Laval saw Hitler again in December; with the support of Abetz, he wanted to form a single political party for Vichy, to act against the multitude of fascists and factions that made up collaborationist circles in Paris, most of whom hated him—Céline led the way, calling Laval “a nigger and Jew.”25 Hitler refused again, and when he did Laval turned to Joseph Dar-nand, a former member of Action Française, Croix-de-feu and the Cagoule. Darnand was a staunch, even a fanatical, Catholic and anticommunist. As a Cagoulard, Xavier Vallat had helped him to escape prosecution. Darnand was also a much-decorated war veteran, and was devoted to Pétain.
In January 1943, instead of forming his new political party, Laval placed Darnand in charge of the Milice,26 a private army—blue jackets and trousers—set up to fight the growing French Resistance, and to serve as an armed guard for Pétain. To Pétain the Milice vowed: “I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy.”27 Henry Charbonneau edited its journal, Combats, and Colette wrote for it. Darnand was ruthless and violent, and so were his men, a great number of them practising Catholics, “soldiers of Christ.” One Milicien leader carried around with him a Star of David made from the skin of a Jew. The Milice was in many ways a French Gestapo, and its name became as synonymous with execution and brutality as its German model. At first Pétain said of it, “a few spectacular executions are better than riots and the breakdown of law and order.”28
In London, General de Gaulle had withstood the irritations of the Anglo-American alliance sufficiently to attract to his Free French movement men like Jean Moulin. Until René Bousquet displaced him, Moulin had distinguished himself by becoming, in 1937, the youngest préfet in France. Like Bousquet, he came from the southwest—from Béziers—but his republicanism led him swiftly into resistance, and legend. Today there is hardly a village in France that does not have a square or street named after him.29
By 1941 Moulin had reached London, and was recruited by de Gaulle, who parachuted him back to France in 1942 to achieve the impossible: the formation of a united French Resistance. The French who fought the Germans and Vichy, “so different from each other…so quick to tear each other apart”30 were by this time a collection of disparate networks working undercover all over the country—the Maquis in the hills and forests, communists, Catholics, Jews, royalists, army and naval officers, socialists. Fighting alongside them were Spanish republicans, Poles, Italians, Lithuanians—and more.
Their sabotage and intelligence work for the Allies, and their propaganda, mostly through underground newspapers, had created a body of men and women whom Pétain and Laval hated as much as, if not more than, French communists. Under the code name “Max,” Moulin succeeded in his mission just as Pétain approved his Milice to destroy it. Five months later Moulin died under torture, but not before he had created a Conseil National de la Résistance (National Council of the Resistance).31 This was the state of the French civil war in June 1943.
The year had opened with German reverses on the Eastern Front and the fall of Tripoli to the British. Then came the turning point of the war, the surrender of the German army at Stalingrad on 2 February. After this, everything changed. For the French, shortages got even worse: legal rations hardly fed half a human body. In the face of mounting German demands and increased repression from both their rulers, under the fatherhood of Pétain, life, already harsh, became horrible. In January Fritz Sauckel came to Paris again. In February Laval was required to transform the voluntary Relève into forced labour: the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), the Compulsory Labour Service, which eventually sucked almost 400,000 workers to “serve” in Germany, or work on the Atlantic wall in France. Thousands took to the hills, to the Maquis, and went underground to join the Resistance. At the same time, after a gap of three months the deportations began again in February 1943. The French Church made representations to Vichy immediately: Archbishop Suhard begged Pétain that at least they should be carried out more humanely.
Most French civilians passed the war trying to avoid any contact with their German occupiers, but even in the exalted circles in which French and Germans circulated it was impossible to escape the growing unpopularity of Germany and Vichy. American films were banned in France, and the names of Jewish directors and scenes of Jewish actors were cut from existing films, but the movies remained immensely popular, and by 1945 what there was to see included many masterpieces, including Marcel Carné's ravishing Les Enfants du paradis. 32 Into every programme the Propaganda Staffel inserted German newsreels. By 1943 audiences were loudly booing every manufactured German triumph. The Germans reacted by ruling that films must no longer be shown in the dark. Booing under electric light proved equally popular, and soon half the cinemas in Paris were closed down.
