In his last defence, presented in August 1992, Bousquet once again denied culpability and passed all responsibility to the Germans and to Louis Darquier. Except for Pétain and Laval, who were not accused of these crimes, Bousquet would have been the first French collaborator responsible for the French holocaust to come to trial. As this was about to begin, on 3 June 1993, Bousquet was shot by an unhinged publicity-seeker who rang the bell of Bousquet's front door pretending to be an agent of the Ministry of the Interior. It took four shots to kill him. The deranged assassin stated that he was happy to have executed justice and to have rid the world of a “piece of garbage.” Bousquet was eighty-four years old. François Mitterrand's protection of and friendship for him—there is a famous photograph of Bousquet dining with the Mitterrands in 1974, and Mitterrand also avowed his friendship for Bousquet on television in September 1994—has encouraged the view that it was Mitterrand who had Bousquet shot before he could come to trial and make uncomfortable revelations.
Louis Darquier's statements about the gas chambers and the murder of Jews were not the birth of Negationism, as the denial of the Holocaust is called. Paul Rassinier opened the subject for the French with his book The Lies of Ulysses, published in 1950, and Louis' old anti-Semitic comrades, particularly Céline, had been saying the same for years. The day after the l'Express interview was published, Robert Faurisson, a university professor in Lyon and a seasoned warrior in the war against the Holocaust, wrote to Le Monde. His letter of 6 November 1978 expressed the hope that Darquier's words would enable a large public to discover that “the so-called massacres in gas chambers and so-called genocide, were one and the same lie.” Negationism exploded again in l'affaire Faurisson, and has never gone away.
Louis did not live to enjoy these events, but he soldiered on happily for another two years, and was on holiday when he died in his bed on 29 August 1980. Teresa, as ever, was looking after him in the small spa town of Carratraca in the Sierra de Málaga, replete with oleanders, orange and lemon trees, and white houses with tumbling geraniums.
Above the town is the cemetery; there are no tombs, only niches; it is a very pretty cemetery. Louis has no tombstone because his daughter wanted no one to know where he was, but she gave him a funeral. The entire community of Carratraca came out for it—though no one knew at all whose funeral they were attending—and, in a moment of what Teresa called “divine justice,” communists carried him to his resting place, niche number 121 at the cemetery. When it was over, they all sat down in the village square and drank whisky. Teresa kept Louis' death quiet, and it was not publicly known until 1983, the year written on his civic documents in Cahors as his date of death, the town's last word on its least favourite son.
In 1998 the niches at the cemetery above Carratraca were decaying. When rebuilt, new numbers were allotted; there is no niche number 121 now, and Louis Darquier's bones were given no new number. There is an annual fee for a niche; if unpaid, the corpse is removed, put into a black plastic bag, numbered and stored in a warehouse near the small chapel next to the cemetery. If the plastic bag is not claimed, in time it is destroyed. When the cemetery was asked to check for bag no. 121, it was missing.
In England Elsie lived on, never without her floppy old felt hat, which she wore in and outside the house, her photograph of Anne always displayed on the mantel. She fell to skin and bone in old age, still saw the funny side of things when possible, expected traffic to stop for her, and vigorously shook her stick at all comers. She died just after her ninetieth birthday, in 1983, and is buried with Arthur and all her sisters in Great Tew churchyard. She left behind a little trinket box of treasures: three ashtrays, a nappy pin, a thimble, a small metal mouse and the photograph of Anne, with four of her childhood books. Elsie's life savings, all £2,000 of them, she bequeathed to the National Children's Home.
Anne's greatest suffering came from the silence in which she lived, suffering which she could ease only by contemplating the pain of others. When she tried to deal with it, her inner demons led her to place her trust in a man who treated her in adult life as her father had as a child. At the time of her death, Robert Hobson wrote a poem about her—“In Memoriam”—in which he calls her a
psycho
therapist.
The space between the words makes his meaning clear.
