French Nazis and anti-Semites went en masse to the Nuremberg rally of 1937. 30 The courts finally sentenced Louis to pay a thousand francs for the incident in the Bar Marlène the year before, and he was months in arrears for his rent.31 At this low point, Louis followed Charles Maurras to Geneva, where Maurras was to give a lecture on the poet Horace. In the course of the event Louis contributed a vehement diatribe against the French government and the League of Nations—“Diplomacy is crawling with Jews.” He was publicly expelled from Switzerland the next day, and as the League of Nations was sitting in Geneva at the time, all the newspapers reported his outburst.
Results were instantaneous: within a month Louis could afford to expand on all fronts. By October 1937 he had paid the rent bill and improved the kitchen and plumbing. In November he presided over a large meeting of his Anti-Jewish Union with the Cagoulard Charbonneau as star speaker, to loud cheers of “Bring on Maurras!” and “Down with the Jews!” A thousand young men attended. Two weeks later the planned Cagoule insurrection was called off at the last moment and their conspiracy was announced in the Chamber of Deputies. By December its leaders were arrested, and Voltaire immediately published an article fingering a senior Cagoulard as Louis' banker.32
A more accurate assessment of the source of his new funds came from the Ministry of the Interior, which in December reported that Goebbels' Propaganda Office—probably by way of Julius Streicher and “‘l'Internationale Antisémite’ which is based in Geneva, under the directorship of Otto Grutzner…provided Darquier de Pellepoix with all the ‘means’ he needed. This permitted him to publish the most violent tracts for distribution throughout the entire country. But it is in Alsace and North Africa that they are achieving the most success.”33
A year later a furniture salesman from Lyon was sent to Louis Darquier by the German consul-general for advice as to how to proceed in the anti-Semitic marketplace. Louis told the salesman “take money from anyone, with the excuse that the movement which inspires you is fighting the enormous power of Judaeo-Marxist finance and they have no scruples of any kind.”34 The consul-general considered Louis “the national leader of the anti-Semitic movement” in France.
Production stepped up at the rue Laugier. One sticker, in vivid yellow, proclaimed, “The breast of France is the last defence of the Jew. Join the Anti-Jewish Union of France”; posters were plastered all over Paris and provincial towns. The rue Laugier could also now afford to make merry at Christmas. Louis called “all women sympathetic to our movement” to a meeting to form a women's section, and its president, Madame Dehouve, celebrated Christmas 1937 with Louis by installing a Christmas tree in the club and requesting all to bring their children, for whom a party, games and presents were provided. Anne, seven by this time, was of course not there, but Myrtle would have heard Louis' Christmas message:
The weak deserve to be massacred.
We French are a strong people.
We want to subdue the Jews and we shall subdue them…35
Towards the end of the 1930s the Parisian world of anti-Semites was wider than its cliché-ridden newspapers and ill-attended meetings might suggest. Many French writers—literary authors and editors, essayists, novelists and orators, poets and playwrights, but above all journalists— put their facility with words at its service and, in a great number of cases, at the service of Nazi Germany. Some of these men of letters were renowned, and many of them were former protégés of Maurras who gathered around the newspaper Je Suis partout, “one of the intellectual melting pots of French fascism.” Articulate, voluble, over-educated, these included the paper's distinguished editors, first Pierre Gaxotte, then Robert Brasillach, and a journalistic elite: Lucien Rebatet (who thought of Louis as “a most sympathetic daredevil”), Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, older brother of the famous oceanographer Jacques, Alain Laubreaux,36 Georges Blond and, from time to time, Maurice Bardêche. Cousteau, Blond and Brasillach made the obligatory visits to Germany in 1936, 1938 and 1939. This clique produced a special edition of Je Suis partout,“The Jews,” a perfect French mirror of Streicher's Der Stürmer. As editor-inchief, Brasillach used the same approach as Louis, calling the “Jewish Question” the “Monkey Question.”
