It is hard to believe that Myrtle did not shower letters upon Anne and Elsie in Kidlington, but there are no signs of such correspondence. Louis now had to deal directly with Elsie, and his occasional letters were noted, though the despatch of money was as ragged as it ever had been. René was still sending money to Elsie in May 1936, but enfin for Louis was also enfin for them. Anne was six when Louis quarrelled with his brother René. Paying Elsie was never first in his financial considerations, and Nanny Lightfoot and her charge survived until the outbreak of war assisted by the ever affectionate “aunts,” Maud and Violet, and in the mid-thirties by their niece May, who was earning too, as an assistant in the perfumery department of Babcock's store in Oxford. When Anne was seven, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister and the British appeasement of Hitler began. There was still fun to be had in these anxious years. May Brice would go to sixpenny hops and dances with her boyfriend Danny Puddefoot; Danny had a car, and he and May often took Anne on such jaunts, freeing her from the hovering Elsie.
Everyone commented upon Nanny Lightfoot's fiercely protective attitude towards her charge. Anne was not allowed to mix with all and sundry, and Elsie—how she learned it we will never know—spoke French with her at home.7 She told the world that Anne came from an aristocratic French family, but in public the additional “de Pellepoix” was never used; Anne entered schools simply as Anne Darquier. Anne's “Dear Daddy” letters to her father attest to her dreams of a fabulous French family of aristocrats and doctors; it was her father the baron who was the linchpin of her fantasies about her missing parents during her childhood.
The magnificent International Exhibition of Art and Technology opened in Paris in May 1937, with the German Pavilion built by Albert Speer growling at the Soviet Pavilion which faced it, and on display everywhere in Paris were masterworks of art deco architecture and design. As the exhibition opened, Louis' Bulletin recorded what he thought to be the great success of the first meeting of the National Anti-Jewish Committee, and announced the birth of another association, his Rassemblement Antijuif de France (Anti-Jewish Union of France), and the launch of a new weekly newspaper, l'Antijuif (the Anti-Jew).8
THE ANTI-JEWISH UNION OF FRANCE
… Its aim is to bring together all people of French race, of whatever political opinions, to liberate France from Jewish tyranny. Its sole credo is that the renewal of France is not possible as long as Jews are not considered as foreigners and treated as such, and as long as they continue, behind more or less camouflaged labels and fronts, to stir up division, excite hatred and prepare with impunity revolution and wars of which they are the sole beneficiaries.
Lengthier explanations of “our passionate propaganda movement” were also provided—honour, dignity, service to the nation “strangled by Jews and Freemasons,” love for the Fatherland, return of national wealth to true Frenchmen, protection of French patrimony both artistic and moral—as well as a requirement that all members must have four non-Jewish grandparents. All this came at twelve francs a year, half the charge for the National Club. For the insignia of his new union Louis chose a sword and shield, “purely Aryan symbols in opposition to the six-pointed star of the Jews.” His colours: red and white—“in politics the colours of extremes, because the solution of the Jewish problem demands an alliance of all opposed parties.”9 The National Anti-Jewish Committee collapsed immediately after its first meeting.
Louis' “newspaper” before he received sufficient Nazi funding, l'Antijuif, no. 3, 26 June 1937 (© Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
In Erfurt in 1937 Fleischhauer held his annual Weltdienst Congress. Adolf Eichmann, at that point in charge of the Nazi office for “Jewish Emigration,” was there, and he reported: “Most of these Weltdienst members give the impression of being dubious characters who are obsessed with the idea of achieving recognition as leaders of parties and organisations in their own countries. They devote their entire attention to losing themselves in small details, to put it mildly, and this makes them incapable of working out or following any major strategy.”10
Coston had been leader of the pack. Now Louis had taken over the committee from Coston and made himself president, so all of Fleischhauer's French cohorts refused to join it, using one excuse or another. In the spring of 1937 Coston fell upon Henri-Robert Petit and accused him of mismanaging his library and archive. Petit extracted the Bulletin of the Centre for Information and Propaganda and fled with it to Louis.