In 1985 Hobson published a book about his work, Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy. He aspired to be a psychiatrist who was also an artist/scientist; he was a pioneer of what is called the “conversational model” of psychotherapy. Hobson loved to use words, yet he could write: “I hope to respond to my unique client by sharing in an ongoing act of creation, expressing and shaping immediate experience in the making and remaking of a verbal and non-verbal language of feeling.” He once told an interviewer: “Charismatic leaders can leave a trail of destruction.”29 In Forms of Feeling he fictionalised his patients, never an acceptable practice then, but today there is a code of ethics prohibiting, and a system of investigation for, offences such as this.
Hobson's reaction to Anne's suicide probably encompassed many emotions, extraordinary guilt being one, grief another. He wrote that the last section of his book, which he headed “The Heart of a Psychotherapist,” was “an intimate statement,” which it is, but it is also a thinly disguised portrait of Anne, and reveals a formidable lack of self-knowledge, injured vanity and a—probably unconscious—desire for the last word, for revenge.
“The Heart of Darkness” is the title of the chapter in which he recounts his relationship with her in considerable detail; he renames Anne “Sue.” Anne had been dead for fifteen years. Presumably he thought no one would notice; who was left to remember Anne Darquier? But her friends noticed, and so did I.
“Sue's story is one of loneliness, guilt, destruction, and meaninglessness. It is also a story of courage and love,” Hobson wrote. After briefly reporting Anne's childhood and her “girlhood fantasies about her absent parents,” he is accurate about Louis, “an idealised aristocratic father,” and Myrtle, “a loathed alcoholic mother”; and accuses Elsie of child abuse, “terrible deprivation… squalid filth… sexually perverted nanny.” He goes on to describe, in perfectly identifiable terms, the years of analysis Anne Darquier underwent in his care. He notes the “disillusionment of seeing her idealised father as a cruel monster,” and how “with sensitivity and courage she helped, in an amazing way, very many difficult patients.”
Elsie was two years dead when Hobson accused “Sue's sadistic nanny” of child abuse. No one who knew Elsie believes this: “No way, they were just not that kind of people. Elsie was not like that”; “Elsie loved Anne as her daughter”; “I wouldn't say she worshipped her, but she loved her, was proud to be associated with her; she was devastated when Anne died.”30 The Jones family certainly thought Nanny Lightfoot was capable of anything, and did not believe she should look after children. But as they thought of Louis and Myrtle as characters in an aristocratic love story, their views are at best questionable. Hobson coupled this irresponsibility, and the assumption that people of Elsie's class would not have access to the kind of book he was writing, with a serious betrayal of Anne's trust. He tells how Sue/Anne pointed a loaded revolver at him, flung herself down the stairs of his house, smashed every milk bottle outside the houses of the street where he lived, hurled a table at his head, ripped the buttons off his “lime-green waistcoat with delicately coloured buttons.”
“Sue was brilliant and she was ruthless. And she certainly had charm,” Hobson writes. “… She died suddenly. Since she had no available relatives I was asked to identify the body. The Coroner's verdict was ‘accidental death. ’ I knew it was suicide.” And: “We might consider the effects of abandonment in infancy, and to what extent damage is irreparable.” His account throbs with his sense of failure and regret, but also with unusual self-absorption: “Here, I am concerned with how Sue, and many other patients, have compelled me to acknowledge the hidden regions of my own heart…I came to see on
ce more how, despite a long training analysis, I had only a passing and casual acquaintance with myself. I was faced with meaninglessness and with the essential loneliness which lies at the heart of psychotherapy and of all personal relationships.”31
The words are his, but Anne's fatal dependence on narcissistic dinosaurs was the legacy of Louis and Myrtle Darquier.
When I rang the doorbell of flat number 38, 59 Weymouth Street, on 7 September 1970, at 8 a.m. as usual, Anne Darquier was upstairs, dead on the bathroom floor. Although she was courting oblivion, it is unlikely that Anne was courting death. Hers was one of those silent suicides, in which stopping the pain, rather than the ending of life, is the point. How I know this, and whether I am right about it, hardly matters. What I am more certain of is that people who commit suicide are not alone: they are addressing someone.