All these writers admired their wildest representative, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the outlaw genius—yet another man wounded and decorated in the First World War—whom Louis selected as his next hero. In December 1937 the author of the epic masterpieces of the 1930s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Voyage to the End of Night) and Mort à crédit (Death on the Instalment Plan) produced Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre). This was the first of his three books of venomous hatred of Jews— “pamphlets” they were called at the time because they were works of propaganda, fragmented and bizarre, staccato streams of abuse making use of the “insane statistics culled from the anti-Semitic den of Darquier de Pellepoix.”37 These “pamphlets” were also literary antidotes to the “Jewish” Proust whom Céline so despised—“Prout-Proust,” he called him, “Fart-Proust”—and they caused a sensation: “We welcomed with joy and unlimited admiration Céline's Bagatelles pour un massacre,” wrote Lucien Rebatet.38 “We knew pages of it and hundreds of its aphorisms by heart.” Céline followed Bagatelles with L'école des cadavres (The School for Corpses) in 1939 and Les Beaux draps (A Fine Mess) in 1941, each reprinted throughout the Occupation.
Céline was Louis' near-contemporary, and both were firm believers in the Protocols. Céline was a doctor, a specialist in children's diseases, and had worked since 1927 in the Parisian medical circuit before taking up a position at a municipal clinic in Clichy, not far from the Ternes and Neuilly. Both he and Louis had one child, a daughter despatched from sight, and both were sexually promiscuous. Like Louis, Céline spoke English fluently and knew England well, but early admiration of England, for both men, had been transformed into anglophobia. Céline declared, “Jew or an Englishman, same thing,” and predicted that in the coming war, “We'll all be maggots by the time the first Oxford queers disembark in Flanders.”39
It is tempting to imagine that Céline and Louis Darquier had met in London. Nineteen thirty was the year of Louis' agonised confrontation with the duplicitous bank manager named Robinson, and “Robinson” is Céline's mysterious “messenger of misery” in Voyage to the End of Night, published two years later. In L'école des cadavres, Céline hailed Darquier as essential reading for all anti-Semites, and for his “pamphlets” he borrowed all the regurgitated prose of Petit, Coston, Darquier and Fleischhauer's Weltdienst, added a dash of Princess Karadja, and created his own language, using French speech rhythms to give French anti-Semitism his own foul-mouthed but magical style.
Like T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism, Maurrassian and elitist, Céline's version—violent and hallucinatory—has been hard to accept for those who cannot couple great writers and intellectuals with gross inadequacies, as is so often necessary. Céline was a comic genius consumed by self-hatred, a combination of attributes which meant little to Louis Darquier, who demonstrated no appreciation of the innovative wonder or black humour of Céline's prose.
Céline was a shabby, scruffy, bright-eyed, ratty-looking man, as tall as Louis but with none of his brute force. But both were bullies, physically exhausting to all they encountered, and utterly committed to a belief that the coming world war was a Jewish conspiracy. “A Jew in every turret, right from the start of mobilisation,” wrote Céline. “…I don't want to go to war for Hitler, I'll admit it, but I don't want to go against him, for the Jews… Hitler doesn't like the Jews, nor do I!…I'd prefer a dozen Hitlers to one all-powerful Blum. Hitler, at least, I could understand, while with Blum it's pointless, he'll always be the worst enemy, absolute hatred, to the death.”40 In this one extract from Bagatelles—by no means the most remarkable example of Céline's crackling writing—the relation between French anti-Semitism and the use the Nazis made of it is perfectly explained.
Louis' entourage of outsiders was a natural habitat for Céline. They all cou
rted him, fed him and published him in their newspapers. He came to their meetings, wrote about them in his books, and recommended their papers. In return Louis published lengthy extracts from his books, any article or letter Céline cared to send, and sold his books from rue Laugier. After one meeting, on 2 December 1938, Céline repaired with Louis and his cohorts to a café, where Céline's despair confronted Louis' optimism as to the inevitable triumph of French will and French blood. “Understand,” said Céline, “when gangrene has reached as far as the shoulder, you've had it. Before that you can cut the arm off. But at the shoulder it's too late. That's where we are. We've had it…We're rotten to the core with Jews.”41 Louis, replying in the heightened tone he used when matters spiritual were involved, indignantly assured Céline that France would rise again; not from the seed of ordinary Frenchmen, though, but from that of “a tiny elite.” It is hard to see how the Australian Myrtle and the half-caste Anne fitted in with Louis Darquier's constantly repeated ideas about “French roots.” For he had now created a kingdom in which he could be monarch of all he surveyed, leading a chosen race of French saviours, with Céline as his muse.