Darquier kept his legal team at the CGQ J at work preparing new anti-Jewish decrees for presentation to Laval. Three categories obsessed him. First were those Jews who took refuge in the zone under Italian occupation—Italy refused to implement Nazi or French anti-Semitic laws. Mussolini did not have to accept Hitler's anti-Semitic laws, and did not until after his fall in 1943. When he was restored to power by the Nazis, the laws were enforced by the German police—Brunner's men did the work. Only 12 percent of Italian Jews were deported, seven thousand out of fifty thousand living there, but it was the Italian police who protected Jews rather than Mussolini. There are many instances of furious rows between French and Italian police on the subject. Darquier's fury, of course, was more excessive.
Next came war veterans and French Jews who used Vichy's dispensations under Vallat's laws; but third, and most important, were half-Jews, both known ones and hidden ones. Only a new law and the scientific investigation of bloodlines could deal with this problem. Darquier requested the creation of a “half-Jewish” status. He noticed that “many half-Jews were working in the national radio broadcasting service,” and considered banning mixed marriages, but knew this would never get through, the conversion of the Jews being a fixed and traditional Catholic aspiration.33 He presented dozens of bills. Laval rejected all of them.
Louis tried another tack. Each time he was rejected he would go straight to whichever German power base he was using at the time— usually it was the Gestapo or the Judenreferat—and file a complaint. After his turmoil in the summer of 1942, first in Vichy then in Paris over the deportations, he chose the embassy. He turned for help to Zeitschel, its specialist on Jewish questions, who conferred with Dannecker; both agreed to force Vichy to give Louis support and money.34
Because of Bousquet, Louis knew what he had to do to reposition himself more favourably and get the money he wanted. Bousquet had told Oberg and Knochen that Louis Darquier was given no money by Vichy because he had produced no proposals. So, in the immediate aftermath of his failures of 1942, he came up with shoals of them. He turned his attention to propaganda. He would cajole the civil population, suffering in ignorance and deluded by Jewish propaganda. In “enlightening them about the Jewish problem” he would save them, save France, and save himself.35
Louis' great passion was for the media, and even his numerous critics agreed that “if he was little occupied at the Commissariat, Darquier, in another way, and at a more general level, was vastly active.”36 What he liked best were associations and unions, floridly named little newspapers, lectures to the like-minded in halls and restaurants—preferably restaurants—surrounded by followers and henchmen who looked up to him, defended him with their fists, listened to him talking for a long time and drank with him into the night.
He decided that his new thrust would concentrate almost exclusively on FRENCH RACE and FRENCH BLOOD. It is often said of Louis Darquier that he was a French Nazi, as so many of the Paris collabos were. But this was not so; he would take German money, but to him Germans were uncivilised savages. He was a French hooligan, a racist à la française: “The Jewish problem,” he declared, “is not specifically a German problem…it faces all nations and has taken on urgent proportions i
n France. Germany has simply been the first country in the modern era to provide a governmental solution to the problem… the French government [must] do the same.”37
Louis set to work in a flurry of activity, and by 6 November 1942 Pétain had already approved the creation of two chairs at the Sorbonne, one in Ethnology in the Faculty of Medicine, and one in Contemporary Jewish History in the Faculty of Letters. Within weeks Darquier came up with third and fourth inventions: a Commission Scientifique pour l'étude des Questions de Biologie Raciale (Scientific Commission for the Study of Racial Biology) and an Institut d'Anthropo-Sociologie (Institute of Anthropo-Sociology). The institute was to be the guardian of racial purity, devoted particularly to “the problem of mixed marriages” and “the study, establishment and protection of the scientific bases of racial selection … with a view towards improving cultivation, breeding and race.” Its members—doctors, professors and lawyers—were presided over by Claude Vacher de Lapouge, the doctor-lawyer son of Georges, another nineteenth-century anti-Semitic “racial theorist.” Robert Castille and Pierre Leroy were members, and in December Louis appointed to it his brother Jean.38
