Louis had his favourite whipping boys. Medical matters always received attention in his newspaper, and in almost every issue he attacked the “Judaised hypocrite” Henri de Kérillis, dubbing him a “hack in the pay of Louis Louis-Dreyfus.”20 De Kérillis, since December 1938, had been running an exposé in l'époque of the hundreds of fascist agents in key positions in France. Louis was notorious for his attacks on President Roosevelt, his favourite enemy: American power was Jewish power. “IS ROOSEVELT A JEW?” headlined long articles which Louis often illustrated with family trees going back to the seventeenth century, in which, with the assistance of the Wichita Revealer and its Reverend Winrod, he revealed all the SAMUELS and SYVERTS in Roosevelt's ancestry. “Let us recall as well,” he would write, “that the mother of the President bears the first name of Sarah and that the mother of his wife, who is also a ROOSEVELT, bears the first name of Rebecca …”21
Louis' newspaper after he received sufficient Nazi funding. La France enchaînée, 15 June 1939 (© Institut d'histoire du temps présent, Paris)
By the time the Marchandeau Law came into being, Louis was already known by the soubriquet of “Hitler's Parrot.”22 Under the Marchandeau Law he was prosecuted for two articles, one on the Jewish “invasion” of France, the other asserting that “The readers of this paper know the leading role that the Jew has played in corruption in general, and in drug trafficking in particular.”23 His first court case of 1939 was, however, the appeal he had launched against the Lecache decision: this he both lost and won, inasmuch as the appeal was denied, but Lecache's fine was raised by a hundred francs because he had made the first attack. It was a pyrrhic victory, because within weeks Darquier was indicted and a search warrant issued; the police invaded rue Laugier and seized his papers.24 “What did they find?” complained de Monzie. “Without doubt only unpaid rent bills.”25 Two days later, on 19 June, Louis Darquier and Pierre Gérard were charged under the Marchandeau Law for disseminating propaganda on behalf of a foreign power.26
From this date Anne and Elsie could have known of Louis' activities in France, for the next day The Times reported: “M. Darquier de Pellepoix, a member of the Paris city council, has been indicted on a charge of publishing libels against the Jews… shopkeepers and insolvent merchants listen with approval to what he says, but his campaign as a whole falls on deaf ears.”27 Scrambled reports such as this continued in The Times and the Manchester Guardian over the next six years, but no one who knew Elsie could imagine her reading those newspapers; it would have been the Daily Mail, or most likely the Banbury Advertiser.
In Paris, Louis Darquier, unknown to himself, had a distinguished ally in the shape of the former British King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor. On 12 May 1939 José de Lequerica, Franco's ambassador to France since March—“a gigantic golden turkey-cock, pot-bellied like one of Charles V's galleons”28—sent a report to Madrid of a long conversation with the Duke at a dinner party at the Argentinian embassy. While admitting that the Duke's official standing in Britain was “non-existent,” and his personality “somewhat worrying,” Lequerica enthusiastically reported that “the Duke, as can be discerned from his conversation, has political opinions which run contrary to those of the country he once ruled. He believes war to be a complete catastrophe, and the triumph of Moscow, but he does not see the way to avoid war as residing in the rearmament of the democracies. He attributes the policy of war and of alliance with Russia to the influence of the Jews, who are extremely powerful in his country.” The Duke of Windsor went on to attribute his loss of the British throne to the same influences.29
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, pacifists and defeatists of the right and the left staged a last-ditch stand, many of them gathering in de Monzie's ministry office in the boulevard St.-Germain. This included morose encounters with Marshal Pétain, at this point French ambassador to Madrid, who informed de Monzie, “They will need me in the second week of May.”30 De Monzie engaged in secret diplomatic dealings with Italy and Spain. Then, in July, Henri de Kérillis denounced Otto Abetz as a spy and corrupter of French citizens.31 Abetz brought a suit against de Kérillis for defamation. “Never,” he declared, “have I given any money to bribe newspapers.”32
The source of these revelations could not have been worse for Louis. De Kérillis was deputy for Neuilly, chosen for the seat by the nationalists in preference to himself in 1936. He was the parliamentary representative of Pierre and Louise, and politically everything that Louis failed to be. De Kérillis had a touch of Churchill about him: he was a fervent anticommunist, a patriot, but one who put resisting Hitler before any other consideration.