Louis' National Club gradually disappeared under the weight of his Anti-Jewish Union. Because of the continuous riots at his meetings the government forbade any more public gatherings in the large Parisian meeting halls Louis could now afford to hire, so he held lavish meetings at his Sports Club. In February 1938, “thanks to generous donors,” he could also rent number ten next door when necessary.42
In October 1936, desperate to get René to call off the bailiffs, Jean Darquier had assured René that Louis “always avoided any propaganda in Strasbourg, even though it is a stronghold of anti-Semitism…a sign of his desire not to harm you.”43 Now, all concern for René abandoned, Louis sent Pierre Gérard to open an office in Strasbourg, to serve as a regional office for Alsace-Lorraine and the Franche-Comté. Soon he also had branches in Nancy, Marseille, and Orléans.
For the Nazis in 1938, Strasbourg and Alsace were the front line, a hotbed of conflicting French and German national loyalties, swarming with spies and secret groupings dedicated to returning Alsace and its German-speaking population to the Reich. Strasbourg also served as a centre for the distribution of German funds and propaganda to Parisian centres of anti-Semitism. The French préfecture in Strasbourg amply provided the Ministry of the Interior in Paris with information about the “flagrant German propaganda”44 rampant in the area, particularly the activities of Fleischhauer and his Weltdienst.
As war approached, the Nazis were pouring money into Strasbourg's fascist parties, and Gérard, now a young lawyer, was instructed to divert some of this towards Louis. Most important for Louis Darquier was the participation of “M. Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, who has sent an important sum of money to acquire a building in Strasbourg, number 7 or 8 rue de la Douane, where [Darquier de Pellepoix] is to set up an Anti-Jewish Centre for Alsace and the eastern region.”45
After Gérard had placed the brass plate of the Anti-Jewish Union on the door of his Strasbourg office, police spies were sent to each meeting, and took notes on each generously distributed tract and on the monthly journal he began to publish, in German. “The waters of the Rhine will be red with Blood of Israel”46 was typical of his work, but mostly each leaflet posted through the letterboxes of Strasbourg was a request for money— “Help us, send us donations, they will be well used and they will save your life.”47 René Darquier would have recognised this sort of thing should one of these tracts have landed on his doorstep. Rue de la Douane, along the quais of Strasbourg, was not far from René's home, and he and Louis could have met in 1938 and 1939, because Louis often visited his subsidiaries; but a few years later Louis told the Germans that he had not spoken to his younger brother for some years, while he worked for those Jews.
Louis' list of demands was simple by this time: all Jews who had arrived in France since 1918 should be expelled; no Jews who remained should be entitled to hold public office; their activities in all spheres should be limited and their ill-gotten gains returned to the French state. Most important: all well-meaning people should give money to the Anti-Jewish Union of France to assist in this great cause. In Alsace Gérard was lucky if twenty people turned up to his meetings, but when Louis spoke about three hundred came to swell the coffers.
In Paris, Louis' presence had become so pervasive that he and his “biff boys” were followed around not only by the police, but also by Lecache's LICA, for whom he was now public enemy number one. They hounded him for his “Hitlerian staff ” and Nazi money, and on one occasion Louis and Lecache fell to blows.48 Lecache described Louis prancing up to him, hopping from one foot to the other like a dancing bear or a heavyweight learning to box. When Lecache called him a “foreign agent, a traitor, a spy,” Louis sued for defamation. As Louis had called Lecache “excrement of the ghetto” and a “circumcised swine,” Lecache sued back for racist abuse. The trial began at the end of January 1938, and for the first and only time Louis, frenetically adjusting his monocle, was required to admit that his real name was Darquier, without any Pellepoix.
In March 1938, on the day Hitler took over Austria, Léon Blum returned to head the government for a brief three weeks before being replaced, finally, by édouard Daladier, that other veteran of the 6 February riots. As the Popular Front died in France, Louis' insignificant Antijuif also disappeared, and on 25 February he launched his first real newspaper, a large broadsheet, La France enchaînée (France in Chains).49 This “Organ of Defence against the Jewish Invasion” appeared twice a month and was decorated with monumental headlines, exclamation marks and the usual gross cartoons, interlaced with lengthy articles by Louis himself, mostly transcripts of his speeches in the city council. It is from this date, perhaps because Goebbels had now entered the picture and Louis was being paid for a specific purpose, that the objects of Louis' other animosities— communists, Masons, capitalists—disappeared from his rhetoric.
