Decades later, a friend of Louis Darquier in Madrid told this story: “One day, a French doctor who knew Darquier before the war visits Madrid. There he bumps into Darquier… Shortly after, the doctor attends a medical conference in France…he joins some colleagues for dinner. One of the diners reveals that he shot Darquier. ‘But Darquier is alive and well, ’ says the doctor, ‘and living in Madrid. I've just seen him. ’ Some time later, tormented by the knowledge that he has killed the wrong man, the colleague puts a gun to his own head, leaving a note behind saying he couldn't live with the idea that he'd shot the wrong man.”11
Meanwhile, Louis' secretary Paule Fichot was interviewed on 5 September, and told her investigators he was still at the Hôtel Bristol. She also told them that Louise was in Neuilly, where she heard Louis' assassination announced on the radio; and at the Bristol, Louis and Myrtle heard it too. Myrtle was frantic. She was “aware of the danger but she could not convince Louis.” When they came to get him, the moment she heard the expected knock on the door, she shoved Louis out through a second exit. That is the story Myrtle told her family, but the truth was that René came to their aid, again. René Darquier had an immensely strong sense of family, of tribu. 12 Despite everything, he could not abandon his brother. He hid Louis in a room on the sixth floor of the house in Neuilly where Louise and René's parents-in-law had apartments.
Louis Darquier himself told more lies than usual about his escape: “In 1944, when everything had begun to break up, I began to think of my own safety. A friend took me to Toulouse, another to Bordeaux, and a third got me into Spain.”13 One account, reported by the Jones family, has him arriving in Spain by submarine; in another, he crossed the border in the boot of the car of a woman variously reported as Yvonne, Germaine or Giselle de Bayehache, who was “in love with him.” When Louis used this version he said he walked across the Pyrénées: “Do you know who helped me to get from Bordeaux to Spain over the mountains? A half-Jewish woman, who, what is more, went under her father's Jewish name …” (“Louis was not past having a Jewish lover”).14
In fact René put him into the boot of his car and drove him across Paris in September 1944, to where “people” were waiting to get him south, to the Pyrénées. These “people” seem to have been organised by de Monzie, whom Louise Darquier had called immediately: “he still had ministerial contacts and he said to Madame Darquier ‘I'll do what I can to save him. ’ He achieved the impossible.”15
The Spanish ambassador to Vichy, José de Lequerica, was back in Madrid by 11 August 1944, when he was sworn in as Franco's Minister of Foreign Affairs. His Vichy office informed him of Louis Darquier's “assassination,” and seven days later Louis had his pass to Spain. “Lequerica helped Louis because Louis had helped him.”16
Much about the defeat of France and its suffering during the Occupation becomes clearer when those years are viewed as a French civil war, a variant of that of its Spanish neighbour. And so, certain aspects of the Vichy state become more comprehensible when viewed from a Spanish rather than a German or Italian perspective. The archives of Spanish libraries and institutions, open since Franco died—though much culled by him— demonstrate the closest of ties between Franco and the Vichy state; they were kissing cousins, not a relationship Pétain and his fellows had with Hitler, or Mussolini.
Both Franco and Pétain came to power in reaction to democratically elected Popular Front governments in the 1930s. Pétain's Spanish connec tions were always strong: he had been ambassador there in 1939, when he commended the “wise leadership of General Franco”; he used José de Lequerica as a conduit to the Germans for the armistice of 1940;de Lequerica, with de Monzie, worked on the provisions for that armistice, and it was de Lequerica who took the cease-fire offer to the Germans. Lequerica was ambassador to France throughout the war years, from 1941 until 1944 when Pétain was taken to Sigmaringen. In his Vichy villa de Lequerica was only a step away from shared strolls, dinners and lunches with Pétain at the Hôtel du Parc.
In June 1941 Cardinal Gerlier went to Madrid to reopen the French church of St.-Louis des Français, which had been destroyed in the Civil War; he took Franco a personal message from Pétain. This church was to become the centre and meeting place for the French political exiles who found shelter in Madrid after the war.
