For men like Louis Darquier, and those to the left and right of him in anti-republican France, Franco's revolt against the Spanish republic was a national revolution, a patriotic uprising against communism. Throughout 1936 Darquier addressed tumultuous public meetings in the Salle Wagram and elsewhere, gave rousing anti-war speeches—the Spanish republicans were communists, the coming world war was a Jewish conspiracy—and worked closely with, and on behalf of, Action Française. He continued to posture in the city council, where he interjected constantly, sometimes spoke from the rostrum, but rarely strayed from jokes, innuendos and lectures about Jews, communists, Masons and foreigners.
Maurras went to jail in October, and held court there until July the following year, sentenced for his articles in Action française demanding the death of over a hundred deputies, including Léon Blum (not forgetting previous articles demanding that Blum be lynched, shot in the back, or have his throat slit “with a kitchen knife”).26 With Charles Trochu, Louis arranged for forty city councillors to make a statement of public homage to Maurras on his incarceration. He held meetings of his club in the rue Laugier: Léon Degrelle, the Belgian fascist leader, was turned back at the frontier on his way to one of them. Louis was permanently under police surveillance, and reports on the bumping and grinding and bellowing which issued from his Sports Club added further to his reputation as a homosexual. Louis also ran off tracts and leaflets modelled on the anti-Semitic propaganda of Fleischhauer's Weltdienst, and wrote for Coston's Libre parole, favouring the kind of nationalist fascism advocated by Maurras.
Nevertheless, for the next few years Louis' success in Nazi-funded French anti-Semitic circles was seriously limited by his connection to Maurras. Within the walled encampments of Parisian anti-Semitism, one of the most bitter enmities had always been between Maurras and Léon Daudet and other veteran anti-Semites—the followers of Drumont such as Urbain Gohier, to whose camp younger fellows such as Coston belonged. “Bandits,” Gohier called the men of Action Française, demanding that they be “defenestrated by the righteous anger of the people.” This mutual loathing, based on some anti-Semitic inadequacy invisible to the naked eye, simmered on despite court actions for defamation.
Coston and Gohier and their clique—some of them rivals or disillusioned followers of Maurras—particularly abhorred the royalism of the AF and Louis' continued support for the movement in Paris and in other provincial cities. Like squabbling soldiers ignoring the enemy and turning upon each other in the trenches, they argued and disagreed and fought each other with words and fists and through their little newspapers and journals. They swapped wives and mistresses, shouted their ideas to small audiences of like-minded people, aped the rituals of their fascist neighbours, and congregated in the meeting halls, cafés and gathering points of their agitated milieu. Many of these men were editors or journalists. Some of their groups or newspapers barely lasted a few weeks: each rose again in different form to join or create another, each given names of considerable length and ambitious grandeur.27
By 1938 Louis had come to the conclusion that “every nationalist party is full of Jews.”28 He put men such as Pierre Taittinger behind him, except in the council chamber, where Trochu remained an unfailing supporter. However, he convinced Charles Maurras, if few others, of his independence from Germany and so, uniquely, managed to straddle both nationalist French and Nazi-French anti-Semitic circles until 1939.
As a frequenter of Louis' club, Jean Darquier saw the papers from René's bailiff inscribed “Darquier vs. Darquier,” announcing the seizure of Louis' assets. Jean found the reading of this so painful that he wrote to René:
for [Louis], the seizure means he will have nothing to live on, at little profit to you, and at the risk of a frightful scandal—which the political and police scum will exploit to the full.
…I attach no importance to Louis' belief that you are deliberately doing as Jews do. I know too much what you think of those people to believe such a fact.
…I cannot believe that the very vague notions in Louis' phrases could really have offended those people [ Jews] who are only a part of your Mill's trusts.