Although Pétain had considerable reservations about the choice of a homosexual for the post, the intellectual Abel Bonnard, “la Gestapette,” became Laval's new Minister for Education in 1942. 39 Darquier's academic chairs and anthropo-sociological arrangements came under Bonnard, “a pathetic old queen with mascara-ed eyes” and a fuzz of white hair, a fascist and an anti-Semite, and another high-liver like Darquier. It was he who found the professors Louis required. Louis did the honours at the inaugural event of his Institute of Anthropo-Sociology at 43, rue de Monceau, in the 8th arrondissement. Talking about his work to Le Matin, he explained, “Up till now the quality of a human being has been too often neglected in favour of quantity. It is normal to encourage and to support large families, but it is also normal and just to encourage healthy individuals rather than imbeciles and the physically handicapped.”40
In its few months of life, streams of anti-Semitic figures from Darquier's past came and went through the revolving doors of the institute; it had three directors within six months.41 At the CGQ J, as Darquier had learnt from his experiences with Galien, German spies were omnipresent, everyone was watching everyone else, everyone was on the take, and everyone was reporting this to the Gestapo. Louis wanted to filter his profits away from suspicious eyes. To achieve this he created his fifth and favourite group, the Union Française pour la Défense de la Race (UFDR), the French Union for the Defence of the Race. This was no more than a rebirth of his pre-war Anti-Jewish Union. He told the embassy that he wanted his new union “to lead the masses in the struggle against the Jews.”
He had grandiose ideas about Jewish properties he could Aryanise to house each of his new associations, but particularly the UFDR, for which he had his eye on a sequestered Jewish bank in the boulevard Haussmann.42 In fact its registered office, in December 1942, was Louis and Myrtle's room in the Hôtel Fortuny, though soon an exasperated embassy pushed it into the ground floor of 21, rue la Boétie, where the Nazis housed a miscellanea of anti-Semitic organisations.43 More than anything else, the UFDR got Darquier out of his German-infested headquarters, because in theory it had sections in all the CGQ J's regional offices. Off Louis would go, “encouraging, monitoring and coordinating” his troops.44
Nothing about the French Union was new; Louis even used the statutes of his Club National from 1936, changing only the words “the practice of sport” to “the integrity of our race.”45 The moral values of the race were also to be restored. One of his cronies later explained that Louis founded it “to strengthen French unity by the following means: the fight against abortion, venereal disease, alcoholism, immigration policy etc. …”46
By 12 December 1942 Louis Darquier's magnum opus, his propaganda manifesto, was ready, and when he presented it to the German authorities he announced his sixth and seventh innovations, a Propaganda Department and the transformation of Sézille's IEQ J into the lengthier IEQ JER—the Institut d'étude des Questions Juives et Ethno-Raciales (Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions). Under Georges Montandon, the IEQ JER would lecture the public: “pure doctrine” for the educated Frenchmen, “basic information for the lower classes.”47 This, another “organisation for scientific study,”48 rose upon the flickering shadows of Louis' Commission for the Study of Racial Biology and the Institute of Anthropo-Sociology, which by March 1943 had already been deemed “inappropriate” by Heinz Röthke. What Louis wanted from these organisations, apart from money, was scientific authority for his racial views; “it was his pet subject.”49
Once again it was to Ernst Achenbach at the embassy that Louis revealed his plans, attaching to his lengthy proposals for propaganda a request for an automobile which he could use at night and on Sundays, the better to circulate around Paris: a car was absolutely necessary if they wanted him to educate the French masses about Jews.
A Vichy law of 11 July 1942 had allocated the Commissariat a further 2.1 million francs (worth £360,000 today) for its propaganda service. Darquier's multitude of plans forced Laval to give in to German pressure, and by the end of December 1942 Louis finally got the money he had been demanding from Vichy for so many months.