Cordons of police and customs officers lined the Spanish border in the autumn of 1944. On the French side large bands of Spanish republican partisans roamed the frontier, and the fighting between Milice and Maquis was savage. The smuggling racket was well organised and indiscriminate, supporting a flourishing black market in everything, particularly escaping war criminals. By the time Louis Darquier reached the border there were roadblocks at every village. Louis was in disguise: spectacles instead of a monocle, which he hated: “He felt as if he was wearing a bicycle over his nose.”17 He walked over the Pyrénées and crossed over to Spain at the town of Vera de Bidasoa on the little Bidasoa River, inland from the border towns of Hendaye on the French and Irún on the Spanish sides. There he presented his papers on 30 October 1944. He was now a French citizen named Jean Estève, authorised to travel to Madrid by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His credentials were sufficiently elevated for him to avoid the temporary camps or cells other exiles had to endure. When he got to Madrid he was provided with “all necessary documents to stay in Spain.”18
In 1945 Franco's government was floundering as the Catholic and fascist dictatorships of Europe disappeared before its eyes, and accommodation had to be arranged with the United States and the victorious democracies. For them, within months of the war's end, Nazism and fascism defeated, communism became the sole enemy, and the Soviet Union was divided from western Europe and the United States by what Churchill called an “Iron Curtain.” Thus Nazi and other war criminals were often spared punishment as they became useful to American and Western intelligence in the Cold War—a prime example of this being Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.” Thousands got away, and not only to South America—the residue of Hitler's and Pétain's followers found bolt-holes in Australia, Switzerland, Britain, Italy, the Middle East.
But the Franco regime made Spain the chosen refuge for Miliciens, the Paris collabos—particularly its journalists—and Doriot's fascists. For most it was getting out of France that was the problem; once they had made it across the border, false documents were produced in a flash to see them safely on to Madrid, Barcelona or Cadiz. The coastal stretch between Cadiz, Barbate and Algeciras was a favoured refuge for Nazi exiles; some French war criminals went to Barcelona, but most chose Madrid.19
The Cold War saved Spain from punishments due, but for many years after the war it was ostracised, an isolated, backward and brutally repressive country. Within its dismal confines Louis Darquier swiftly reassembled himself, but some things—money, high living, power—had gone forever.
Franco believed all opponents of his regime to be “the scum of Jewish-Masonic-communist conspiracy.”20 His dictatorship was in every way unfriendly to Jews, albeit more modestly than Vichy or Nazi Germany. Otherwise Franco's Spain was the perfect spiritual home for Louis Darquier, a regime entirely free of the errors of democracy, socialism and communism. After the Civil War Franco had imprisoned or killed most of his people who believed in such things, and the rest were in exile, or silent.21
In early 1945 reports reached Paris that Louis was not dead but living in Madrid, where he was writing his memoirs. He was soon seen around town with a woman on his arm, a pretty, very young “shop girl” from the Basque country, with a strong southern accent. His new mistress, Geneviève, was only twenty-five, and had fled France to escape punishment: she was pregnant by an occupying German. On arrival in Madrid she sought help from an association for such exiles and so met Louis, as ever its founder.
The considerable émigré community of French and German war criminals who had preceded Louis to Madrid now offered him such cock tail parties, lunches and dinners as they could afford. Louis would ap
pear, monocle in position, thunderous of speech, his girlfriend silent and timid at his side, his audience immediately stunned by his vociferous pretensions. By March 1945 the French government knew where he was.22 Three months later a warrant was issued for his arrest, and the French ambassador in London began his attempts to return Anne to the Darquier family in Paris. In the Hotel Margerit, in Madrid's avenida de José Antonio, Louis' new mistress became pregnant again.
According to Louis' accounts, he and his “wife” were impoverished when they first arrived in Madrid, and were reduced to selling braces in Retiro Park, but very soon he was teaching French at the Friedendorff-Norris, a German-language school near the avenida. This street, renamed Gran Via today, became Louis' Spanish Champs-élysées. He was often seen there, “suit badly crumpled and stained, monocle glued in, with his eternal walking stick… passing by the luxurious terraces of the cafés of the Gran Via, which he could not afford, scornful of eye, his soul as light as his purse.”23 In its purlieus he began again the life he knew all too well from his London years: small hotel rooms, flitting from one place to another up and down the avenida, then descending to lodgings with a sequence of Spanish landladies—he would give them French lessons in exchange for a room.
