Coston had met Fleischhauer in 1934, and went to Berne to serve as a witness on his behalf in 1935. Like all Fleischhauer's supporting witnesses, Coston was not called because Fleischhauer submitted evidence running to nearly five hundred pages, and defended the Protocols himself for five days, without drawing breath. Fleischhauer had begun his work in 1919, with his own publishing house; after 1933, when he moved to Erfurt, he launched his Weltdienst—World Service—a non-profit-making anti-Jewish press agency for “International Correspondence for Enlightenment on the Jewish Question.” But it was the Berne trial, which he lost, that made Fleischhauer's name forever afterwards entwined with the Protocols, which the Swiss judge had dismissed as “ridiculous nonsense.”5
The Nazi Party used Fleischhauer for foreign dealings while it suited them, which was until 1939, when Goebbels got rid of him and Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideologue of the party, took over his Weltdienst. With it came Fleischhauer's “flawless” library of apocryphal literature, much of it pornographic, with such precious volumes about Jewish ritual murder that in 1943 Rosenberg began to construct a rock cellar below ground to protect it.
Until then, Erfurt became la Mecque de l'Antisémitisme, the Mecca of anti-Semitism. Fleischhauer had agents—spies?—all over the world, and information poured in: “Greyshirts of South Africa are with you, if not in person, in spirit and our hand of cooperation is stretched out to your Assembly in Erfurt.”6 By 1936 Fleischhauer was dealing with Himmler's SS, and was supported by Hitler's propaganda ministry, run by Goebbels, and by Rosenberg's foreign policy office.
The documentation of the Nazi Party's relationship with its French postulants is complex, but all of its warring departments seem to have used the services of Julius Streicher in their dealings with foreign countries. Streicher, Hitler's most favoured journalist and the most brutal of all Jew-baiters, was the founder and editor of Der Stürmer. Henry Coston met him in Germany in 1934, and other French anti-Semites followed him. Streicher also had a vast library of pornographic anti-Semitica and, as Hitler said, “had only one disease, and that was nympholepsy.”7
Streicher was considered a maniac by many prominent Nazis—as indeed were Rosenberg and Fleischhauer—but under Hitler's favour he flourished. Der Stürmer was a scandal sheet full of cartoons and photographs, sex and crime, rape and plunder—all Jewish—presented in words of one syllable. It was the most verminous of all Nazi anti-Semitic publications, and after 1935, at its most successful, sold well over 600,000 copies a week. Louis Darquier and his comrades got their personification of the Jew from Der Stürmer: “short, fat, ugly, unshaven, drooling, sexually perverted, bent-nosed, with pig-like eyes.”8 And they learned about promotion from Streicher: copies of Der Stürmer were sold at bus stops, in the street, outside factories.
Fleischhauer told Rosenberg that all other French anti-Semites were too chauvinistic or reactionary; only Coston could be of any use to Hitler. From 1934, through his Weltdienst, Fleischhauer gave enthusiastic publicity to the activities of Coston and his comrades-in-arms, such as the ferocious anti-Semites Jean Boissel and Pierre Clémenti.9 Though precariously funded himself, in the early days of the Nazi Party Fleischhauer was a conduit for these men, and for Louis. They copied his style, too. A typical Fleischhauer news story, headed “Jews in Hollywood,” read: “Eddie Cantor = Issy Iskowitz, Charles Chaplin = Tonstein, Bert Lahr = Isador Barrheim, Ethel Merman = Ethel Zimmerman …” and so on.10
On 5 April 1936 Louis Darquier received a telegram from Fleischhauer's secretary Emilie Vasticar offering him a subscription to the Weltdienst, telling him about certain other anti-Semitic contacts, and giving their opinion on la Roque and Julius Streicher. Louis replied, and at the end of April there is a reference to a meeting in Paris. On 1 June 1936 Emilie invited him to Berlin. Did they meet? Did he go? We do not know.11 What is certain is that by early June 1936 Louis had acquired sufficient money, and confidence about more to come, to take his revenge on René and to expand his activities on many fronts.
