wheat and of subsidising the Popular Front.30
In 1935 Taittinger declared that a majority of the Paris city council were friends of Jeunesses Patriotes, which also exercised a serious influence in the Senate. Louis had always hoped to take up at national level the political life his father had abandoned. Action Française suggested him as parliamentary candidate for Neuilly in the elections of April–May 1936, but instead Bailby, Taittinger, Chiappe, Trochu and his other nationalist cronies gave their support to the maverick conservative Henri de Kérillis.31 This was a crossroads for Louis Darquier.
Discipline, obedience and a somewhat austere manliness of purpose were favoured by the nationalist leagues; Louis shared their views, their furies, their enemies, their attitude to women (for personal use, and best kept within the home) and their passion for purity of race. He could bring them the violence and the martial qualities they demanded, but his indiscipline and self-indulgence and his gadfly contributions to the council discussions blocked his path to national politics. He also drank, and his wife drank more, he gambled if he could, he lived in nightclubs and bars and used other people's money to pay for everything. Even his friends described him as “always drunk and always broke…vain and self-satisfied.”32
For Taittinger and la Roque it was communists, not Jews, who were the prime enemy. All the more so because in the 1930s, their leagues were funded by powerful French industrialists and by some rich Jewish banks and bankers—Rothschild, Dreyfus, Lazard, Worms.33 Mussolini, also uninterested in anti-Semitism until the end of his reign, was their model, soon to be joined by Franco.
Louis Darquier's lack of administrative skills did not prevent him being an instinctive strategist who manipulated men much more able than himself. After this political rejection by his nationalist colleagues, Henry Coston provided Louis with the stage and income he was looking for. By March 1936, with the national elections approaching, Louis was attacking the Popular Front and all its candidates—socialists, Radicals, communists—as members of a Jewish conspiracy of financiers, stockbrokers and Bolsheviks who wished to place France under the power of international Jewry. By this time he was already fingered as being among the Parisian friends of Hitler for saying that “Any man who, like Hitler, has given his country such great demonstrations of spirit, faith and honour, is worthy of our esteem.” A month later, on 5 April, he received messages of gratitude from Nazi Germany.34
In the two months leading up to the election of the Popular Front government in May 1936, the last elections in France for almost a decade, and the last elections of the Third Republic, Louis moved away from national politics into the Parisian anti-Semitic underworld which, together with the anti-republican right, greeted the arrival of the “Jewish-infested ‘Front Popu’ ” with incredulity and horror. Over five and a half million men voted for the left and centre, the Popular Front, and just over four million for the right (women could not vote in France until 1944).35 Of the three parties which formed the Front, the socialists gained the most seats, and so the socialist leader Léon Blum, a Jew, became prime minister of France.36
A few months before, in February, the people of Spain had preceded the French by electing a Popular Front government of their own. France and Spain were thus left and centre coalitions, surrounded on almost all sides by fascist dictatorships—Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Salazar in Portugal. Britain would shortly be occupied with the abdication of Edward VIII, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister and Winston Churchill was in the wilderness, watching his government appease the European dictators. Both Spain and France, however, had vociferous minorities who preferred Hitler to Blum and Franco to socialism. In Cahors in 1934, Canon Viguié, the editor of La Défense, described Léon Blum as a “sinister Jew… hideous métèque who is preparing new massacres to establish his tyranny on our corpses.”37
The first round of the elections took place on 26 April, the final round on 3 May, but Blum would not form his government until 6 June. In that intervening month, tension in Europe mounted as Mussolini finally defeated Abyssinia, while in France workers all over the country celebrated their new dawn. On one particular day, 24 May, there was a Popular Front parade to commemorate the Paris Commune of 1870, and hundreds of thousands of supporters marched. It was a Camelot tradition to attack Jews in cafés and brasseries, and on that day Louis, drunk, went berserk on the terrace of Chez Doucette, a restaurant in rue Paul Baudry, and attacked three Jews, two of whom were called Blum, Max and Jules, though how Louis discovered this is unknown. He began by making the remarks which were de rigueur in extremist French circles: “I can smell Jews here,” or “Get out! We'll teach you a lesson!” He then stood up and threw a cup, saucer and mustard pot, tried to punch one of the Jews and, brandishing his cane, shouted, “I am Darquier de Pellepoix, city councillor. If I want to, ten thousand men will take to the streets tomorrow and kill a hundred thousand Jews. I can arrange for the assassination of Léon Blum. Hitler was right to throw them out of Germany.”38
On 1 June Louis received a telegram from Germany inviting him to Berlin to meet “friends and politicians.” In those days Paris councillors were not confined to discussion of municipal matters: they contributed to Assembly debates and could give free rein to their political opinions about national affairs.39 On 4 June, two days before Léon Blum's government took power, in the council chamber Louis, sober now, put down a motion for “a debate against Jewish tyranny and the invasion of foreigners,” proposing the annulment of naturalisations granted since the Armistice of 1918 and, for Jews, withdrawal of their right to vote or to occupy public office.40 These ambitions were borrowed, almost word for word, from Henry Coston's instructions,41 and covered every point Louis was to repeat many hundreds of times over the coming years: “time to put an end to the destruction of France…men of destiny… heritage of France today in Jewish hands… Socialist Party…Communist Party… product of foreign and Jewish powers …”
Louis' way of rousing the interest of his male colleagues
was to refer regularly to the male sexual organ—impotence, emasculation, and the circumcision of Jewish penises were not spared. Nor was anyone named Dreyfus, “belonging to that privileged race,” nor Jewish “grain merchants and flour milling trusts.” Though he bowed to his nationalist colleagues by acknowledging that exceptions could be made for Jewish war veterans— a position he was to maintain for scarcely another week—this was the beginning of Louis' rejection of Catholic and nationalist anti-Semitism in favour of the French version of the Nazi racist variety.
