Pétain courted the peasant, and extolled the wonders of the French soil, its beasts and its produce. The family and its produce—the young— came next. It is an eternal truth that when the word “family” is uttered by a politician, women, and therefore men, have everything to fear. Pétain, a womaniser, was not himself a family man. This did not prevent him from holding firmly to Catholic sentiments about family life as the cornerstone of the ordered state, and the Catholic hierarchy welcomed the reforms of the National Revolution with enthusiasm.
Vichy authorised financial rewards for the birth of children. Fathers of a family of more than five children were given additional civic rights, while childless men had employment disadvantages. Pétain gave French women bronze medals for having five children, silver for eight, and gold for ten. In 1942 divorce was forbidden until a marriage had lasted for three years. After that time it was rarely permitted, and never in the case of adultery.29 Pétain, who had married a divorcée in 1920, rearranged his own marital situation to suit the conditions he now imposed upon his people. The Vatican annulled his wife's first marriage, and the Archbishop of Paris secretly remarried the couple by proxy in church. Pétain did not attend.30
Actually, women spent most of their lives during the Occupation queuing and working. Day after day and hour after hour, beginning in the dark, they queued for tiny amounts of food and for the basics of life, most of which very soon disappeared for good or were priced exorbitantly. In schools the children were taught to write: “If your bread is grey and your piece of it smaller, it is not the fault of Marshal Pétain.”31 Amidst air-raid warnings, hunger and mourning—almost every French family was touched by the permanent absence of a father, brother, husband or son—making do, not making children, was women's chief occupation. With their men away, not even the most willing wives could manage to produce fifteen legitimate children, which automatically qualified the last child to have Pétain as a godfather.
As to their children, they were indoctrinated with the principles of the National Revolution at school, and were encouraged to send Pétain little messages, cards and presents. As usual boys got the most attention, and thus came off worse. Vichy youth groups, clubs and organisations introduced them to outdoor life, hiking, camping, rural work and physical exercise, an approach matched and approved of by the Catholic Church. Singing around campfires and male purity and virility were much encouraged, but as the Germans needed more and more men to fuel their war machine, Church and state both lost their quarry as men and boys were summoned to serve in Germany.
A new anthem, “Maréchal, nous voilà!,” “Marshal, Here We Are!,” replaced the irreplaceable “Marseillaise.” Apart from that, “Thou shalt not” was perhaps the most noticeable aspect of Pétain's National Revolution. Hostility to the Germans was forbidden, listening to the BBC or Swiss radio was forbidden, helping Jews to escape, or helping escaped prisoners of war, was forbidden. It was forbidden to locate cafés near schools. Catholic women were instructed not to wear shorts, and the Church permitted no mixed sports meetings. To such prohibitions were added punishments for myriad misdemeanours, ranging from “transmission of information to the detriment of the German army,” which covered a great deal of ground, to “street gatherings, distribution of leaflets, public meetings and demonstrations, and any other activity hostile to Germany.”32
The most hated new control was the almost impassable frontier, the demarcation line which the Nazis used to control Vichy. Getting a permit, an Ausweis or laissez-passer, to cross the border between ZoneO and Zone NonO, policed by the Nazis and garlanded with prohibitive signs in French and German, was almost impossible. As this extended to members of the Vichy government, it made a joke of Vichy's supposed administrative control of both French zones, and strengthened the hostility between Paris and Vichy.
Letters were censored, and limited. Time changed too. The Occupied Zone kept Berlin time, two hours behind Britain, and by 1941 Vichy did too. The electricity supply was intermittent. Ill health, malnutrition, chilblains and eternal cold were among the first results of the National Revolution. So was the black market, known as le système D, 33 universally practised, although officially banned, as was dancing—but dance the people did.