On the day he received René's letter, 17 June 1936, he stood up in the council chamber to demand “the withdrawal of civil and political rights from Jews,” using the words of the Protocols and the Weltdienst to create an unprecedented scene. Every sentence he uttered was greeted with raised voices, interruptions, sarcasm, protests, abuse, raillery or fury. The row went on and on, a perfect microcosm of the continuing war between republican and nationalist France, as councillor after councillor stood up to defend the right of Jews, established by the French Revolution, to live in France like other Frenchmen. “The Unknown Soldier could be Jewish,” Jewish “writers, artists, thinkers…have added to the glorious heritage” of France. Jews belonged to the great family of France: “There is no difference. They are as French as we are!” “Go and make this speech to Hitler!” they cried. The words “Hitler” and “Jew” ricocheted around the chamber like a hail of bullets.
Within this maelstrom Louis quoted, as proof of the decline of France under the Jewish Peril, the opinion of the Daily Telegraph in London that France was now a second-class power. The riposte flew back: “If the Daily Telegraph said that, it's because they know you.” Louis maintained an injured dignity as he explained, again and again, that Jews were “not only a religion, but a race, and above all a nation,” which had spread through France and taken it over. The health of France was at stake! The life of France was at stake! “We, whose roots have been buried in the soil of France for millions of years,” were now ruled by “a foreign race, a nation of wanderers” who “have taken over everything, even the government of the country! When we take in a guest who behaves properly, we treat him with honour, but when he puts his feet on the table and pisses on the curtains, we show him the door!”12
Georges Hirsch, a socialist, then raised the name of Louis Louis-Dreyfus, “that grain speculator and enemy of the people,” whose Jewish money Louis had been so happy to accept in taking a salary from Bailby. Louis went berserk. He demanded satisfaction outside the chamber for any calumny that associated his name with that “appalling man,” and called Hirsch “a dirty little Jew.” Later, in the cloakroom, Louis attacked Hirsch, and the scuffle continued until other councillors pulled them apart.13
But this was all as Darquier wished, because he had been, for hour after hour, the absolute centre of attention. More important for him financially, the uproar had been so great that, as one councillor intuitively remarked, every newspaper would report on the astounding scenes, and such reports would, of course, be picked up in Germany. In one manoeuvre Louis had placed himself at the front of the queue of French anti-Semites waiting for attention from the Reich.
Outside the council chamber another immensely influential man had already spoken out. Xavier Vallat, deputy for the Ardèche since 1919, had always been noted for his hostility to Masonry rather than for his anti-Semitism. After the First World War there was hardly a league, group or movement of the extreme right that Vallat did not join. His transformation into an anti-Semite came about with the election of Léon Blum. In the Chamber of Deputies, at the inauguration of Blum's Popular Front government on 6 June, Vallat became both notorious on the left and celebrated by the right when he stood up to deplore the fact that for the first time “this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew.”14 Vallat's speech encouraged Louis to speak even more violently in the Hôtel de Ville ten days later. There were only three Jews in the Popular Front government, but for the next two years a good part of the French right insisted that it consisted entirely of Jews.
Sixty-four years old when he became prime minister of France, Léon Blum was a well-to-do intellectual, a lawyer, an elegant writer, a literary and dramatic critic and an able civil servant. Physically, he had a Proustian kind of beauty—floppy straight hair, straight nose, thick round-rimmed spectacles, a dignified moustache. His feet, in spats, turned outward, his hat was black and large and his voice was light, “flute-like.” He was much caricatured. Blum was a parliamentary democrat hostil
e to communist and fascist dictatorships, a clever, witty, cultured man, not a great orator nor a man of the people. But he was the first socialist and the first Jewish prime minister of France, the successor and friend of the great socialist Jean Jaurès, and his compelling honesty commanded attention and loyalty. His Popular Front government was always an uneasy coalition, a very shaky threat to the right even in the best of times. The Spanish Civil War broke out a month after Blum came to power, posing him insoluble problems abroad and for his coalition at home, where he was always dependent on the support of the Radical Party. In addition, the Depression had not yet lifted. But to French conservatives the Bolsheviks had taken over, and they were now ruled by the industrial working class and/or by Moscow. Indeed Stalin kept a firm eye on the policy of his international adherents, but his French communists, who numbered seventy-two deputies, the largest figure they had ever achieved, did not participate in the government, merely gave it support inside the chamber.