Many of the French collabos taught for a pittance at language schools, chief among them the école Briam, still there today. Its director then was the Milicien leader François Gaucher, for many years Doriot's friend and right-hand man. Gaucher's life was typical of these impoverished war criminals in the early years after the war. Life was still dangerous for them then, as one by one their death sentences were announced in France. Gaucher would not arrive at the school until 4 p.m., and then worked behind a closed door until late at night. “He was very very retiring and few people came into contact with him at all…he followed the same routine, day after day.”24 In the boiling heat of summer, teachers like Louis would scurry from one windowless classroom to the next with scarcely a break, using pseudonyms taken from the great names of literature: Sr. H. G. Wells, Sr. Gustave Flaubert…
On 30 July 1946 the Spanish government gave Louis a passport; he became Jean Estève Roussel, born in Hirson, France, on 16 August 1899; the next day Teresa, Anne's half sister, was born.
Meanwhile, in Paris, in November 1944 de Gaulle had set up an Haute Cour de Justice, a High Court of Justice, to try “les grands responsables,” the men of position who had committed the crimes and offences of Vichy's “government or pseudo government.” It took some months to track down Louis, but a warrant for his arrest was issued in June 1945.
Life was wretched for men like de Monzie after the Liberation; he was kept under investigation for treason, but never formally charged. For the people of Cahors he was the “prototype of a collaborator, a Vichyiste.” He was on the point of being executed by the Resistance but the man who carried the order was killed in an ambush.25 In Cahors de Monzie's name was linked with Louis Darquier; he was not safe in the Lot, his country house was burgled, and even in Paris, where he died in January 1947, his apartment was pillaged.26
In 1943 de Monzie had published a book, La Saison des juges—The Season of Judges—in which he argued that French statesmen had always been pulled between revenge and tolerance, between pursuit of those responsible for a national catastrophe and letting sleeping dogs lie. This expressed something of de Gaulle's position: at the Liberation his transformation of France into a nation of résistants and his limitation of state punishment meant that compromise tempered justice—wise at the time, but leaving France with festering wounds.
State “épuration” by military and civilian courts throughout France— the collaboration trials of 1945 to 1949—did not begin with Pétain and Laval, but theirs were the most sensational cases. When the Sigmaringen fantasy came to an end as General Patton's army approached the castle, its exiles fled in all directions. In April 1945 Pétain insisted on returning to France. At his trial in July Charles Trochu appeared as a witness for his defence—startlingly transformed into a republican and Gaullist since 1940, “the only person” at Vichy “supporting this viewpoint.” As for the enemy whom he, Pétain, Maurras and their confrères had fought for so long, communists, Trochu now had “nothing but admiration” for them.27
Trochu's court statements were typical: lies and bombast, obfuscation and fantasy became the order of the day, particularly evidenced by men such as General Weygand, who testified on Pétain's behalf in a diatribe that was also a ferocious defence of himself. Pétain, nearly ninety by this time, still managed to present his years of belief in, and service to, a Nazi victory as devoted protection of France. By playing “a double game” with the Allies, he claimed, he was “the shield” of France, its protector against the invading Hun.
Pétain and Trochu were only two of hundreds of thousands of hitherto unsuspected supporters who made themselves known to de Gaulle and the Allies at this time. The truth came from Pétain's public prosecutor: “Hatred of the Republic stands at the beginning of the whole Pétain case.” Pétain's death sentence was commuted to exile for life on the île d'Yeu, off France's Atlantic coast. Eighty percent of the French public were in favour of his punishment; the remainder, to this day, clamour for the reinstatement of his reputation and the transfer of his bones to Verdun—he died on his prison island in 1951. 28
Like Louis Darquier, Laval applied to José de Lequerica for sanctuary in Spain. In May 1944 de Lequerica claimed that history would one day recognise the greatness of his friend Laval. By July this was forgotten, and his “friend” was surrendered to the Allies.29 Laval's trial in October was a farce. Hatred spewed from prosecutor, judge and jury. He was barely permitted to speak or defend himself. Condemned to death, he tried to commit suicide the night before his execution by swallowing cyanide; he failed, and was carted half-dead to the firing squad.