This was the residue of the faithful with whom Louis launched his new organisation and paper, printed and distributed from the rue Laugier. There was nothing original about it; there had been various versions of l'Antijuif in France, using the same name, since the nineteenth century.11 The first meeting of Louis' Anti-Jewish Union at the Salle Wagram on 4 June 1937 was a prototype. The gathering at which Robert Castille and other men of Action Française mixed with Louis' small band of brothers was disrupted by provocateurs with truncheons; many were injured.
This gang could have been sent by Bernard Lecache of LICA. Already an archenemy of established French fascists such as Coston, Lecache now pinpointed Louis, who called him “the yid from LICA” or “servant of Stalin.” Lecache's Le Droit de vivre made fun of Louis' rantings, clubs, associations, unions and grotty little newspapers. He also accurately denounced the “sinister Darquier sans Pellepoix” as “sold to the Nazis.”12 Much the same age as Louis, a former communist, Jewish and a journalist, Lecache was a militant. A quick phone call to LICA could produce a car full of North African boxers who could clear a gathering of fascists in minutes. Communist fighters would do the same thing.13
In this case, however, it was not Lecache but the Francistes of Marcel Bucard, another man on Elizabeth Büttner's payroll, who invaded the Salle Wagram, given vociferous support by all those furious about Louis' invasion of their cabbage patch. To his rivals, Louis Darquier's intense narcissism was their greatest problem; also, as a councillor he was the only one of them with a public appointment and a civic platform from which to sell his wares. They never ceased to object to his vainglorious approach.
Coston joined Doriot's Parti Populaire Français in 1936. Apart from the greater success of the PPF, Louis competed with Doriot instinctively. Both were large, strong men, bruisers, greedy and self-indulgent, fond of brothels too. Doriot was a tough, independent fighter, a rousing orator, a bully and an authoritarian. He was a classic fascist leader, big, black-haired, spectacled and charismatic, while Louis bored people to death. Very few things united these fascists and anti-Semites of the 1930s; hatred of Jews and communists did, and also the habit of hunting in groups, journalism, speechifying and alcohol. All of them were desperate for money.
Léon Blum's Popular Front government fell in June 1937. Blum's attempts to be a “ ‘loyal manager’ of capitalism” failed, both because they were inadequate and because the hysterical opposition he faced was equalled in volume only by the hero-worship the German populace was offering to Hitler. “With Hitler against Bolshevism” and “Rather Hitler than Blum” were cries of the time, and not only from the right. Sections of Blum's own Socialist Party, and both the Communist and Radical Parties—purportedly supporters or partners—displayed rigorous and unchanging hostility to their Popular Front, and the French Senate consistently opposed Blum, while the fragility of the franc, the disastrous rise in the cost of living and the need for rearmament also contributed to his failure.
From 1934 French fascists were offered money by both Mussolini and Hitler, but for anti-Semites Germany was the most generous banker.14 Paying agents to foster anti-Semitism in France was an essential item in Goebbels' Nazi propaganda budget, while the Spanish Civil War was the melting pot in which all European anxieties boiled and bubbled, particularly in France, already on the way to its own civil war.
One of the reasons Britain was finally left in lone resistance to Hitler in 1940 was that throughout the 1930s British governments sacrificed almost every other European country in pursuit of British forei
gn policy, always failing to support France in its attempts to hold Germany to at least some of the conditions of the Versailles Treaty. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, or the long sequence of events which led to Munich, and which began with Hitler's Anschluss, his invasion of Austria in March 1938. After each submission to the will of Hitler, often forced upon them by their allies, and often by their own divisions, French republicans—even partisans of peace and the grandeur of Europe such as Anatole de Monzie—began to abandon hope. Nineteen thirty-eight was the year of democratic despair in France, the year in which nationalist France first began to scent victory.
Without British support Blum could not help the Spanish republic; nor was he permitted to by the Radical and pacifist socialist members of his own government. To men like Charles Maurras it was the Russians who had bombed Guernica, and for Louis Darquier “the massacres of Christians in Spain are the work of the Jews.” The non-intervention pact signed by Britain, Portugal, Italy, Russia and Germany in September 1936, then enthusiastically promoted by Britain but ignored by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, doomed both the Spanish government and the impotent Blum and his Popular Front. The French government limped on until April 1938, but except for a brief return, Blum had been deposed.
