In the summer of 1938 Anatole de Monzie was sitting in his garden in his country home in the Lot, writing a book about Savonarola, when édouard Daladier rang to ask him to return to the cabinet as Minister of Public Works. De Monzie had not been in government since 1934, and after the Anschluss of March 1938 all that remained of his European ambitions was his “Franco-Italian vocation.” The cabinet de Monzie joined descended immediately into crisis as Hitler mobilised his troops and ordered the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain's Britain would not support France in her sworn commitment to Czechoslovakia, and the French government, particularly its pacifists and appeasers, would not fulfil its promises. On 30 September Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement, giving Hitler what he wanted. The French people, like the British, reacted with a mixture of joy, relief and shame. Léon Daudet cheered. “Israel and Moscow can go into mourning,” he wrote in Action française. “We will not fight for ‘the Czechs. ’ ”5 Chamberlain, whom Daladier described as a “desiccated stick,” returned to applauding crowds in London and declared “peace with honour… peace for our time”; Daladier was welcomed by similar crowds in Paris—“Les cons! ”he said. “The idiots!”6
As Anne turned eight, the distribution of gas masks and preparations for evacuees (anticipated during the Munich crisis) gave Kidlington a good idea of what was to come. Just at this time, Elsie moved up in the world. Paying £25 down, she took out a mortgage on 98 Hazel Crescent— now number 12—in a rural part of Kidlington which was meant to become Oxford Garden City, but failed to do so because of the war. Though in what was hailed as “Oxford's Latest and Finest Estate,” this redbrick house, brand-new in 1938, is notable for its charmless and utilitarian ugliness, a desolation only increased by its duplicates which line Hazel Crescent. It did, however, promise, and deliver, a modern kitchen, bathroom and indoor lavatory. This was Elsie's home from 1938 until 1957, and Anne's too, with room for Aunty Violet and for May, before she went off in the early 1940s to become an ambulance driver. According to Elsie's friends the down payment on the house was actually in Anne's name. Elsie varied her accounts of the purchase: sometimes she mentioned Anne's father, sometimes “Anne's trustees.” If so, it is unimaginable that she had any notion as to the money's Nazi provenance—nor that some of it came from a tyre factory in Paris.
However unintelligent he found her, Louis was close to his mother, and like his brothers continued to visit her at Neuilly throughout the thirties, particularly when he wanted money. Pierre Darquier never came to terms with his middle son, and would not see him. When other guests were at Neuilly at family Sunday lunches, Louis was never there, never mentioned, and certainly neither was Myrtle. Pierre disliked Louis' political views, but more than politics was involved here. He tolerated similar, if more modest, opinions from his son Jean, but Louis “had wasted all their money.”
At Neuilly in 1938 Louis met a neighbour and industrialist, Pierre Auguste Galien,7 the owner of “SUPER GOM,” a tyre-retreading factory in La Plaine St.-Denis, in the north of Paris. Galien was a wealthy man, and a more belligerent anti-Semite and more capacious liar than Louis Darquier. Only a year younger than Louis, shorter and brown-haired, he shared Louis' carousing tastes; together they became ruffians in arms, and Pierre Galien took over the role that René Darquier had filled until 1936: he lent Louis money.
Galien's first contact with Louis coincided exactly with the launch of La France enchaînée. 8 As director of propaganda for Louis' union, Galien was also in charge of distribution and publicity for the newspaper; he made sure it was in all the kiosks of Paris. A mixture of German money and Galien's wealth thus provided the down payment on Elsie's new house in Kidlington.