Closing his speech, he demanded the discussion of his proposal at the next sitting. Some councillors tittered, but generally the response was angry; insults flew. Amongst the ripostes was a request to know “exactly what epoch gave birth to the ancient nobility of M. Darquier de Pellepoix,” as well as jokes about his monocle.42
Louis was to be prosecuted for his attack at Chez Doucette, and his imbroglios—and more—were reported daily in the newspapers. On 5 June the headlines of Action française read “La France sous le Juif ”; this issue covered in full Louis' performance and “bristled with provocation to murder, gross anti-Semitism, calumnies and lies.”43 But there was one reader unimpressed by Louis' speech:
Strasbourg, 15 June 1936
My dear Louis,
I have given myself time for reflection before deciding upon my attitude towards you following the motion that you have put down at the General Council, which has been published in toto by Action française.I did not want you to think that I have yielded to a bad-tempered moment, and so here is what I want to tell you calmly and with moderation.
For nearly eight years I have played the role of “providence” for you. This unrewarding role has never brought me anything but rebuffs; the last is of such an order that I have decided to change my attitude.
I venture first to remind you in case you have forgotten, that I belong to the trust of the mill, which controls (!) eight per cent of French production. I belong to it financially because it gives me my living and also thus permitted me to advance to you more than 150,000 francs to get you out of unpleasant situations and to pay for the larger part of your election costs.
But I also belong to them morally and with all my heart, and for those who run it I feel an affection which far exceeds that of an employee towards an employer.
In these circumstances I consider that you have attacked me personally, in an absolutely unwarranted and gratuitous manner. I would have hoped for a different attitude on your part.
It's up to you to treat with disdain the most elementary feelings of gratitude. I ask for nothing: you doubtless reckon that this justifies every liberty as far as I am concerned.
As this is the case, I inform you that I have made over your debts to a specialist Company, that is to say:
1—a bill guaranteed by Monsieur TROCHU for 10.000 francs
2—an acknowledgement of debt of 5000 francs
3—an acknowledgement of debt of 150.000 francs payment due on demand
This Society having acquired the said debts, for a consideration, you should not expect any consideration on their part.
With all my regrets
[René Darquier]*
Some member of the Darquier family has written on this letter, in red ink, “ENFIN!!!”—AT LAST!!!
* Each French anti-Semitic group seems to have published its own version of the Protocols. Louis' edition, published by his own newspaper, La France enchaînée, in August 1938, and lavishly footnoted and annotated by himself, was obviously subsidised and came cheaper than Coston's at two francs a copy. In his preface, he quoted (René?): “Every government in the world is consciously, or unconsciously under the yoke of the great ‘super-government’ of Sion, because all the money is in its hands, since every country is in the debt of the Jews, for sums that they can never repay.”
9
Pot of Gold
IN 1936 LOUIS WAS NEARING his forties, and he was to live for over forty years more. He did not have to bother with an original thought or speech in his new milieu: he was the inheritor of a rich tradition of French anti-Semitism, absorbed from Charles Maurras and Henry Cos-ton, but stretching back to centuries past. The mainstream left had renounced the anti-Semitism of the right during the Dreyfus Affair. But in the 1930s there were traces of anti-Semitism in a section of the left which concentrated its vigour on the financial domination of Jewish banking families such as the Rothschilds, and extended this sentiment to Jews generally. All bankers were Jews; all Jews were bankers. Capitalism was the enemy of the worker; all capitalists were Jews.