By now Louis Darquier had a good idea of what lay in store. Most of his fellows were captured and punished in these years. In 1944 Eugène Deloncle was assassinated by the Gestapo, and Georges Montandon by the Resistance. Pierre Taittinger found himself incarcerated in the Vel' d'Hiv,' complaining of the cold, of the biscuits and jam and sardines, and of the ragtag and bobtail—Negroes, Indians even—mixed up with the mayors, préfets and other officials who had served Vichy and Germany. Taittinger's indignant protestations when he was transferred to Drancy— used by the new government as a camp for French war criminals now— continued up to and throughout his “ridiculous legal proceedings,” his imprisonment in cell number 210 at Fresnes, and the Pooterish books he wrote about himself after his release in early 1945. 30 Inexplicably, his only punishment was prohibition from holding any public office.
Robert Brasillach was executed in Feburary 1945. In March 1945 Drieu la Rochelle killed himself. Later in the year Joseph Darnand, Jean Hérold-Paquis and Marcel Bucard were executed—Bucard went to the firing squad singing “I am a Christian, that is my Glory.”31
Charles Maurras was arrested in Lyon in September 1944, two weeks after the last issue of Action française. Amongst his indictments were “incitement to murder” and “intelligence with the enemy.” During his trial, which began on 25 January 1945, he delivered a six-hour declamation of his innocence and the guilt of the republic: “When you say, as you do, M. le Président, that in February 1944 drawing public attention to a Jew was to point him out, his family and himself, to the reprisals of the Germans, to spoliation, to concentration camps, perhaps to torture and to death, not only did I ignore these fine things, but I knew the contrary …”32 When sentence was pronounced—dégradation nationale (loss of civic rights) and life imprisonment—Maurras declaimed that it was “the revenge of Dreyfus.” His lifelong colleague Maurice Pujo, tried with him, was condemned to only five years in prison and released after two years.
The crimes of Vichy and its collaborators were called “intelligence with the enemy” and “plotting against the security of the state.”33 Manifestation of hatred of Jews was one indictable offence, as was working in
an executive position at the CGQ J. Otherwise, the imprisonment and murder of Jews and others did not become criminal offences until 1964, when French law changed to allow retroactive trial for crimes against humanity. Until then, the Nazis were allotted blame for Vichy atrocities.
The business community was lightly dealt with; writers and broadcasters, warriors of the word, received the harshest treatment. Dégradation nationale was only one punishment. Solitary confinement, life and other prison sentences and hard labour were alternatives. Some seven thousand men were sentenced to death; but nearly four thousand of the accused had already fled France.
Of Darquier's deputies at the CGQ J, Joseph Antignac was condemned to death in July 1949, but ill health saved him. After six months of investigations Pierre Galien fled to Turkey and was tried, in absentia, with Antignac. Galien was occasionally heard from again through letters to his wife in Neuilly.
The Nazi alumni from whom Louis received money from 1936 onwards—Rosenberg, Ribbentrop and Streicher—were all hanged in Nuremberg in 1946. Goebbels, Himmler and Goering committed suicide. The Germans who worked in France were spared. Otto Abetz was condemned to twenty years' hard labour in 1949, but was released after five years. Helmut Knochen's death sentence in 1954 was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, but he was pardoned in 1962: a retired insurance agent, he was reported as still alive in Germany in 2004, “weary and bitter.” General Karl-Albrecht Oberg, “the Butcher of Paris,” was tried with Knochen and received the same sentence, but died three years after his release. Theodor Dannecker hanged himself in an American prison in Bavaria in December 1945. Colonel Kurt von Behr and his wife mixed cyanide with champagne in their castle in Germany. Ernst Achenbach became a deputy in Germany until 1970, when his past caught up with him. Heinz Röthke was as fortunate as Darquier: untouched, he became a lawyer in Wolfsberg in Germany, and died in 1966. Lesser German officials—Rudolf Schleier, Dr. Peter Klassen—seem to have been equally ignored.34
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