At the end of October 1938 the Nazis forcibly expelled some fifteen thousand Jews to Poland, putting them into boxcars and dumping them at the Polish frontier town of Zbaszyn. They included the family of Herschel Grynspzan, who on 7 November in Paris attempted to assassinate the German ambassador von Welczek, the man to whom Louis had applied for money a year earlier. Instead Grynspzan shot and killed the Third Secretary at the embassy, Ernst vom Rath. Two days later Hitler ordered a massive coordinated attack on Jews throughout the Reich— Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass—an attack so murderous that world outrage was immediate. Louis greeted these events with the words “Bravo, Fritz!” and, bearing a large garland of chrysanthemums, took his boys to the Protestant funeral service of vom Rath to pay his respects. Surveillance of Louis Darquier by the French state and its police intensified. The government seized the September issue of La France enchaînée, which accused five French ministers of warmongering, and the security services made plans to suppress both Louis and his newspaper.
Meanwhile Lecache v. Darquier came before the courts, and during its disorderly proceedings the amount of German money that Goebbels had placed at Louis' disposal was spelled out clearly. Distinguished professors appeared in court on Lecache's behalf. Marcel Bloch, Lecache's lawyer, outlined Louis' long commercial relations with Jews, as employee and debtor, and described him as a “French Hitlerite.” But most noteworthy were the words he used, always borrowed thereafter, to describe Louis' brand of French nationalism—“patriotisme alimentaire”: patriotism for money, patriotism for hire. The exchanges between the two sides reached such a pitch that the hearing was suspended. Louis wrote vainglorious appreciations of his own theatrics in La France enchaînée, and Action française, as ever, published daily encouragement. The court case ended the day before the signature of a Franco-German Declaration of Friendship, on 8 December. Darquier and Lecache were both fined two hundred francs and ordered to pay two thousand francs in damages. Louis, who could now afford to hold private dinners in restaurants such as La Chope Cardinale in boulevard St.-Germain, could afford to appeal, and he did.
By the end of 1938 Louis announced that his “Anti-Jewish sections have multiplied tenfold the number of members,” and the police agreed that his union was now the most important anti-Semitic organisation in France.9 On 13 December, speaking to his followers after dinner, Louis called upon them to celebrate the growing success of his Anti-Jewish Union, recalled its shaky start—now a thing of the past—and rendered homage to Hitler, “not because he is a national socialist, but because he is the only statesman who understands the Jewish problem.”10 Two days later, in the council chamber, he harangued his fellow councillors with a violent attack on republican, “Jewish,” France: “They have invented another France, a kind of synthetic machine… their France…the product of their hysterical and neurasthenic brains …” Then he shouted at his old foe Maurice Hirschovitz, “I despise you. Before the year is out you will be in a concentration camp.”11
According to Céline, all Jews were “buggers.” In 1938 Louis was also denounced as such, and the vice squad was sent in to investigate rumours about his “special tastes,” but found the accusation unsubstantiated. With his Anti-Jewish Union permanently under attack, Louis advertised for a live-in guardian for the rue Laugier, and for volunteers to protect the members selling copies of La France enchaînée on the streets of Paris. There was already a lengthy police report on Louis; by July 1939 the police had prepared a second, more detailed analysis which covered all anti-Semitic organisations, with Louis the leader of the pack.12 Until war broke out, he and his fellows spent most of their time fighting—at meetings, in the streets or in court. The months after Munich and the victory of Franco in Spain saw the clash of ideologies in France reach its bitter apogee. The streets of Paris were littered with leaflets shouting “Down with the Jewish War,” many of them emanating from the rue Laugier, many of them printed in Germany.
In January 1939 Pierre Galien was arrested after a brawl with LICA's troops selling their newspaper, Le Droit de vivre. Louis could print forty thousand copies of his own newspaper by this time, and though it was sold in Paris by his boys, it was also well distributed throughout France. He began to praise Hitler openly in its pages and amongst friends,
thus preparing the way to put Maurras and Action Française behind him. He was now in receipt of German subsidies from many sources, while Maurras' hatred of Germany continued to express itself volubly—particularly in his insistence that the Nazis were Jews. Louis permitted Urbain Gohier to accuse both Maurras and Daudet of being Jews themselves in La France enchaînée. The publicity Lecache v. Darquier gave to the complex sources of Louis' Nazi funding provided such detail that even Maurras could no longer ignore the truth. All this led to the final break: “Our enemies cannot be our friends,” said Maurras in February 1939.