On a more ludicrous level, these connections extended, in ways mysterious to most minds, into a netherworld of French anti-Semitic extremists, and often drifted into secret worlds of Masonic and Jewish rituals and societies, spiritualism and revolutionary plots, druidic and occult practices, apocalyptic utterances and visions, the Templars, the Illuminati,1 Rosicrucians and the Holy Grail. Satanic/Jewish plots were often invoked. édouard Drumont, the father of French anti-Semitism, carried a mandrake root on his person, while Louis' newspaper patron Léon Bailby was a lifelong devotee of the occult sciences. The rantings of Drumont, like those of Darquier, sound like the outpourings of a lunatic, but then, often so did those of Hitler. Like Hitler, Drumont was respected by his vast readership. Words and thoughts which appear in his twelvehundred-page diatribe against the “Jewish Conquest” of France appear again in Maurras and Darquier and le Pen, most particularly his catchphrase “France for the French.” Jews could never become part of France; they were inassimilable.
Louis Darquier's intense anti-Semitism was a product of various sources and conflicting attitudes, and for some years he worked within all its different arenas. Once he was given power no Jew was safe from him, because every Jew was a criminal, part of a world conspiracy. At this level of contemplation, Jews were not human beings like the rest of us. In the minds of men like Louis Darquier they became mysterious bodies, another species altogether, creatures of enormous power controlling ordinary mortals through international finance and international communism. The idea of blood was central to this hatred and fear, rather like the fear of menstrual blood exhibited by certain men of religion over the centuries. Anti-Semites hated the physical appearance of persons they decided were Jewish, and caricatured them relentlessly—curly hair, balding, large round faces, curving long noses, long-nailed hands like octopus tentacles grasping every part of the world—but it was the blood inside they concentrated on the most. The book which fired Louis' words, words he mixed with those of Maurras into his signature tune, was The Protocols of the Elders of Sion. This book and its fate would also lead to Louis' first links with Germany, and his personal pot of gold.
Louis Darquier said the Protocols first came his way in 1935; probably Coston gave him his own edition of it when both men were standing for the Paris city council in that year. There were, and are, many versions and thousands of different editions of this forgery, probably the invention of the Tsarist secret police in 1903. The Protocols is, in fact, a cut-and-paste job from various sources and countries mixing medieval anti-Semitic mythology with more recent political and Catholic tracts from strange abbés and disappointed activists, plagiarising all of them into a patchwork which sold more copies in the twentieth century than any other book except the Bible. Published originally in French, in Russia, the Protocols appeared in Germany in 1919, and in Britain and France in 1920. 2 Millions of sane and insane people believed its convoluted message. In the United States Henry Ford promoted it for years. Hitler used the Protocols extensively in Mein Kampf, and made it a set text in all German schools of the Third Reich. Its message, decorated and elaborated within a tapestry of paranoia, was that there was a world Jewish conspiracy and a secret Jewish government with plans, enunciated in these Protocols, to control the world.
The anti-Semites who believed in the Protocols were often obsessed with numbers, with identification. Many of them, like Coston, were fanatical archivists, eterna
lly collecting, filing and annotating proof of the satanic Judaeo-Masonic forces arrayed against Western civilisation. The obsession with blood permeates the Protocols too—Jews using the blood of Christian children for Passover, Jews poisoning wells, spreading the plague through Gentile blood, encouraging drunkenness and prostitution and thus polluting the seed of future generations.
Louis liked to quote The Times in the council chamber, his command of English being part of his monocled Wodehousian persona. The paper had exposed the forgery of the Protocols in detail in August 1921, but in this case Louis did not believe The Times, 3 he believed in satanic Jews— though he ignored the Protocols' advice that drunkenness and prostitution were Jewish weapons for world destruction. As the Protocols spread around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, each country adapted its message to suit itself, so that it could be marshalled to suit any current hatred. Christianity itself could be considered Jewish, and the governments of Britain or France also, if such an opinion was useful.
The trial of the Protocols in a Swiss court from 1934 to 1935 also brought the book to Louis' attention. Since the 1920s the Nazi Party had disseminated the Protocols everywhere, and in Berne Swiss Jews brought a court case against Swiss and German Nazis for “publishing and distributing improper literature.”4 This was one of those cases which drew into court a multitude of mysterious Russian spies, pseudo-mystics and table-rapping eccentrics, to the amusement of the public at large, and it became internationally notorious. As the trial progressed in fits and starts, the Swiss defenders of the Protocols turned to Nazi Germany for financial and philosophical support: both were supplied by the star witness, a German, Colonel Ulrich Fleischhauer, who was to intervene assiduously in French affairs over the next few years.
Bad Faith Page 17