…I am certain that Louis will pay you back when he can …the sight of the bailiff 's papers has forced me to talk to you as an older brother who has always loved all his family …29
In the middle of all this, Louis still looked to his earlier patrons. Ana-tole de Monzie was older now, his infirmities increased by a bad car accident, but he remained a powerful figure, and though he held no ministerial position in the Popular Front, he became the centre of a “kind of phantom cabinet for peace within the government.” An expert on Russian affairs and a known acquaintance of Mussolini, he wanted an entente with fascist Italy and communist Russia against the German threat. His unusual position in this as in so many other matters meant that he could not take Louis Darquier's anti-Semitism seriously, and as long as Louis still paid court to Maurras, who remained one of de Monzie's esteemed intellectual companions, he continued to consider Louis' endeavours as nothing more than the activities of a raffish bohemian. And so, after Louis' frenzy in the city council in June 1936 and the subsequent rupture between the Darquier brothers, de Monzie intervened. Louis was instructed to behave less wildly. On 10 November René withdrew his action. Louis was asked to visit the bailiffs in order to come up with a different arrangement. He answered no letters, made no visits, and a year later René himself closed the affair by paying the bailiff an honorarium. Louis and Myrtle never repaid René.
Throughout 1936 Louis was occupied with other legal matters. In June he refused “in a most incorrect manner”30 to answer charges brought against him for his attack at Chez Doucette, and only agreed to appear before the judge in October after receiving a personal letter of invitation from the commissioner of police—he was eventually fined a thousand francs. As soon as he had dealt with that request, one night with Myrtle in the Bar Marlène in the elegant 1st arrondissement he attacked and incapacitated a Romanian barman, Dino Banatzeano (though Louis called him “the Jew Simon Botzananeano” in the protracted lawsuit which followed).
Hitler had numerous organisations with overlapping responsibilities and initials, all of them dependent upon his favour, each cordially loathing the other: he ruled by division. When Louis applied to the German embassy in Paris for money, Ambassador Johannes von Welczek was cautious, but wrote to the German Foreign Ministry: “Yesterday a young lawyer called Robert Castille… came to see me. He said he belonged to the National Club. He intended to write a thesis on the question of the Jews in universities and wanted information as to how the German universities had rid themselves of Jews…Then he came out with the actual purpose of his visit …” This was to ask for money for Louis' club: “not actually a club but a big association with 3000 members [sic] in Paris who are mainly anti-Semitic lawyers [sic]…an explicitly nationalist and anti-Semitic organisation, actually the only one which openly confesses anti-Semitism.”31
Louis' first cheque, for 2,500 marks (worth about £27,000 today), came on 4 January 1937 by way of Elizabeth Büttner, a resident of Berlin who, as a demimondaine woman of mystery, worked as a Nazi spy in the years before the war.32 The British Foreign Office believed she worked for Otto Abetz, a former art teacher who had joined Ribbentrop's Foreign Bureau, the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, in 1934. Abetz was a francophile, a blond and charming fellow and a close friend of the Radical journalist Jean Luchaire—whose journal Les Nouveau temps was one of the many Abetz was later to “subsidise.” In 1932 he had married Luchaire's French secretary, Suzanne de Bruycker. Two years later he was introducing Hitler to French veteran leaders, and by 1935 he was head of the French section of Ribbentrop's office. His great success was the Comité FranceAllemagne—the Franco-German Committee—in 1935. This committee, in which his French counterpart was the journalist Fernand de Brinon, included notables such as the writer Drieu la Rochelle, the mad Catholic chaplain Monseigneur Jean Mayol de Lupé and Jean Luchaire.33
Although Abetz did not become a member of the Nazi Party until 1937, on Ribbentrop's orders his job was to “reconciliate” French artistic, intellectual and journalist circles with Nazi Germany. Nominally working at the French embassy, he used the inducements of free visits to Germany and abundant entertainment, in a combination of wine, women and song which brought him great success in the salons of Paris. Through the fashionable Champs-élysées club Le Grand Pavois, where de Brinon held court, French Nazis mixed with an elite of intellectuals and high society. The British Foreign Office reported that Abetz spent £2,000 a month on bribing the French press, with Elizabeth Büttner as his assistant.34
Abetz has always been presented as among the more affable German presences during the Occupation, but his connections to the seamier side of French anti-Semitism were long established, and they continued, although its denizens were, and remained, persons not at all to his taste. Though some of Elizabeth Büttner's cheque stubs, discovered by the French police in 1939, are unreadable, quite clear are those for cheques made out to Fleischhauer's French followers, amongst them Darquier, Coston and de Brinon.35
Many of Louis' Reichsmarks seem to have been spent on drink. At the end of January 1937 the police were called to throw him out of the Lord Byron Cinema in the Champs-élysées because, with a woman— Myrtle?—he took over some already occupied seats, refused to show any tickets, and refused to move: “I'm here and I'm staying here.”