After his rupture with Maurras, Louis Darquier took on men of a more distinguished mien than the Costons and Petits of the anti-Semitic underworld. His new team looked upon the destruction of Jews as a financial and professional enterprise, and included doctors and men of business and the professions. Most of them were veterans, and each Croix de Guerre or Légion d'honneur was paraded with pride. Marcel Jouhandeau,13 the respected novelist—and author of Le Péril juif—having flirted with Doriot's PPF, settled for Louis' Anti-Jewish Union. On the basis of Louis' belief that “it is always better, in all cases, to be a stupid Frenchman than an intelligent Jew,” another addition to his inner circle, madder than all the rest, was his “right-hand man,” a retired colonial officer, Captain Paul Sézille, a French version of Ulrich Fleischhauer, though more damaged by alcohol.
Many associates came Louis' way through Céline or Galien. Céline supplied Louis' first scientist in the sinister Swiss anthropologist, ethnologist and doctor of medicine Georges Montandon. By March 1939 Montandon was giving slide shows for Louis' union on “The Jewish Race” in the Café St.-Sulpice in rue du Vieux Colombier, with Céline in attendance. Montandon proposed a racial theory of anti-Semitism, a theory of hierarchy of civilisations and races, asserting that the yellow, black and white races each came from a different kind of ape—orangutans, or gorillas, or chimpanzees. He considered the Jewish people to be the most dangerous of all racial groups, and advocated their isolation within their own separate state. He hoped to improve them in other ways too: “I am sure that I have read somewhere about the proposal, for example, to brand Jews with a hot iron and I am personally convinced of the efficiency of, in certain cases, cutting off the noses of female Jews since they are no less dangerous than the males. When I was a student doctor in Zurich I noticed the excellent effect of such an operation on an individual whose nose had been bitten off.”14
Céline wrote often of his affection for Montandon. He was particularly attracted to the obsessional nature of Montandon's research, often attended his lectures, and liked his proposition that France was really a Celtic, Germanic nation, not of the Latinate Catholic stock claimed by Maurras. Montandon also insisted that Maurras was Jewish on his mother's side. After his encounter with Montandon, Louis took to adding Celtic aristocratic roots to all the other bloodstock he had invented for himself.
In early 1939 La France enchaînée was in vibrant form, serialising the Protocols, with Louis announcing all kinds of new endeavours. The previous May he had founded another association, a Union Française—much the same kind of thing as his Anti-Jewish Union, but concentrating on French racial purity rather than on its Jewish opposite, and this took over his Sports Club at 8, rue Laugier, replacing water jets and pistol practice with a space for large private meetings, necessary now that he was banned from most public halls.15 Louis injected further energy into this second union, the manifesto of which differed from that of his Anti-Jewish Union in an unsurprising emphasis on delivering France from democracy, and the physical and spiritual training of an elite of young men, and a surprising insistence on the defence of the family and encouragement of an increase in the birth rate. The voice of Pierre Galien could be heard in Louis' unusual eloquence on the subjects of a corporate economy and capital and the worker.
At the same time Louis announced the publication of a quality review, the Cahiers jaunes, the Yellow Notebooks. During his evening with Céline in December 1938, Louis had tried to convince that determined pessimist of the imminence of a pure-blooded French victory over the Jews. To that end he came up with yet another association, which he called Les Vieilles Souches, Ancient Roots, aiming “to give back to the French people the family and racial pride…to gather together all French people of the white race, no crossbreeds with Jewish blood.”16 To belong to Louis' Anti-Jewish Union, one had to prove four non-Jewish grandparents; to qualify for Ancient Roots one needed eight similarly pure great-grandparents.