On 6 July 1937 Louis stood outside the doors of the Santé prison to greet Charles Maurras on his discharge. Two days later an enormous meeting was organised to celebrate Maurras' release at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the cycling stadium near the Eiffel Tower, then one of the largest places of assembly in Paris. Once again Louis stood beside Maurras, Léon Daudet, Jean Chiappe and the two Catholic militants Xavier Vallat and Philippe Henriot, and spoke to a crowd of thirty thousand, all of whom stood as he “concluded his speech with the phrase that swept through the meeting… ‘Charles Maurras, until today you were the Leader of Action Française. From this evening, you are the Leader of the French Union. ’ ” “The only possible national solution,” Louis said, “is to unite around Maurras, against the Jews.” Maurras continued to publicise Louis' activities, and permitted him to distribute his paper at provincial meetings of Action Française. “More than ever France is divided in two, composed of the great majority of good people, surrounded by many cretins, and led by filthy scoundrels,” was the tenor of Louis' propaganda.
In l'Antijuif Louis reported on Jewish activity everywhere, always referring his readers to his bible, the Protocols: “The Jewish Republic of the USSR… The Protocols of Sion …The Jewish Popular Front… The Protocols of Sion …The Jewish massacre of Catholic Priests in Spain by the Jewish Spanish Republic… The Protocols of Sion …The Jewish World War… The Protocols of Sion …”
Not one country was spared, but there were new themes. Louis seems to have given up paying any attention to Myrtle's sensitivities, because he now took up the public anglophobia Maurras had always preached but which Louis had hitherto eschewed. He inveighed against Britain in almost every issue:
THE ANTI-JEW
His Royal Highness and the Jews: “It is whispered among well-informed English circles that George VI will be elevated in the ceremony of 30 June, to the dignity of Grand Master of English Masonry…Violent Anti-Jewish demonstrations in London under the leadership of Sir Oswald Mosley, who was wounded…
The Jewish Government in England
The British Empire, like the United States, like France, is currently governed by the Jews…
M. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister
His father, Joe Chamberlain owed his brilliant career to Jewish support…Chamberlain's aunt was Jewish… the Chamberlain family, like the Churchills, are in the service of Jews…Mr. Anthony Eden…is the great-grandson of Frances Schaffalitsky a Polish Jewess…Duff Cooper's great-grandmother was called Stein… 15
The tally goes on and on. Though the accusation of madness is most frequently directed at Louis Darquier and his extreme anti-Semitic brethren, it is also true that in November 1938 Action française was still peddling the idea that Hitler was a Jew, and that his persecution of Jews in some way exalted them.16
In l'Antijuif the influence of Henri-Robert Petit, Louis' new fellow-inarms, is obvious: Masons were dug up from under every toadstool. Henry Coston's training is even more vividly felt: there are lists of doctors with Jewish names, lists of government ministers, all Masons or Jews, lists of kings and generals murdered by Masons and Jews, lists of the percentage of Jews in every profession: “Dentists 37 per cent, Money lenders 96 per cent… Here are the names of the Jews in the Syndicate of Stockbrokers at the Paris Bourse.”17 To these new tics were added two old ones. Louis never forgot the medical profession, and never ceased to ask his readers for money: “send financial assistance to the Anti-Jewish Union of France and particularly to its President, Darquier de Pellepoix,” he wrote on 5 August.18
Three weeks later Elizabeth Büttner replied with another cheque for three thousand marks (worth about £35,000 today). Immediately l'Antijuif gave up the rickety office typewriter; Louis could now pay for typesetting. The issue of August 1937 shows the effects of German money from other sources too, as Louis “distributed for the first time in France a grossly anti-Semitic brochure entitled ‘The Key to the Mystery. ’ It was imported from Canada and propagated in Switzerland through the intermediary of Princess Karadja who used German funds to this end ( World Service, Erfurt).”19