This meant nothing to Blum's opponents, because after the victory of the Popular Front, and to its great detriment, spontaneous sit-down strikes, the largest in French history, broke out and continued throughout May and June. Workers occupied the premises of heavy industries, factories, department stores, mines, hotels and restaurants, waving red flags or the tricolour, and dancing to accordions. The social reforms the Popular Front introduced, despite furious opposition, offered a forty-hour week, pay rises, two weeks' paid holiday a year, and raised the school leaving age to fourteen.
Later in 1936, a quarter of a million workers were on strike and Blum was forced to devalue the franc. All this caused terror amongst business leaders and on the right. “A man to shoot, but in the back,” said Maurras. One of Daudet's contributions was to call Blum a “circumcised hermaphrodite.”15 If the Vichy years played out the Franco-French civil war, the excessive fear of revolution—to be wrought by communists for one side, by fascists for the other—began here. In a way the strikes were victory festivals, but “the great fear of June 1936” stretched the divide between left and right to breaking point.
As Hitler increased his persecution of Jews and the world refugee crisis escalated, the Jewish population of France changed, but they were always a tiny minority. The history of persecution and containment meant that most “old French Jews” lived in big cities—Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille—and that their occupations were often noticeable, or distinguished—banking and the commodities, the professions, politics. Many Jews still lived in Alsace, while a large number of Alsatian Jews, French patriots, had moved to France after the defeat by Germany in 1871—the families of Louis Louis-Dreyfus and Léon Blum being two examples.16 Many, like Blum again, no longer practised their religion.
By 1939 France was home to about 330,000 Jews, of whom some 30 percent were refugees.17 About these the French Jewish community itself was divided. As is ever the way, many “French Israelites,” the “polite” name by which long-established French Jews were known, were unhappy about the influx of these poorer Jews. Even so, whether old citizens or new refugees, Jews remained less than 1 percent of the population of France; but they did not seem so to those who magnified this small number into an invading horde. The result was xenophobia and resentment, by no means confined to men such as Louis Darquier.
When he began his anti-Semitic career, Louis did not concentrate wholly upon Jews. In the short term he added the Popular Front, communism, Masonry and all foreigners to his list of mortal enemies, and he used these hatreds to make his living. His relationship with Maurras was now at its zenith, and he was a regular visitor at the headquarters in rue Boccador. Action française followed his every word, and when he arrived at the Salle Wagram on 20 June 1936 to make another speech on behalf of the Vigilance Committee, he entered to a standing ovation. He lauded Maurras, attacked Blum, socialists, communists and Jews, and left to cries of “Vive Darquier! …Down with Jews!… Death to Blum!”
Louis needed the Nazis all the more because René had called in the bailiffs, and his salary from the Hôtel de Ville was already sequestered by a monthly payment to the Hôtel California—the Darquiers had not paid their bill before departing, and the California had seized their luggage, again.18 That he got financial help is demonstrated by the fact that despite all these debts, by June 1936 Louis had acquired sufficient funds to found the next of his associations, the Club National.