With his German cheque Louis' Bulletin became simultaneously lower and louder, and he began to spread his wings.
BULLETIN OF THE NATIONAL CLUB
No. 52, 17 April 1937
THE MOSES-EUM
… It has also come to our notice that n° 57, rue de Varenne [the office of the French Prime Minister] … has been used since June 1936 as the home-lair of the entire Jewish clique which gravitates around Blum, the Blumels, Blumschens, Mochleins who now are solidly installed there and encrusted en famille with grandfather Abraham, old mother Sarah, uncle Laban, cousin Isaac and cousin Rebecca and all the little brothers, sons and nephews, Simon, Levey, Mordecai etc. etc.
All these come and go, bustle about, fly hither and thither, raise their fists, yell, chirp and swarm about from morning to night and from night to morning. Number 57, rue de la Varenne has become a Polish Jew-house, a Leghorn ghetto, a Moroccan mellha. To keep up the neighbourhood tone, the nearby Rodin Museum may as well be renamed a “Moses-eum.” Its façade could then be painted deep blue just like the homes in North Africa of the innumerable and disastrous posterity of Jacob-Israel; “The Deceiver” and worthy forebear of Léon Blum.
And:
A few weeks ago, a Miss World Fair was elected. She was called Mademoiselle Jacoview. Then Miss Cinema. A “Goy” was elected, protests were made and, under a fabricated pretext, the election was cancelled. Mademoiselle Joel was elected instead.
Yesterday Ce Soir, the Jewish-Soviet journal, published an interview with Miss Venus. She is called Yvonne Heymann, and she has a nose, but what a nose!36
Each of the Bulletin's fifty-five issues was more or less exactly the same.
The third German financial source Louis used was the Geneva office of l'Internationale Antisémite, a nineteenth-century organisation which by this time seems to have been working with Julius Streicher. Later Louis added the Gestapo, and many strange figures on the occult fringes of the Nazi world were also to surface, bearing gifts, in the coming years. This flow of German money into the lower reaches of French anti-Semitism resulted in a flurry of activity in March 1937. Coston's Libre parole proposed a National Anti-Semitic Congress in the style of Fleischhauer's annual Erfurt Congress, held each September.
A month later a Comité Antijuif de France (Anti-Jewish Committee of France) was constituted, with Louis Darquier as president and Henri-Robert Petit as secretary.37 On 11 May, in full flourish, the first meeting was held in the Salle Wagram, and the anti-Semitic brotherhood turned out in force. “Subjects discussed: History of the Jews in France, from the Talmud to Marxism, Jewish capitalism, Jews and Freemasonry, the Jewish invasion.”38 Louis spoke last, and it was on this occasion that he uttered his most quoted sentence: “We must, with all urgency, resolve the Jewish problem, whether by expulsion, or massacre.”39
“It is already well known,” Louis wrote in 1938, after being in receipt of Nazi money for nearly two years, “that through the intervention of organisations like the Franco-German Committee (Vice-President Fernand de Brinon, married to a Jew) there are men who sympathise with Jews, Masons and democrats, in a word, scum, who are persona grata with the top Germans, and in particular with His Excellency Herr Ribbentrop.”40
This kind of lie was inspired by Louis' exclusion from de Brinon's aristocratic circle in Le Grand Pavois, doubly irritating as “Comte” de Brinon was another French journalist said to have bestowed nobility upon himself. Though Louis used “Baron Darquier de Pellepoix” without pause, and though he received money from Elizabeth Büttner, the elite club of Abetz's pro-Nazis had little to do with his rabble fringe. None of this fooled the French security service, who recorded most of Louis' German contacts, but until 1939 such words satisfied Charles Maurras, a happier man that year because Pope Pius XII revoked the interdiction of Action Française; Catholics could now join it again.