Postscript
IHAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE to think of Anne's story simply as a tragedy. When I began my research I felt a great sense of injustice on her behalf, but as the years went by I came to feel not so much less sympathy for her, as regret, for her sake, that she lived in a milieu and at a time when silence was the only way she could live with her story and survive. Sometimes I wanted to rise up and retrospectively shake her. She was so clever, so astute. She had such ambition for the happiness of those she cared for. She could heal others—there are many besides myself living well because of her—but she could not heal herself. And, the child of gamblers, she had wretched luck.
After the Second World War each country produced myths about its victory or defeat. In Britain and America, the Russian and Eastern European experience was obliterated for decades during the Cold War. General de Gaulle too orchestrated a mythology, probably necessary at the time, about the role of France after its defeat by Germany in June 1940, in which his vraie France was entirely and always opposed to the German occupiers, obscuring the minuscule size of the Resistance and of his own Free French forces, ignoring Vichy, its deeds and its initial popularity, such as it was.
It is now many decades since the French have rejected this Gaullist myth; their self-scrutiny of the Dark Years is unmatched by most Western countries. An ocean of books has been published—accusatory, analytical, anecdotal and revelatory—telling the truth about France's role of collaboration with the Nazis during the war. Historians and academics have minutely chronicled French collaboration, and worse. Though the Vatican remains the great unpunished, and Catholic fascism is still glossed over, the Catholic hierarchy have acknowledged guilt, and once François Mitterrand was dead, Jacques Chirac, when president of France, apologised too.
There was a bit of Louis Darquier in all French collaborators and Paris collabos. There were many political thugs. Certain French banks made a great deal more money out of the war than Louis Darquier. Pétain was more than his match as a womaniser, and the list of raving anti-Semites stretches into infinity. With hardly an exception, all these men were marked by the First World War. It is perhaps only as a braggart and a boulevardier that Louis Darquier was their superior. The most distinguished historians continue to label Darquier as a Nazi and to index him under his assumed title. If remembered, he is known as the French Eichmann; but he was not, not at all. He was the natural inheritor of generations of antirepublican attacks by the old order, of ideas borrowed from strangely revered French intellectuals such as Charles Maurras, of centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism and nationalist mythmaking.
But he was not a clever man; he was a mountebank and a chancer who stretched the charity, tolerance and patience of those few who loved him, and irritated to breaking point the many who hated him, yet still survived to do it all again. Funded by the Nazi Party from 1936, he used French fascism and anti-Semitism to make his way in the world and to aggrandise his small self.
Louis Darquier's rightful place was in the rue Laugier, addressing the minuscule number of his fellow misfits and repairing to the bar as soon as his posturings were over. Immersed in the abracadabra of his trade as an anti-Semite, the hold he had upon reality was always as inadequate as his intelligence. Yoked in mutual self-deception with Myrtle, the Baron and Baroness, twin children—wicked children—played games, murderous games, pulling wings off butterflies, dispensing cruelty like liquorice water. Left to himself, Louis Darquier would have destroyed only his own children and any adult—except his adoring acolyte Myrtle—foolish enough to dabble in his fantasy world. But, as the only professional anti-Semite with a public appointment, put to dirty work by his betters, thousands, besides Anne, died because of him.
He could have achieved nothing without the Vichy state and the Nazis, who used him for their own purposes. Here was a man—a con man, but they turned a blind eye to that for as long as they could—who openly called for the massacre of Jews, the appropriation of their property and the pursuit, and hopefully the elimination, of any “half-caste” with Jewish blood. Primo Levi rightly called Louis Darquier a “cowardly and foolish man.” Above and around Darquier were the real criminals, the Pétains and Weygands, the Bousquets and Vallats, the cardinals and clergy, the judges and lawyers, the industrialists and businessmen, Académiciens and intellectuals, writers and journalists and functionaries who put his babbling mouth to work for their own ends.