With so much going on in the early months of 1938 Louis had been absent from the council chamber, but in April he began to attend again, his focus narrowed to Jews, and only Jews. He insisted that the council debate the naturalisation of foreigners in France, and spoke for hours about the invasion of Jews into every nook and cranny of the French body politic. Obviously briefed by his brother Jean, he took medicine as an example: “I will read you a list of names.” Beginning with A— “Abdalian, Adda, Aïchenbaum, Amirian, Amir-Sikal, Anencov …” and ending with Z—“Zarrabi, Zimmerlich, Zwahlen, Zyngerman,” he listed every position in the medical profession occupied by a Jew, down to the last alphabetical obstetrician and rhinologist.50
The German inspiration for Louis' rhetoric is obvious in the vast flood of facts, figures and percentages, and his insistence that “the essence of a Jew is not his religion, it is his race.” Mostly he read out long extracts from newspapers or obscure thinkers, with more lists of invaded professions—Jews in the theatre, in politics, at the bar: “Schwartz, Guilevich, Bisbaum …” Stunned by this endurance test, his colleagues of right and left reacted with insults, mockery or silence, but as he continued “violentes protestations… tumulte” erupted. At this April sitting of the city council Louis fought another Jewish councillor. When Louis objected to the “insolence” of the “Jew Hirshcovitz,” Maurice Hirschovitz replied: “A Jew who kicks your arse.”51 Their confrontation led to the suspension of the sitting for two hours as glasses, water, sugar, ink, carafe and bell ricocheted around the chamber.
After the First World War, with so many men dead, so many injured, France had watched its birth rate dwindle as that of Germany grew. Conservative France blamed the Third Republic for its empty cradles as well as for everything else. Louis moved on to this subject: “There is no reason to believe,” he said, “that a strong and virile race such as the French would be incapable of abundant procreation if they lived under a regime which gave them the chance… but always, and everywhere, thanks to their genius for proc
reation we are surrounded by little Cahans, little Isaacs, little Jacobs.”52
By early 1938 Louis was paying particular attention to children in the rue Laugier. The Anti-Jewish Union offered child-care facilities every Thursday afternoon, from 3 to 6:30 p.m.: “we look after children, we amuse them, we give them a nice snack. A renowned Professor teaches them to have a knowledge of, and taste for, music.”53 The name of the music teacher is not mentioned, but it is unlikely that Louis would spend good money on hiring anyone when he had Myrtle to hand—but the children she taught had to be French.
11
War
UNTIL 1939, Anne and the other subjects of Kidlington, like the rest of the British population and the French across the water, watched their country hiccup towards another world war. In France, through the dark glass of the Protocols, Louis Darquier and his like saw its approach as “the Yids of the world” preparing for “another massacre of Christians, pushing ‘the goyim’ into wiping each other out…for the greater benefit of the so-called ‘chosen race. ’ ”1
Though La France enchaînée had its own handsomely printed stationery, blazoning “Director: Darquier de Pellepoix,” Louis used his position on the Paris city council to add status to his associations, and purloined twenty thousand of their inscribed envelopes in which to distribute a particularly noxious leaflet and an invitation to his meetings at the rue Laugier.
Fleischhauer was receiving reports commending Louis' progress,2 and his work was appreciated, for in July 1938 he was invited to go to Nuremberg to meet Alfred Rosenberg and Dr. Ernst Bohle, head of the Auslandsorganisation (AO), the Nazi organisation for foreign countries. He did not go, for in July 1938 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to Paris. When Daladier became prime minister again in April 1938 he strengthened the Anglo-French alliance and fully endorsed Neville Chamberlain's policy of non-intervention in Spain and appeasement of Hitler. A four-day visit to Paris was arranged for the British King and Queen. The city council held a grand reception for them; as a councillor Louis attended with Myrtle. She wrote to her family about the occasion, and their version relates that “The King and Louis stood by, nervously fingering their ties and finding little to say to each other, while their wives chatted together. Louis felt that the Queen was delighted to discover among the crowd of Frogs a woman of Scottish ancestry, who knew and loved Scotland. Knowing Myrtle I shouldn't be surprised if she didn't claim kinship!”3 Louis would have found little to say because his anglophobia was well advanced; he now considered Britain, his former sanctuary from France, to be entirely controlled by Jews: “No man with self-respect lives infested with lice. Nor does a country.”4 Myrtle seems to have kept from her family in Tasmania a volte face which doubtless gave her many more bruises than those she had wept over in their London years.
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