Louis Darquier's court cases and his financial connections with Nazi Germany were referred to regularly in the press, yet Charles Maurras, to whom all contact with Germany remained anathema, chose to ignore them. The explanation for this, and for Darquier's fealty to Maurras, lies perhaps somewhere in the relationship between Anatole de Monzie and Maurras. While de Monzie relieved him of his fraternal problems, Action française gave front-page coverage to Louis' anti-Semitic speeches, lectures, fights and court cases, published his letters and shared platforms with him. Until 1939 Maurras gave Louis Darquier fame as a Jew-hater, fame sufficient to satisfy the Germans that Louis Darquier would be prepared to murder them.
10
On the Rampage
As LOUIS BECAME MORE successful in his chosen profession, and as the Nazi money he was paid became more and more obvious, Renseignements Généraux—the French equivalent of MI5— began to follow him around. Louis called them his “guardian angels.”1 They followed Myrtle too, and it is only through police reports that she surfaces after 1934, when she returned to Paris in such wretched shape.
By 1937 she seems to have been on the mend, dealing with matters at the Sports Club, seeing workmen and paying the gas bill. She convinced her family in Tasmania of the “importance to him [Louis] of food, restaurants, dress and high standards in everything associated with the social side of life.” Myrtle, the “born entertainer” who sang with “such wit and verve,” had lived for years now in one hotel room after another, without a piano. She told her family her life was full of music, but no one who came across them makes any mention of it.2
The Baron and Baroness had moved again, and by August were living in the Hôtel Terminus, 108, rue St.-Lazare in the 9th arrondissement. Beyond the Hôtel Terminus and the dismal rue Laugier, Paris offered extraordinary film, music and song—jazz, Piaf, Charles Trenet; its painters were legendary. The Jones family sincerely believed that Myrtle “learnt a great deal from Louis, a fount of knowledge in so many spheres, and a true scholar.”3 But the names of Jean Gabin or Jean Renoir, Picasso or Matisse were never heard on Louis' lips, and his rare references to the cinema were always in character, as when he described the great director Abel Gance as a “filthy Jew.”
When the police began tracking Myrtle they called her “Myrthe,” believed that she was childless, that she came from “Launcestan,” and that her family name was Lindsay-Jones, or Morrison-Jones. They thought she was an heiress, but that her fortune had been dissipated by her and Louis' expensive lifestyle and the Depression. It seems, therefore, that Myrtle was still bemoaning the Australian wool prices and hoping for the inheritance removed a decade before.
Towards the end of 1937 extant bills, paid an
d unpaid, suggest that after over a year in the Hôtel Terminus Louis and Myrtle went to live in rue Laugier, though Louis seems to have kept a hotel room too from time to time. Two establishments were more suited, anyway, to his frenetic sexual arrangements. At other times he was seen with his buddies, mostly younger than he, a kind of rat pack of bully or homosexual boys, depending on who made the report. With them went Louis' dog Porthos, trained to chase Jews at the words “Aux Juifs! ”4 Money still ran through Louis' fingers. He had two clubs, his National and his Sports Club, was painting the town with Myrtle or his “boys,” and, the police noted, holding “numerous reunions” and distributing “a vast number of tracts protesting against the dictatorship of Jews and foreigners.”5 At these meetings, year after year, sat plainclothes members of the Special Branch, taking down notes and misspelling names.
In the letters to which Myrtle was addicted she told the Jones family that she had fallen in love with Paris, and spent her days satisfying “her love of museums, picture galleries, old buildings, history, theatre, ballet and music… with the best of the old and the new around her…she acquired a considerable knowledge.” To Myrtle, history was “no string of dates, wars and treaties…No, it was warm, breathing people.”6
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