After the early months came the most noticeable characteristic of the “Dark Years”: silence. The silence of the dark mornings and the black
Principal authorities dealing with Jews, 1940–44 (Adapted from p. 373 of Principal Occupation Authorities Dealing with Jews 1940–1944 by Marrus and Paxton, copyright © 1981 Colman-Levy;first printing in English 1981, reissued 1995. All rights reserved. Used with permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org)
outs at night, of the streets after curfew. The silence between people faced with the worst in human nature; the silence of a population doing what it was told, doing what it was safest to do, and the mirror image of this in the mountains of denunciatory letters which poured onto official desks. Faced with betrayals, disloyalties and greed, with trust gone, it was always dangerous to speak your mind.
But even though there was compliance, resignation, fear, despair, self-interest, betrayal and shame, a strong sense of sullen, hungry fury growls through these years. Matching it was an astute capacity to navigate the ocean of instructions doled out to every French subject in the new French Fatherland.
When Louis settled back into Paris he seems to have lived with Myrtle, at least until the spring of 1941; his silence for the first six months may well have been partly due to her. Her Tasmanian family describe Myrtle as always flying the Union Jack in her heart. In her cups, however, she was wont to make this public, and she was living now in a city draped with swastikas, German signs and proclamations. It wasn't until later, in Vichy, that she had any trouble, when other Vichy wives of consequence—one of whom was Madame Pétain—objected to her presence and her attitude, and, presumably, to her alcohol consumption. Louis claimed that an explanation to the Marshal himself—that Myrtle was entirely uninterested in politics—was all that was required, and that after that she was never troubled again.
But in these early years of the war, before Louis came into his kingdom, Myrtle's insistence that “Britain must win!!!!”34 was dangerous. It was also another cause for rows between them, for in Louis' circle the war was the fault of the Jews and the English. In these months of uncertainty he had no money. Physical violence always erupted between them when money was short, another of many reasons for Myrtle to leave Louis. By May 1941 the police recorded that they were living apart—she in the Hôtel Cousin in rue des Mathurins, he flitting from hotel to hotel, probably with another woman, because the hotels he passed through at this point were elegant and expensive.35
Throughout this period letters flew in all directions about Louis' prewar criminal convictions. An outstanding case investigating the Büttner cheque stubs had been transferred to the military courts in September 1939, and a year later the War Office was considering imposing disciplinary sanctions on Louis. He knew his sentence was likely to be two months' imprisonment; instead, in November 1940 he received an official pardon, and for the first time could edge his nose above the parapet.
In the meantime Louis was keeping company with a few trusted disciples—the faithful Pierre Gérard was one, but in his pursuit of Vichy his old nationalist colleagues were the order of the day. He made his first public appearance since the Occupation on 6 February 1941, when he went on German-controlled Radio-Paris to ask, again, for contributions to his Association of Widows and Orphans, inviting listeners to its annual Mass in the church of the Madeleine. Following the ceremony, with Charles Trochu he led a delegation of twelve to lay a wreath at the foot of the fountain in place de la Concorde.
Some days later, questioned by the police when he crossed the square outside the Hôtel de Ville without using the pedestrian crossing, Louis took umbrage and the usual altercation ensued. This was his first eruption since his brawl in the Brasserie Lipp on the eve of war. A month later, back on form, h
is name appeared in the files of the occupiers for the first time.