Abetz was expelled from France for subversive activities, and suspicion centred on Fernand de Brinon as Abetz's front man. Louis, who as recently as June had been receiving money by way of Nazi agents in Belgium, appeared in court to deny vehemently that he had ever received a foreign penny. “TO BE ANTI-JEWISH,” he declaimed, “IS TO BE ANTI-HITLERIAN. TO BE ANTI-JEWISH IS TO BE FRENCH.”33 The minimum sentence under the Marchandeau Law was a month in prison and a five-hundred-franc fine. On 26 July Louis stood in court with Pierre Gérard and was sentenced to three months in jail, Gérard to one month, and both to a fine of five hundred francs, plus costs. “I have done nothing except to follow the dictates of that true Christian ideal, the truth,” stated Louis. His defence counsel Pierre Leroy explained that while the Catholic Church instructed us to pray for the perfidious Jew, and to pardon him for the murder of Christ, we were not obliged to forget it, and “the Jewish race can never efface that stain.”34
The following day Daladier prorogued Parliament, and trenches began to be dug all over Paris. There were air-raid shelters in the lawns of the Champs-élysées, gas masks were distributed, streetlights blacked out and the sirens tested every Thursday. In Britain Winston Churchill, as convinced an anti-communist as any French nationalist, presciently urged his government to ally itself with the USSR against Hitler.
La France enchaînée, into which Louis poured out his injured dignity,
Louis boasting about his performances in court, in his newspaper La France enchaînée, 1–15 April 1939 (© Archives du CDJC—Mémorial de la Shoah)
was the only newspaper to be charged under the Marchandeau Law, and Louis and Pierre Gérard were its first victims. Louis appealed, but in the midst of his first trial he was arraigned again, for another article in La France enchaînée, “The Jews and the War.”35 The new court case began a month later, in August, and with Abetz's departure the publication of La France enchaînée ceased, its thirty-third and last issue blazoning Louis' Pétainist anthem: “We'll get them!”36
Throughout the hot summer months, Louis was not unhappy. His lawyer colleagues kept him out of prison, and his name was in every newspaper. Then, in late August, in Moscow, the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.37 This came as a thunderbolt to Europe's democracies, the union of their two greatest fears: communism and fascism, Hitler and Stalin. Their alarm was mild in comparison with the bombshell the treaty presented to both communist and fascist activists, who had been trying to murder each other for over a decade.
The next day Britain signed a pact of mutual assistance with Poland. War was imminent; mobilisation began. Daladier immediately banned l'Humanité. Later in September, those communists faithful to Moscow were required to perform a monstrous about-turn and start mouthing support for Hitler, though rebellious members quit. Daladier reacted instantly by dissolving the French Communist Party. Thirty-five communist deputies were arrested, and other “undésirables” were rounded up and dumped in camps, where already interned by the French republic were 350,000 Spanish republican refugees who had fled from Franco's armies after his victory in March 1939. 38
On 1 September Hitler attacked Poland. Two days later, France, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany and, twenty-one years after the end of the First World War, the same
enemies resumed battle.
The Second World War broke out on Anne's ninth birthday, a Sunday, 3 September 1939. Kidlington went on full alert: it had its own small airport with anti-aircraft guns near the grain silo, and this became an RAF training ground, providing endless fascination for the children of the village. Evacuees from London flooded in, and every garden and allotment was turned over to Digging for Victory.