The embassy was the German patron of Louis' propaganda efforts, financing up to two-thirds of the costs, though as the prospect of German defeat loomed Louis had already begun to announce publicly, again, that he refused German money. Pierre Gérard ran the propaganda department at the CGQ J in addition to the UFDR; it was Gérard, like Antignac, who did the real work.50 One of his first tasks was to hire an assistant “to compile reports as to how certain Jewish companies, and the Louis Dreyfus firm in particular, gained their fortunes.”51
The propaganda proposals Gérard wrote for Darquier covered every contingency, categorising the French public like railway carriages. There were first-class (“cultivated”), second-class (“this group does not have the same capacity for grasping complex issues as the first”) and third-class persons (“the masses”). For the latter he proposed:
– fiction (crime, romance, swashbuckling stories) in which the Jew plays a pernicious role
– Amusing radio shows (Jewish jokes, funny sketches etc.)
– theme films (e.g. the Jew SüSS)
– special newspapers adapted to the intellectual level of the masses providing information in a humorous format (“Le Canard enchaîné,” “Le Rire” etc.)
Darquier, in Gérard's prose, promised German command that each class of French person would be targeted by newspapers suitable to their intelligence. He announced hundreds of plans: a youth section, radio programmes, a radio station to be called Radio Révolution, a cinema section which would make films and documentaries, a press agency to assist anti-Jewish journalists with subsidies for press campaigns against Jews. He would hold exhibitions, arrange lectures and publish tracts, brochures and books—these were to be only “2–300 pages long …the style and text should be light and the works well illustrated.” He would produce posters and leaflets, and the militants who distributed these throughout the regional offices would be “an excellent way of keeping central intelligence informed.” He proposed infiltration, too, into schools and youth clubs, “sports societies (sailing, cycling, camping, swimming etc.) [and] student bodies, mutual benefit societies … philosophical and religious societies.”52
Darquier had learnt many tricks of propaganda from Germany and fascism, of which the one he used most was repetition. His mantra ran:
“We have lost everything—our army, our navy and our colonies: all that remains is our race. It is still pure. Let us start a national revolution and together we shall help to build an eternal France in a new Europe.”
By the end of January 1943, cheques in pocket, Louis had returned to his social life, celebrating the launch of each of his new projects at dinners, lectures, soirées and receptions. He gave interviews and speeches; he br
oadcast on the radio. In the New Year, perhaps because it was all too much to pack into his room at the Hôtel Fortuny, he moved back to his old hotel, the Terminus, opposite the Gare St.-Lazare.53
In 1942 Louis had complained that Laval would not permit him to broadcast on Vichy's radio station, Radiodiffusion Nationale, Radio-Vichy; he thought Bousquet was responsible for this. In October 1942,to counteract the profound public reaction to the July and August deportations, Vichy gave the CGQ J its own programme. Basically these broadcasts were rousing “Thoughts for the Day.” For ten minutes, three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, just before 10 p.m. Louis addressed the French nation on the subject of “The Jewish Question in France and Throughout the World.”
For such a large man, Louis' voice was high and squeaky, and of course untrained. He repeated himself too, in an amalgam of paragraphs from the Protocols and nationalist patter about French glory, French blood and the Jewish peril, much of it culled from his 1930s editorials. Most of all, his forty broadcasts ridiculed any suggestion of pity for the Jews— every tall story about their sufferings was just “Jewish propaganda.” One listener, signing the letter “A Christian,” wrote to him: “You say that Jews are dirty and speak no languages correctly. We are sure that you are well washed and that you speak German very well indeed.”
Louis was taken off after three months of such performances, and a professional took over. But radio was a key segment of his propaganda promises, so he was given a twice-weekly broadcast, again on Radiodiffusion Nationale, at midday on Mondays and Fridays. This was three minutes of anecdotal anti-Semitism, solemnly topped and tailed with Louis Darquier's theme song: “ We have lost everything. The only treasure left to us is our race …” accompanied by a gong.54
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