Louis was becoming what he had laboured to be, the top man in his field, the baronial capo of an anti-Semitic industry, and an expert on human bloodlines. His two unions in rue Laugier, his newspaper and journals and his National Club all brought in contributions. He charged twelve francs a year for membership in the Anti-Jewish Union, twenty-five francs for an annual subscription to each of his newspapers, twenty francs for membership in his French Union, and a special rate of a hundred francs a year for the lot. He had never abandoned his widows and orphans of 6 February, and that association still brought in a little, particularly on the anniversary each year as he continued to celebrate the great day of the 1934 riots. Louis threw a banquet for his new team at the rue Laugier on 11 February 1939 to celebrate the first anniversary of the publication of La France enchaînée, and his comrades met regularly on the first Friday of every month in the large meeting room of 8, rue Laugier. The new team remained in close touch with Erfurt.
Fully under the influence of Nazi policies now, though never admitting it, monotonously praising Hitler but always trumpeting in the pages of La France enchaînée the essential Frenchness of his own theories, Louis had taken on the Nazi idea of corralling Jews together in some distant land. Most Nazi theorists and their French twins selected the island of Madagascar (whose inhabitants were never consulted) for this purpose, and occasionally Louis did too, but he also recommended Soviet Russia, the home of “Jewish communism.”
In March, despite Goebbels' generosity, Pierre Gérard's lack of success in Strasbourg brought him back to the rue Laugier, and even with the reinforcing presence of men such as Céline and Jouhandeau, Louis' empire ceased to grow; it never exceeded about a thousand members. All his ideas for new clubs and journals and associations also came to naught, because from April 1939 he spent most of his time in court, and when not there, in fighting with anti-fascists and Jews, imaginary or otherwise, wherever possible.
But there were some changes. To earn his German keep Louis had to do as he was told, and in March 1939, in the council chamber he turned on Le Provost de Launay, president of the council, who had sent a message of congratulation to Isaïe Schwartz, Rabbi of Strasbourg, on his appointment as Grand Rabbi of France. Le Provost de Launay publicly reprimanded Louis. This was intolerable: de Launay was a 6 February man, and his family were linked to édouard Drumont. This time the level of uproar brought to an end all tolerance from the right in the council chamber, even from Charles Trochu.17 Louis took the Hitlerian line, as he was paid to do: “Good Jews are perhaps more dangerous than the others…I fire on all of them!”18
Being on Hitler's payroll had lost Louis the approval of Action Française, and now his allies of the Front National and the old diehard nationalists of the former paramilitary leagues. All nationalists, as patriots, retained the notion of Germany as the ancient enemy, however much they approved of some of Hitler's methods. Louis' “egotism” and his Nazi money were known things, but his association with Galien and other businessmen brought the new and accurate discovery that he was in it for the money. More important, he and his fellows were accused, rightly, of being “under orders from Berlin” to use anti-Semitism as a front for a German fifth column attempting to weaken France before the war all now saw coming. Isolated and boycotted by the right, Louis appealed to the readers of La France enchaînée for “a war contribution”: “Faith can move mountains. She can also rid us of the Jews. HELP US.”
France and Britain were entering their last mont
hs of the appeasement of Hitler. In March 1939 Hitler finally invaded Czechoslovakia and the Spanish Civil War ended with victory for Franco. Daladier, the seasoned Radical warrior, extracted almost dictatorial powers from Parliament, providing nationalists like Taittinger, Trochu and la Roque with the authoritarian government they had always wanted. Daladier was a suspicious, ill-tempered man, which most people attributed to the amount of alcohol he consumed and his dispiriting appearance “of having had too few or too many.”19 At this point the French republic, encircled by fascist dictatorships, finally took action against the enemies within. Naturalisation laws were tightened, and Daladier's government prepared the ground for later Vichy measures, with a series of restrictive decrees which brought forth internment camps and intense police surveillance for all foreigners. The Marchandeau Law, named after Daladier's Minister of Justice, was promulgated in April: limitations were placed on the freedom of the press—racial or religious attacks became crimes. Louis was a principal target, for in the March and April issues of La France enchaînée his campaign “THE JEWS WANT WAR” had reached a hallucinatory level of delirium.
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