In that month, in the midst of the flurry of telegrams and letters to and from émilie Vasticar, Louis rented two buildings, numbers 8 and 12 in the drab and insalubrious rue Laugier in the 17th arrondissement. Number 12, a large but unimposing building, was to be the headquarters of his new National Club for “selfless Frenchmen” devoted to “the grandeur and prosperity of the fatherland by devoting themselves to the practice of sport.”19 This was an ambitious project: the building was three storeys high and included a meeting hall for about a hundred people, as well as a sitting room and bar. Number 8 was his Club Sportif—the Sporting Club of Ternes, where men could engage in physical culture and bodybuilding and take water treatments in the form of hot showers and water jets. According to Louis it was “a magnificent two-storey building which comprises offices, meeting rooms, a large gymnasium where members can practise PT, boxing, fencing, table tennis, pistol shooting etc., with first-rate instructors. The locker rooms, shower rooms and a brightly decorated private bar also make this one of the finest private clubs in Paris.” According to the police it was a club for “fervent right-wing elements who could well serve as leaders in time of trouble.”20
Louis had always been good at sport, an able horseman and fencer, and for those with eyes turned to Germany this was important. The Berlin Olympic Games, Hitler's theatrical masterstroke, were only six weeks away. Louis loved the characteristics of fascism: the violence of language and action; the uniforms and impedimenta, the passion for propaganda. However, one contemporary said that he never set foot in the gym, and it is hard to see how the physical exercise of which fascists were in principle so fond could be combined, on a daily basis, with drinking and nights on the town and the furious concentration required by his new role.
From 12, rue Laugier Louis published a shoddy four-page Roneoed weekly Bulletin, combining his hatred of Blum and Jews with his love of journalism.21 It is likely that the entire endeavour was made possible by various Nazi subsidies. In his first Bulletin, which also presented a photograph of the club's president, looking chubby and in need of the services provided by no. 8, he asked the public: “What is the National Club?” And he replied:
The National Club takes a firm stand
Against Jewish and Foreign domination
Against the anonymous power of money
Against Soviet enslavery
Against the trickery of international Socialism
And For
National Renewal
There was a section for “Young Nationalists”—these were Louis' “biff boys,” the thugs who now accompanied him, a product perhaps of training received at no. 8. 22 There would be a women's section, and “Sons of France” for those between twelve and eighteen years of age. There were to be no exceptions to the membership rules:
The National Club refuses to admit Jews, Freemasons or anyone
belonging to, or believing in, international organisations. Each member
has to swear the following: “I declare upon my honour to have been
born French and to be neither of Jewish nor Masonic origin, nor
attached to any international organisation.”23
Myrtle could not have joined its women's section.
Maurras, unaware of Louis' contacts with Fleischhauer—Louis lied about his German money for years—heralded the National Club in Action française as a place where “all Nationalists will find indispensable information for the battle against Jews and wogs who pillage and dishonour our country.”24
A characteristic of all the French nationalist groups was a constant process of rechristening. This was f
orced upon them just as Louis opened his club when the Popular Front government followed the earlier closure of Action Française with the dissolution of all the paramilitary nationalist leagues. Some immediately re-formed into political parties, ready to participate in the election process. Taittinger's Jeunesses Patriotes became the Parti National Populaire (PNP); la Roque toyed with rebellion and considered an approach which would make General Weygand head of state, but Croix-de-feu too peacefully reshaped itself into a parliamentary party as the Parti Social Français (PSF). On the fringe both of these newly named nationalist parties and of the Paris intellectuals, more ridiculous, wildly less intelligent than those often brilliant men whose activities he aped and whose words he borrowed, Louis founded his club to pick up the residue and the membership fees of the disbanded leagues.
Launched at the same time was Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF), another beneficiary, and a far more successful one. Because Doriot had been a passionate communist himself, and because, like Taittinger and la Roque, he received money from wealthy Jewish sources, the target of the PPF was, initially, communism. For the Nazi bankers of anti-Semitism in the mid-thirties, Louis therefore had much of the field to himself.
In early July 1936, Louis held the first large meeting of his club. Many of his speakers were Action Française comrades—Robert Castille, Henry Charbonneau. Jean-Pierre Maxence took part too, but Louis' most important coup was the contribution of the celebrated writer Lucien Rebatet, and of the devoted disciple of Maurras, Henri Massis, who presided. Both of these men brought Louis' club and his anti-Semitic movement intellectual endorsement. He could now mix with some of the most gifted writers of the time. His hero was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but he came to know Rebatet and Robert Brasillach, both products of Action Française, Brasillach's brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche and Georges Blond—who married a neighbour and friend of the Darquier family in the Lot—as well as Thierry Maulnier and many others of the French intellectual world. All of them gave a literary gloss to the fight against the Youpin, the Yid.25
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