Vichy was in disgrace in early 1941. In December 1940, after only five months in office, Pétain, supported by certain of his courtiers, dismissed and arrested Laval for, amongst other things, keeping his manoeuvres too close to his chest and too close to Otto Abetz in Paris. The results were disastrous for Pétain in both the short and the long term. The Germans were furious. The demarcation line was closed, and Abetz came to Vichy, brandished a pistol at Pétain and refused to deal with Pierre-étienne Flandin, Pétain's first choice as Laval's replacement. After some months of crisis and negotiation Admiral Jean-François Darlan, commander of the French navy before the war and Pétain's Naval Minister from June 1940, was appointed Pétain's deputy, and Pétain raised up Fernand de Brinon, Abetz's crony, to be Vichy's delegate in Paris. Hitler finally accepted Darlan in February 1941. Darlan had something of Laval's matter-offact manner, but none of his occasional charm. He was another of those who thought the decadence, decline and thus defeat of France had been due to its Jews, to an international Jewish conspiracy, Anglo-Saxon warmongers and Freemasons (though Henry Coston spent a great deal of time asserting that Darlan was a Freemason himself ).36
On 1 March Abetz submitted two lists to Vichy of names of suitable candidates to head a central Jewish agency the Germans wanted Pétain and Darlan to create. Both lists included Louis Darquier.37 Amongst the other names were all those which had appeared on the Elizabeth Büttner cheque stubs, as well as Georges Montandon and Céline. This new agency was to control the “Aryanisation” of the wealth of the Jews, and so to be the cornerstone of the Nazi-Vichy system for the elimination and despoliation of the Jews.
Although every piece of Vichy legislation had to be submitted to the German military command, the occupiers were particularly anxious that control of the Jews should be seen to be the responsibility of the French government. Pétain, under pressure from the Americans, who kept an ambassador at Vichy and an unhappy eye on the persecution of its Jews until November 1942, worried about an anti-Jewish agency. But Vichy was anxious to appear to be self-governing, and on 29 March Pétain signed legislation to create the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs—the CGQ J, the initials by which it was always known. This time, Louis did not get the job: Vichy's choice, Xavier Vallat, was appointed. Nevertheless, six months after his liberation from prison he knew that his name had been on the German list; now he set about convincing Vichy of his worth.
On 15 July Louis was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm by General Huntziger, who was distributing honours liberally at the time.38 Though Pétain had certainly seen Louis Darquier's name as a candidate for the CGQ J, Vichy's Ministry of War still could not locate him. Substantial correspondence about his whereabouts revealed nothing, and in July 1941 his Croix de Guerre was sent to the Paris city council on the assumption that Louis was still in Offlag II D.
Of Myrtle the ministry knew nothing, although as the wife of a prisoner of war, the medal should have been sent to her. But when Louis went to war he had given the city council as the address to be informed should anything happen to him. Myrtle's name never appears on Louis' civic documents, as is compulsory by French law, perhaps an indication that he was aware of the true state of his marital arrangements.39 Charles Trochu pinned the Croix de Guerre on Louis' chest at the Hôtel de Ville, after which Louis ventured out to secure his essential identity card from the police.
The English education system in 1941, then as now, stratified its children. At the age of eleven the brighter children of Kidlington Junior School were bused to Bicester Grammar School, five miles away. Those who did not pass the scholarship exam necessary to go there were sent to Gosford Hill County School in Kidlington. Elsie told everyone that Anne was “brainy,” but she failed the scholarship exam. This meant she must go to the County School. When she enrolled on 22 September she was the only child listed as having no parents and no legal guardian.
This school, already notorious for its treatment of the East Ham evacuees, was simply not good enough for the indomitable Elsie, who took immediate steps to move Anne elsewhere. First she tried to track down Louis Darquier. After the fall of France a number of charitable committees and clubs were set up under the aegis of de Gaulle and his Free French government, and one of them, the Maison des Ailes, was at Ditch-ley Park at Enstone, about ten miles from Kidlington.40 Elsie started there. When Myrtle was down and out in London in 1933she had asked the London Société Française de Bienfaisance (French Benevolent Society) for money. They always refused her, but ten years later they did not refuse Elsie. On 15 September 1941 the Comité d'Assistance aux Familles de Soldats Français (Committee for the Aid of the Families of French Soldiers) in Cullum Street, London EC3, wrote to the French consul-general in London asking him to find out the whereabouts of Louis from the Vichy War Ministry. It was more than a year since Anne had heard from her father, eighteen months since he had sent Elsie a penny. On receipt of the letter from London, the Vichy Ministry of Foreign Affairs—Admiral Darlan's bailiwick at this time—applied in turn to General Huntziger.