Princess Karadja was a remarkable table-rapping and Theosophist patron of the astral spheres who in earlier days, with Annie Besant and Mrs. Pankhurst, pursued Krishnamurti, the Great World Teacher, Avatar of the Order of the Star of the East. She was a prolific writer of bad poetry and prose: “Originally the dual souls are part of the same Divine Ego. They are golden fruits upon the great Tree of Life.” Now an elderly woman inhabiting the Villa Lux in Monti, near Locarno, Princess Karadja, who liked to be addressed as “Your Highness,” sent out mystic messages and money to anti-Semitic groups across Europe, in particular through her Anglo-American Aryan Protection League. “I wish to create,” she said, “a ‘façade, ’ all white and bright and shining…I am ‘the left hand’ and do not want to know what ‘the right hand’ does …” In pursuit of a New World Order, her right hand was in constant touch with Fleischhauer in Erfurt.20
In his paper Louis wrote about Jewish incest, about Jewish men's lack of respect for virginity, abuse of Gentile women and general sexual habits. Jews “return from a lover as naturally as they return from lessons or taking tea with a friend.”21 In 1939 Pierre Gérard was sued for writing that Jews were responsible for the divorce law and the low French birth rate, and that foreign Jewish doctors performed most abortions: “The Jew prevents us from having children.”22
Yet another addition to Louis' formulae in 1937 was one which, henceforward, was to mark his entire life: “Here are the names of Jews and half-castes …” The explanation for the millions of words about Jews which Louis Darquier left behind lies in this obsession, an obsession with blood. The body of a half-Jew contains only 50 percent Jewish blood; the rest of it is Aryan or whatever. How can you divide the blood? This impossibility tormented him: “We should particularly distrust those half Jews who, under French surnames, are sometimes more harmful than whole Jews, if you can call any Jew that!”23 In the Paris council chamber, where he continued as before to mix boyish interjections of questionable wit with anti-Semitic insults and diatribes, Louis lamented that “most French people still only have a poor understanding of the Jewish question.” This, finally, was his greatest cause for distress. Louis Darquier came to feel that his people, his French people, were being prevented by Jews from understanding what divided France in two: “the microbe of disintegration, of division, is the Jew.”
Louis saw himself as a militant prophet holding “every evening, in all districts of Paris and in several suburban towns, propaganda meetings about the Jewish problem.”24 He produced postcards with Joan of Arc saving France on one side, Jews destroying France on the other. Sometimes he used the hammer and
sickle to disguise his tracts as communist leaflets. These were distributed outside factory gates. Various henchmen who did this sort of work now lived in the houses in the rue Laugier— Petit had moved in, Louis' secretary lived there, and also Pierre Gérard, providing Louis with articles and illustrations for his papers and writing his booklet The Jew… Our Master.
Even more tormenting than the ignorance of the French people about the Jewish threat was Louis' own lack of success. His meetings, often sparsely attended, ended up in brawls, arrests and general turmoil. But most of all: “We need money and it is the duty of everyone to help us financially and to invite all French people to help us … for in THE ANTIJEWISH UNION OF FRANCE there are neither sinecures, nor ways to make easy money. One works here for glory …”25 This was an obvious swipe at Henri Petit, the kind of anti-Semite who took great trouble proving that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, and that He was anti-Semitic to boot. Petit was no use at all as Louis struggled to compete with Jacques Doriot. By 1938 Doriot's PPF could claim a membership of nearly 300,000, while Louis sometimes addressed as few as thirty men at his meetings in the rue Laugier.
Despite his subservience to the sedentary intellectual Maurras, Louis had links to the most violent of all the enemies of the Popular Front: the underground revolutionary movement La Cagoule, literally “The Cowl.”26 Its members were the Cagoulards, the Hooded Men, who in 1936 formed a clandestine and ritualistic organisation. They were dissidents from the leagues, with the usual army officers—some close to Marshal Pétain and General Weygand.27 Most important were the Action Française apostates, in particular the leader of the Cagoule, Eugène Deloncle.28 Their terrorism was based on violent anti-communism, and in 1936 and 1937 Cagoulards devoted their energies to political assassinations and the stockpiling of arms for an attempted overthrow of the state. Their aim resembled Franco's—a civil war to get rid of the French republic. Louis Darquier knew many of them: Jean Filliol, the former Camelot leader who had attacked Léon Blum, was the Cagoule's assassin; other members included Darquier's old Action Française comrade Henry Charbonneau. On behalf of Mussolini, the Cagoule assassinated the anti-fascist Rosselli brothers in 1937. 29
Bad Faith Page 20