Myrtle's life in Paris in the years before the war is mysterious. She was glimpsed occasionally by the police who tracked Louis, and was noticed at restaurants on occasion; but mostly she was little seen and rarely mentioned. Louis' comrades gathered around him in court, but there was no sign of Myrtle. She was, however, always in touch with her family. Her letters home demonstrate that her fantasies were in full flood, for the Jones family's understanding of Louis' court cases, sentences, German funding and street brawls reached Tasmania in an unrecognisable portrait which transformed him into a patriotic Frenchman for whom France, “the jewel of European civilisation,” was under threat from the “twin evils” of “communism and international Jewry.” The Jones family accepted Myrtle's luscious embroideries. For them Louis was no “Hitler's Parrot” but a baron of ancient lineage who, “in common with most of the old French families,” “favoured right-wing politics and disliked the Jews.”39
Louis had a very good war. He was mobilised the day before war was declared, on 2 September, and took himself for a farewell evening to the Brasserie Lipp.40 There he encountered Alain Laubreaux, an equally large and belligerent fellow anti-Semite, the theatre critic and polemicist of Je Suis partout. Louis announced to the restaurant what he thought of this “Jewish War”; a woman slapped his face and Louis punched her two companions and set about them with his cane. A full-scale brawl ensued, with Louis and a “big black man” yelling “Mort aux Juifs” together and taking on all comers.41 Darquier, delighted to have found a black anti-Semite, left the next day to join his anti-tank unit as a lieutenant in the 66th Artillery Regiment. This came in the nick of time, as on 21 September he was tried, again in absentia, and sentenced again to a further two months' imprisonment and another fine of five hundred francs, for injuries inflicted on Jews two months earlier.42 By October 1939 his regiment was still awaiting final orders. His disappearance into battle on 23 October was crucial for him as two days earlier he had been tried, again in absentia, and condemned again to a further two months' imprisonment and another fine of five hundred francs, this time for incitement to racial hatred. The court was told that Louis could not go to prison; he was fighting a war. But he was not at war until October and these were the months of the Phoney War, so until June 1940, Louis was often back in Paris.43 The police noted his presence in the Café Weber in the rue Royale in February 1940, drunk again, and reported “la violence de ses propos antisémites” and his praise for Hitler, who, he claimed, had “turned out to be the stronger man” while the French had been left “fighting for the Jews of the entire world…now they are sending us to the slaughterhouse for them, while they find safe jobs and continue to run their businesses on our backs.”44
When not in Paris, Louis was serving “his” France as lieutenant of the 10th Anti-Tank Battery and doing very well. “He effectively communicates his faith and ardent patriotism to the men,” his superior officer reported. “He is thorough and very tough.”45 These were the static months of the “drôle de guerre,” the Phoney War, with Britain and France desperately building up their fighting strength for the onslaught to come. By February 1940, in the coldest winter for decades, the British and French were unsuccessfully attempting to prevent the Soviet invasion of Finland and quarrelling with each other about their willingness to do so.
When Finland capitulated on 19 March, Paul Reynaud46 took over as prime minister of a flailing French government. Daladier remained as Minister of War, and de Monzie as Minister of Public Works because, as “a known friend of Mussolini,” it was hoped that he could use his wiles to detach the Italian dictator from Hitler. Reynaud was a conservative politician, a tiny man, but robust and spirited, and like de Kérillis a stalwart anti-Nazi. He quickly came to an agreement with Neville Chamberlain that France and Britain would make no separate peace with Germany.
On 9 April Denmark fell after the briefest of encounters and Germany invaded Norway, where the battle went so badly for the French and British that both countries turned on their war leaders. In Britain Chamberlain was brought down by British parliamentarians who turned, with much greater ease than the French, towards a new war leader, Winston Churchill.
