Then he took his revenge on René. The only legal promissory note Louis and Myrtle had signed was that of 23 April 1932, for ninety-six thousand francs, to be repaid “no later than a delay of ten years being the 23 April 1942.” Henry Lévy, the “Miller King,” had died in April 1937— René attended his funeral.9 The Grands Moulins de Strasbourg had been burnt down by the Germans in 1940, and the business was moved to Paris under Lévy's right-hand man—happily an Aryan. Some of the Lévy and Baumann families escaped and made their way to the United States; others were in prison camps or in hiding; others were deported and murdered. Vichy grouped professions and businesses together in syndicates. By 1942 René had been appointed president of the Comité Général d'Organisation des Corps Gras (Organisation Committee for the Production of Fats)—that is, those industries which produced butter, margarine, soap and oil, all so scarce and precious during the war.10
On his appointment as commissioner, Louis presented his brothers to the world as follows: Jean was “an ardent collaborationist and anti-Semite.” Of René, Louis wrote that he had refused to see him for three years “because he was working for a Jewish group. Now that business is Aryanised and this brother, now president of the Organisation Committee for the Production of Fats, whom the Jews treated very badly before their departure, is equally anti-Semitic.” René's position took him into Louis' kingdom; but by now Louis hated René, who was known not to share the anti-Semitism of either of his brothers. Whatever the truth of it, Louis' statement made it impossible for René to return to work for the Lévy family, which after the Liberation he tried to do.
About himself Louis was much kinder: “For all those who know him,” he wrote, “Darquier is a man of total independence towards all powers, driven by one sentiment alone: the desire to serve his country, in the European and anti-Jewish sense. He is absolutely indifferent to money and has preferred to remain poor rather than lose his freedom of opinion…He has been accused of being in the pay of England…and of Germany. The best proof of the stupidity of these calumnies is that [he] owns nothing and has always lived modestly …”11
All these explanations and obeisances towards Vichy did Louis Darquier little good. Vichy did not want him, but was forced to accept him as part of a package of new appointments the Nazis insisted upon. Laval resigned himself to Darquier because “the Germans are determined to have him.”12 German command made inside arrangements for other controls of the new CGQ J, and passed Louis over to Laval to restrain his more extravagant characteristics.
Louis Darquier's predecessor Xavier Vallat had authority over acts and ordinances Louis was never to have, for on the day of his appointment Laval passed a decree taking back full control of the CGQ J. He allowed Louis Darquier into the Vichy government on the condition that he accepted a secretary-general, a supervisor. The man chosen, Georges Monier, a distinguished lawyer and civil servant, lasted a month. Laval had asked Monier to write a report on the CGQ J, with a view to ridding himself of it, but Monier “did not have to prepare the report because in a very few days I learned enough to tell [Laval] immediately what the situation was, and in consequence to give him my oral resignation. M. Darquier de Pellepoix on his side, after the one and very stormy interview which I had with him, demanded that I should be immediately removed.”13 So, from June 1942 until February 1944, Vichy and the Germans had to accept Darquier in undiluted form.
Laval now had much increased power; he was head of government, president of the council, and personally ran the Ministries of Information, Foreign Affairs and the Interior. Pétain remained only as head of state, his hopes for his National Revolution dashed for good. A little over two weeks after Laval's resurrection, Reinhard Heydrich and accompanying Nazi officials came to Paris to implement the rest of the changes they wanted: the despatch to Germany of a million French workers to serve in German war industries, and the implementation of the Final Solution in France. This could not work until they had an efficient puppet in control of the CGQ J to provide the Jews for this purpose, and another efficient puppet in charge of the police to gather them up for transportation.
One of Laval's first appointments was that of René Bousquet as his Secretary-General for the Police. Bousquet was only thirty-three years of age in 1942, a Radical republican from the southwest. Like Darquier he had studied at Toulouse University—law in his case—and like Darquier he failed and he lied about it.14 Bousquet, who always insisted that everything he did, he did “in the service of the French republic,” was one of the most brilliant young men of his time. He became nationally famous for saving lives by braving the raging southern floods of 1930. Impelled into national politics, by 1940 he had become the youngest préfet in France. He was a classic example of a civil servant of the Third Republic, and by the time Laval appointed him chief of police, he was, and was known as, “Laval's faithful assistant, using the same arguments and the same tactics.”15 But Bousquet was more sophisticated and a far more careful manipulator than Laval, particularly about covering his own tracks.