Vichy decorated its murderous activities in the purple prose of the Church and the state. That is why Louis Darquier was so scorned and so hated by his Vichy confrères. Looking at him, hearing him speak, pontificating from his CGQ J, they stared their own inhumanity in the face. Louis Darquier formed no part of the way the men of Vichy saw their relationship with Nazi Germany or their relationship with the French people they governed. He was ridiculous, he was their fall guy, but he was also the dark essence of the l'Etat français.
Louis Darquier distinguished himself in another way. No one remembered him. Many of his contemporaries, from both sides of the political chasm that divided France, wrote their memoirs. Granted that all of them disliked him to a man; none of them recollect the meetings, lectures or marches they shared with him, nor, during the Occupation, the correspondence, parties and dinners, records of which exist in exhausting detail. Otto Abetz spoke for hundreds of them when he said, during his time in Cherche Midi prison after the Liberation: “I must have seen Darquier de Pellepoix at least once during official visits. But I have no exact memory of the event.”1
The French forget Vichy, Australians forget the Aborigines, the English forget the Irish, Unionists forget the Catholics of Northern Ireland, the United States forgot Chile and forgets Guantánamo. Everyone forgot East Timor and Rwanda. As I wrote this book, people constantly asked me how I could bear to write about such a villain and about such terrible things. In fact, horrors from the past did not deter me. What caused me anguish as I tracked down Louis Darquier was to live so closely to the helpless terror of the Jews of France, and to see what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people. Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel “forget” the Palestinians. Everyone forgets; every nation forgets.
Remembering has to do with justice, and as there is no justice, acknowledgement has to do. I hope this book will be some kind of testament to a debt and a friendship I've carried with me for forty years, and in a more oblique way to children and others who are powerless, who live in silence.
Appendix I
In Auschwitz They Only Gassed Lice
AN INTERVIEW WITH DARQUIER DE PELLEPOIX, FORMER COMMISSIONER FOR JEWISH AFFAIRS IN THE VICHY GOVERNMENT, BY PHILIPPE GANIER-RAYMOND (l'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978)
“Six million dead Jews? An invention, pure and simple! A Jewish invention!”
A small shopkeeper from Cahors, with a monocle and an assumed title, is one of those most responsible for the deportation of seventy-five thousand Jews from France. To this day, he regrets nothing. For Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs from May 1942 to February 1944, is not a phantom from the past. He lives in a village on the borders of Estremadura and Andalusia. Just as
the trial of one of the Gestapo chiefs in France, Kurt Lischka,* is about to begin in Frankfurt, Darquier, meticulous organiser of the round-up of the Vel' d'Hiv' in 1942, explains himself in an interview with Philippe Ganier-Raymond. You will need to read it more than once.
L'Express : Sir, it is barely thirty-six years since you handed over seventy-five thousand men, women and children to the Germans. You are the French Eichmann.
* Lischka was one of Knochen's principal deputies and chief of German police in Paris. The German courts sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment in 1980.
Louis Darquier: Where did you get those figures?
LE: Everyone knows them. They are official. You can see them in this document too. (I show him, open at the right page, Serge Klarsfeld's Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France—Chronicle of the Deportation of the Jews of France).
LD: Just as I guessed. A Jewish document. Here we go again with Jewish propaganda! Of course, you can show me nothing but Jewish documents. And why? Because no others exist.
LE: Is that so? There are hundreds, thousands of others, ones that do not come from Jewish organisations. That said, perhaps you would admit that Jews might be interested in the disappearance of six million of their own people.
LD: That figure is an invention, pure and simple. A Jewish invention, of course. Jews are like that: they're ready to do anything to get publicity.
LE: Do you really believe what you've just said? Could you repeat it?
LD: Oh, I see. You're intoxicated like the rest of them. You're all blind… You don't want to face up to the fact that Jews have only one idea in their heads: to wreak havoc everywhere. And why? You know perfectly well: to make Jerusalem the capital of the world. Even today you only need to open any newspaper to realise it. You have come here to accuse me, but…
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