Elsie's house in Hazel Crescent had two large bedrooms and a smaller one, and she immediately took in evacuees, receiving five shillings a week for each child. Anne was still at the Old Church School, due to begin at the local Gosford Hill County School when she turned eleven. In September 1939 East Ham Grammar School was sent to Kidlington from the East End of London. Billeted on the Gosford Hill School, its three hundred pupils and staff survived only five months of sour cohabitation with their indignant hosts before appropriating the local zoo and setting up school across the road from Hazel Crescent.
Elsie took on one family, the Prissians, two of whose children, Mildred and Iris, lived at Hazel Crescent until the summer of 1943. 47 The distressed evacuee children, name tags around their necks, clutching a bag of food, a gas mask and a bundle of clothes, became the first victims of the war; and Anne's circumstances, motherless and fatherless, dreaming of absent parents, were now almost universal.
Nineteen forty saw the beginning of rationing in Britain, and in April Elsie received the last of her sporadic payments, this time probably from Myrtle, as the commanding officers of the 66th Regiment were informed of Louis' judicial record, and his appeal against his prison sentence was heard again, all of which entered his military file. But Louis' patriotism was never in question. He was a good soldier; he used his furies well.
Hitler surprised the French army and its British, Belgian and Dutch allies on 10 May 1940, the day on which Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain, by sidestepping the formidable wall of fortifications known as the Maginot Line, considered impregnable.48 On 15 May Holland surrendered, the French line was broken and the French army, with the British Expeditionary Force, was pulling back to Dunkirk. On the twenty-seventh evacuation began, and within a week over 300,000 men had escaped across the Channel, of whom a third were French; which men like General Maxime Weygand and Marshal Pétain chose to see as a betrayal rather than the sensible—and also heroic—move it was. The evacuation of Dunkirk initiated the British people into the real meaning of war. Kidlington men, serving in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, were with the British Expeditionary Force in France. Some were killed, some returned, some were taken prisoner. Across the Channel France stood on the threshold of its four “Dark Years,” 1940 to 1944, les Années Noires.
As the Germans headed for the Channel, Reynaud, his army outflanked, recalled two old soldiers to the government. Of the long list of reasons given for the fall of France, the one which rings most true with the passing of time is that the country was grossly unfortunate in these new military leaders, both rigid with hostility to the republic they were called upon to serve. Reynaud appointed the eighty-four-year-old Pétain as deputy prime minister on 18 May, and on the next day replaced his supreme commander General Gamelin49 with the seventy-five-year-old Weygand. These decisions were greeted with joy by the cabinet, but Reynaud was to rue them within a very few days. At Pétain's trial in 1945 Reynaud testified: “I thought they would place patriotism before their political passions and ambitions. All France made this mistake, but I was the chief and I am therefore responsible.”50
Pétain and Weygand were by no means twin souls; their mutual antipathy stretched back to the First World War and continued after it. Though he served the republic as Minister of War after the riots of 6 February 1934, Pétain kept his political opinions and dealings to himself. He had allied himself to no leagues and no parties. Nevertheless,
throughout the 1930s his name was brought up repeatedly by nationalists who wanted a strong leader and an authoritarian government. Both Pétain and Weygand received and rejected such offers, for both were patriots and, conditionally, loyal soldiers—but to “their” France, not to the French republic.
On 4 June 1940 Churchill told the House of Commons and the British people: “The British Empire and the French republic, linked together in their cause and their need, will defend to the death their native soils.”51 Churchill flew to France five times between 16 May and 13 June for last-ditch talks with Reynaud, his cabinet and his military chiefs, but British parliamentarian that he was, he could never accurately assess men such as Pétain and Weygand, soldiers called upon to defend a government, a democracy, a republic and a large section of the French population which they both despised.
The British military command in France, understandably unconfident, began to withdraw on 23 May—this was seen by the French as another desertion—and on the twenty-eighth King Leopold ordered Belgium to surrender. By 3 June the Germans were bombing Paris, although three days later the courts were sufficiently in session to hear Louis' appeal against his prison sentence, which was again not upheld.
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