It was Free French charities that gave Elsie the money for Anne, after one term at the County School, to go to East Ham Grammar, which, evacuated from the East End of London in 1939, had appropriated Kidlington Zoo. No one understood why she was the only local child allowed entry to this romantic school, since she was neither a resident of East Ham, nor had she passed the necessary scholarship exam. But Anne had earned the reputation of being very clever; Mildred Prissian and she talked French to each other and competed at lessons. This friendship may have helped gain her admission, but it was the fearless Nanny Lightfoot who managed it.
The old zoo provided a school hall in Rosie's former Elephant House, air-raid shelters in the pigsties, geography lessons around the walrus pond. This could have been the happiest time of Anne's school life, but her zoo school years convey the same sense of isolation. The girls at East Ham Grammar did not mix with the Kidlington children, which pleased Elsie. The grammar school girls noticed that Elsie guarded Anne like a mother hen, and brought her up to be different from the rest of them, though they suspected that Anne would have liked to make friends and to have a family of her own. Though Anne was not to learn much about Catholicism until later, it was generally known that she was meant to be a Catholic, and this too set her apart at her school in the zoo. Anne, one Kidlington neighbour remembered, “wouldn't do things some of the other girls did”; she “spoke almost like a Londoner, never like a foreigner, but she was a complete mystery to all of us. She tried hard to fit in, but she didn't, quite.”41
French authorities in London were assured by Vichy in October 1941 that Louis Darquier was still in prison camp, just as Louis contacted them in pursuit of more decorations, this time the supreme accolade, the Légion d'honneur, the decoration his father Pierre had received.42 By that month Vichy had reconstituted the Paris city council: no Jew (by race or religion), no Freemason, no naturalised foreigner, no “person of doubtful morality in both public and private life” need apply. Charles Trochu was nominated as its president, and Louis, described as “journalist, liberated prisoner,” was one of only forty-four councillors reappointed to their old jobs.43 The charities in London seem to have been aware of this, because they insisted to General Huntziger and the Vichy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to no avail, that Louis Darquier had been spotted in Vichy, in Lyon, in Paris.
At the same time, Louis had inveigled the CGQ J to take him on the payroll. Vallat gave him a fictitious post, with a retainer of eight thousand francs, a substantial advance against “travel costs” (which he later refused to return, despite three reminders) and two months' employment as a “temporary agent… with a pass for the unoccupied zone.” He needed this to visit Cahors.
For a few years René Darquier had been uneasily reconciled with Louis, but his father still refused to see him. By now Pierre and Louise ha
d moved into Cahors, renting an apartment at 7, rue St.-Géry, very near their old home in rue du Lycée. Amongst old friends again, Pierre took up his practice but very soon he knew he was dying. He had phlebitis, blood clots for which he had no medicine, though Jean came down from Paris with injections on several occasions.
As befits a department which was a bastion of Radical republicanism, the Lotois combined an attitude of respect for the Marshal with a healthy dislike of his regime and the German Occupation. Many Jews were hidden by Cadurciens, but many were denounced, and the people who had hidden them shared their fate. Those who knew Louise and Pierre in these war years describe their attitude as Pétainiste, but they were not in any way collaborators. Résistants of Cahors who knew Pierre knew him as a good man who would denounce no one.
For Louise, a harder line was preached at the Cathédrale de St.-étienne. Paul Chevrier, appointed Bishop of Cahors in 1941, was a strong supporter of Pétain.44 Chevrier came to Cahors from Vichy, where he had been curé of St.-Louis, the parish church of Pétain and his ministers. His sermons and pastoral letters were refulgent with praise for the Marshal, and when Mass was celebrated in the open air in Cahors in front of the statue of Léon Gambetta—hero of the anticlerical republic—this act was seen as “the revenge of the curés.”45
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