Bousquet was an elegant and handsome man, a true Gascon, although he had none of the rumbustious attributes associated with that region; he was decisive and a hard worker and, unlike Louis Darquier, never made a fool of himself. More exceptional altogether, a self-controlled and determined man, he worked well with the Germans. He was a man who got things done; the Germans would have achieved little without him.
When, three weeks later, Laval was forced to accept Louis at the CGQ J, Bousquet, the charming republican, was put into harness with the pseudo-Gascon, pseudo-aristocrat Louis Darquier, two men doomed to disagreement. There were three rounds in their encounters: responsibility for the deportation of the Jews, the control of the special French police force needed to hunt down these Jews and to acquire Jewish assets, and the denaturalisation of French Jews to make available sufficient Jewish bodies for extermination. At the time, Bousquet seemed to be the victor on every front, although as a strategist Louis demonstrated near-genius in wriggling out of any instruction Bousquet gave him. After the Liberation, protected by François Mitterrand, Bousquet lived happily and richly until 1978, when Louis Darquier rose up to deliver the blow that was to kill him.
In Paris in 1941, Vallat had settled the CGQ J at 1, place des Petits-Pères, an operetta square near the Bourse and the Banque de France. The building he appropriated was the Dreyfus Bank, and had belonged to Louis Louis-Dreyfus. Louis' delight at this was considerable, and often expressed. He invariably exhibited, too, another common human trait, hatred for one's benefactors—first René Darquier, then his brother's patron and employer Henry Lévy, who had saved Louis from debtors' prison or the equivalent in 1926, and whose money, through René, had supported Louis and Myrtle for ten years. None of them was to be forgiven now. One of Louis' first acts on taking up his office in the Dreyfus Bank was to forbid any Jew to set foot in the premises, and to instruct his staff:
The Commissioner has noticed that in the correspondence of certain departments, Jews are referred to as “Israélites.” The use of this term is due to Jewish influence which, by banishing the word “Jew” has managed to achieve, finally, the first principle of Jewish defence, which is to pretend that the Jewish problem is only a religious problem. At the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, a Jew must be called a Jew, and you must not write “Monsieur Lévy” or “Monsieur Dreyfus,” but “the Jew Lévy” and “the Jew Dreyfus.”16
King Two Louis was not alive to know that Louis Darquier now occupied his premises; he died when he crashed his carriage in Cannes in November 1940. 17
Louis' new Parisian office was a “private townhouse like a financial fortress separated from its surrounding streets like a triangular island.” He now sat in King Two Louis' armchair in a large office on the ground floor, with a bay window looking out onto a leafy Parisian garden. Ensconced behind his large desk, wearing his monocle, he was much interviewed and photographed by the collaborationist Paris press. Today the place des Petits-Pères is as pretty as ev
er, but, unlike its Vichy counterpart, there is a bold plaque on the front of number 1:
From 1941 to 1944 this building housed
the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs
instrument of the anti-Semitic policy
of the French State of Vichy.
This plaque is dedicated to the memory
of the Jews of France.
Louis' appointment was greeted with a shower of publicity, articles in newspapers, agency reports and interviews. He was very fond of holding press conferences at the Nazi Propaganda Staffel, the Propaganda Office, and told journalists at his first one that the French government was to be instructed to punish severely any French person who made common cause with Jews; he would open the eyes of all Frenchmen to the evils of the Jewish race. Race, not religion, would be his criterion, and he would concentrate on the youth of the nation: for them he would create a Chair of Jewish History at the Sorbonne, and the subject would be taught in every school.
The German propaganda machine went into action in support. Elaborately fabricated press releases were sent about, always inventive and untruthful, many of them written by Louis himself. In these he claimed “the astronomer and member of the Academy of Science Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix, 1730–1810” as his ancestor, added “Colonel Baron Darquier, Grenadier of the Imperial Guard” as well, and congratulated himself on having resigned from “a large Anglo-French Grain company. This company having sold one of its subsidiaries to the Jew Louis-Dreyfus …”18 Aristocratic ancestors were cleverly interwoven with Pétainist evocations of himself as a son of the soil, with the blood of la vraie France running in his veins.
Louis wallowed in praise, and was inundated with letters from the public, denunciatory, pleading, oleaginous. One man wrote from Lyon:
I have, for a long time, admired your intrepid courage in purging our unfortunate France of the horde which has dragged it into the mire and which continues to ruin our nation and drive the country to distraction … place all these filthy foreigners in a concentration camp … 19
His anti-Semitic comrades from the 1930s hailed “our old leader, who personified Hope for us through all the dark years.”20 Many who had known him in the past, in Cahors, in prison camp, in Paris, and many who had discounted him, came out of the woodwork to ask for favours. Those who had not discounted him, such as Pierre Taittinger and Charles Trochu, were now in clover. One professional anti-Semite expressed his joy: “There are those who sometimes say that our struggle against the Jews is only a pale copy of German racism. Fools! Don't they know that a true, pure Frenchman, and Darquier is one such, has nothing to learn from anyone in this respect.”21
The files of letters Louis received bear witness to the vociferous French minority who shared his beliefs. A former member of his Anti-Jewish Union of the 1930s asked him what had become of that “good old dog of yours you used to make bark by siccing him to ‘get the Jews. ’ ”22 Sézille, ecstatic, wrote to Dannecker offering his total support and denying that he had ever said “that M. Darquier de Pellepoix had been trepanned and did not possess all his mental faculties.”23 “All its anti-Semitic friends around the world join together to wish you our very best wishes in your new task,” wrote the Weltdienst.24
Denunciations too poured in, and never stopped. “I write to inform you of the following facts,” wrote a member of Marcel Déat's Fascist Party: “The black market is a continual Judaeo-Masonic machination. Shrewd and moneyed Jews have agents who run across the country on bicycles buying all they can …”25 Lists of Jews and their whereabouts followed.
In Cahors, Louise Darquier, a widow for two months, still walking every day to visit Pierre's tomb, was showered with congratulations. Her apartment in the rue St.-Géry was in receipt of “more flowers than a cemetery,” offerings from Cadurciens who hailed the mother of “the youngest minister in France.” This was untrue—Louis was not a minister of state, and René Bousquet, to take only one instance, was his junior by eleven years. Louise never abandoned Louis; she would scold him, but she was, in her own way, proud of him. Her own way also involved considerable grief.
As a practising Catholic, after the death of Pierre, Louise was even more occupied with the activities of Catholic Action, helping the poor and sewing for the clergy. She had adored her husband, she was a Catholic anti-Semite, but she was hostile to the Germans, and was not a denouncer. Louis' words and cries for murder were not what she liked to hear. “What mess has he got himself into this time? Since he was eighteen years old he has never obeyed me, never taken seriously a word I say.” That said, she was now a person of power in Cahors, solicited by all and sundry for everything from food coupons and passes to intercession at the préfecture. So muddled were the reactions of some in Cahors that Louise's maid Augusta recounted that Louis Darquier had married an Australian Jew.26
In England the reception was less complimentary. On 21 May at Balliol College in Oxford, the Foreign Research and Press Service prepared a briefing on Louis Darquier for the Foreign Office. While it is as precise as most documents based upon Louis' own fabrications, it accurately recorded his career to date, and described him as a dissipated rake and “one of the most notorious anti-Semites in France.”27 British newspapers continued to report Louis' activities in a sporadic fashion. The Daily Herald announced on 12 May 1942 that under Heydrich's orders he was to head a special anti-Jewish police force, and the Manchester Guardian warned that “the Jews are likely to suffer harsher treatment for a notorious anti-Semite Darquier de pellepoex [sic] was appointed Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in May.”28 The British press reached Tasmania, so the Jones family knew that Louis had a position in the Vichy government, news the average patriotic Australian would have found difficulty in celebrating. The International Red Cross informed them that all was well with Myrtle.
The moment Louis' appointment as Commissioner for Jewish Affairs was announced, French officials in London were again in touch with Vichy, pointing out in an irritated tone that this was the man they had been seeking. They demanded that he begin paying Elsie the £80 or £100 a year needed to feed and educate Anne, and repay both Elsie and them all the sums owed. This time they requested an assurance of this from Vichy, because Louis Darquier “when living in London twelve or thirteen years ago, after his return from Australia, incurred various debts of honour and borrowed from left and right from many different people in our French colony here, which since his return to France and despite his new and significantly improved circumstances, has never reimbursed any of the debts in question.” Louis sent £50 in due course, but despite more telegrams and letters he paid nothing else.29
After this, Elsie knew where Louis and Myrtle were and what Louis was doing, and she watched Anne like a hawk, for from 1940 onwards foreign nationals discovered in Britain were identified, classified and interned. She would walk with Anne to see that she crossed the road safely, and waited for her after school. Beneath the wings of the hovering Elsie, Anne, now twelve years old, held on to her dreams of her father the Baron, and of a heroic and superior France, undefeated, résistant and uncompromising, personified in the troublesome de Gaulle, who continued to be an unremitting thorn in the flesh of Roosevelt and Churchill. It was well-known that de Gaulle had a beloved daughter named Anne, a Down syndrome child born two years before Anne Darquier.
When Elsie died in 1983, amongst her few belongings, preciously kept, were a few of Anne's books. One of them, Daughter of France, tells a morbid story of a French servant girl who flees to London to escape the Germans.30 This fervent tale of a wistful and silent young girl, a foreigner alone in London as the bombs descend, misunderstood by the insensitive English yet like de Gaulle an embodiment of la vraie France, reveals some of Anne's fantasies about her French family, and about bearing a French surname in harsh times.
After swift appraisal by Reinhard Heydrich in Paris, within a week of his appointment Darquier was in Vichy, where the CGQ J had its head office. Pétain had his rooms on the third floor of the Hô
tel du Parc, Laval on the floor below. The Parc, linked to the Hôtel Majestic—not to be confused with the Paris hotel of the same name—by a passageway, made these two palatial hotels the centre of the Vichy universe.31 Inside, where the Office du Tourisme is now, was the Restaurant Chanteclair. Here the men of Vichy dined, mixed and mingled, and were conveyed to their masters above in the huge glass cage of the lift.
Vichy presented two faces to the world. There was the stern carapace of Pétain's ruled and regulated town, and the razzmatazz of the thirty thousand functionaries and the army of ambassadors, journalists, flunkeys and criminals who descended upon it in July 1940. For four years, sitting in their icy hotel rooms in winter—there was no fuel for heating—using bidets and bathrooms as filing cabinets and offices, their beds often serving as desks, the men of the Vichy state poured out paperwork and propaganda. All were within walking distance of the Hôtel du Parc, a proximity which encouraged the vicious rivalries and quarrels of all closed worlds. For Lucien Rebatet, “Vichy buzzed like Deauville in its heyday. From the railway station to the River Allier poured forth a flood of smart dresses, clever little beach robes, tailored jackets, elegant suits…together with the classiest whores on the boulevard de la Madeleine.”32 But “Vichy is ghastly” was the opinion of François Mitterrand, who worked in the office for prisoners of war in the Villa Castel Français.33
Above this mêlée, Pétain transformed Vichy into a place of ceremonies: of marches past—flags waving, veterans in berets, saluting to military music. A place too of a thousand photo opportunities. Homage hovers in the air in these photos. The results fill volumes in the libraries and newspaper files of France, and in those of Vichy itself. Pétain was photographed everywhere: surrounded by cardinals outside the church of St.-Louis, waving from on high to vast crowds, with veterans and youth groups and officials, and most of all with small children, girls in particular. These photos of Pétain dandling little girls on his knee, chucking them under the chin, giving them a cuddle, are as hard to look at today as those of Hitler, equally ubiquitous, doing the same.
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