APP GA D9, 48 5830, report of 14 December 1938.
Action française reported Louis' outburst in the council chamber the next day, 16 November 1938. The BMO censored his comment to M. Hirschovitz; Action française did not.
Police reports: APPGA/D9 dossier Darquier. The first report, dated 6 June 1938, is almost solely concerned with Louis Darquier; the second, more detailed report, “La Propagande anti-juive,” is July 1939, AP dossier 79/501/882–B, and is reprinted in toto in Kingston, p. 7.
Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979). Prolific and much-quoted French writer. Doctors were omnipresent. La France enchaînée ran a medical column written by Dr. Fernand Querrioux, a good friend of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the most envenomed adversary of Jewish doctors and their “invasion” of the medical profession, while Dr. Georges Rémondy, a nose specialist, became the Union's treasurer and wrote a “Doctor's Corner” column for the newspaper, producing a “harmonious” anti-Semitism attuned to the French spirit, not “racism in the vulgar sense of Hitlerian doctrine.” The rest of his news team were Pierre Gérard, joined by other men of affairs and a token representative of the working class, and by anti-Semitic writers old—Urbain Gohier, Jean Drault, the cartoonist Ralph Soupault—and new—a recent anti-Semitic notable, Laurent Viguier, and Léon de Poncins, whose talents and insights closely echoed those of Princess Karadja.
Letter of Montandon to Professor Hans F. K. Günther, 23 October 1938. CDJC XCV-31 (Billig, p.109).
Georges Francoul, a lawyer, was the new vice president of the Union. Louis put him to immediate use as his defence counsel and as the flagellator of Jewish lawyers in La France enchaînée. The anti-Masonic journalist Philippe Poirson remained as his secretary-general.
Source for all this: Joly, “Champion,” p. 53.
“Le Conseil Municipal tient séance matin et soir et boycotte M. Darquier. Dès qu'il parait à la tribune, le préfet de la Seine et le représentant du préfet de police quittent ostensiblement la salle des séances” (“The City Council sat in the morning and the evening and boy cotted M. Darquier. As soon as he stood up to speak, the préfet of the Seine, and the representative of the préfet of police, conspicuously left the meeting room”) Justice, 12 July 1939, AN 72 AJ592: Fonds Vaniakoff.
Joly, “Champion,” p. 61, quoting BMO, 21 December 1938.
Taylor, p. 58. He was particularly fond of pastis.
La France enchaînée,no. 16, 15–30 November 1938, quoted in Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 112, La France enchaînée,no. 25, 1–15 April 1939.
L'Antijuif, November 1937.
“Perroquet d'Hitler, au point d'insulter le noble Président Roosevelt ” (“Darquier is so much Hitler's parrot that he is now insulting the noble President Roosevelt”) Presse Municipale, 23 April 1939.
La France enchaînée,no. 29, 1–15 June 1939.
Louis Darquier and all the French extremists in the pay of the Nazis were dealt with similarly. Coston's house was searched and his archives seized, Pemjean and Poirson came next, then Pierre Gérard and even his mother's home. The police found Büttner's chequebooks when they searched Gerard's home on 12 February 1945, but Manfred Simon knew of them as early as 1942.
De Monzie, Ci-devant,p. 123.
Darquier and Gérard were charged for articles written in La France enchaînée. Louis' article was entitled “Le Défi insensé ” (“The Insane Challenge”), 15 May 1939; Gérard's was on the unsatisfactory French birth rate, 1–15 June 1939.
The Times, 20 June 1939.
Jardin, p. 72.
José Félix de Lequerica y Erquicia (1890–1963): Of a rich industrialist family in Bilbao. Educated as a lawyer, completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics and in Paris. Initially a right-wing monarchist and Basque separatist, he became mayor of Bilbao in 1938 and joined the Falange during the civil war. Appointed ambassador to France in March 1939, and then to Vichy from 1940 to August 1944. A convinced Catholic anti-Semite, pro-German, friend of Abetz and Laval, but also sympathetic to French fascists such as Doriot. A bon vivant and like Anatole de Monzie in many other ways—intelligent, noted as a conversationalist, physically grossly unattractive but an incorrigible woman-chaser. Minister of Foreign Affairs from August 1944 to 1945. Infamous as a collaborator with Germany, for his ruthless delivery of Spanish refugees to the Gestapo and for his responsibility for the return to Spain—to execution—of prominent Spanish Republicans. From 1945 to 1951 he kept his head down in the diplomatic service in Madrid, but he rose again when appointed ambassador to the United States from 1951 to 1954, and from 1956 as Spain's representative at the United Nations. In these latter incarnations he claimed that he had gone to great lengths to save French Sephardic Jews. Documents prove the contrary. Pétain gave the Légion d'honneur to Lequerica on 29 January 1943.
The Duke of Windsor left Paris at dawn twelve days later. AMAE (b) no. 392, Lequerica letter, Paris, 12 May 1939.
De Monzie, Ci-devant, and PRO FO 371/31939/- Z 3005. Pétain's appointment: 2 March 1939.
Kérillis' famous article “La Trahison déchaînée” (“Unbridled Treason”) named names throughout the Abetz scandal in July 1939 until January 1940. Abetz was expelled at the end of July 1939.
Saint-Paulien, p. 41.
La France enchaînée,no. 25, 1–15 April 1939.
Tribunal Correctionnel de la Seine 12ème chamber, 26 July 1939, Louis Darquier's deposition. AN 72 AJ 592: Fonds Vanikoff.
La France enchaînée, 15–31 July.
La France enchaînée ceases publication, APP GA D9, 7 May 1942.
Some 465,000 Spanish refugees crossed into France after Franco's victory.
Koestler, p. 39.
Tasmania J.
Louis joined the 10th anti-tank battery of the 66th Artillery Regiment in General Huntziger's 2nd French Army. General Charles-Léon Huntziger (1880–1941) was Minister of War from 6 September 1940 until 11 August 1941. Anglophobe and anti-German, he died in a plane crash on 12 November 1941.
Laubreaux, p. 37.
The trial was reported in Paris soir, 4 October 1939. Prison sentences were suspended for general mobilisation.
According to a letter dated 15 September 1941 from the Comité d'Assistance aux Familles des Soldats Français in London, which gave Louis' address as: Lieutenant Darquier de Pellepoix—Batterie antichard [sic]—66ème R.A.D.I.N.A.— Secteur postal 513. His first appeal against his prison sentence came to court in December, and he was still attending council meetings in January 1940 and treating himself to an elegant room at the Hôtel Castille in the rue Cambon.
APP GA D9, 28 February 1940, and Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 133.
AN 3W142, 12 January 1940.
Paul Reynaud (1878–1966): Conservative politician of the centre-right Alliance Démocratique party until he resigned after Munich. Fervently anticommunist, an anglophile and anti-Munich, supporter of de Gaulle before the war, though not of his presidential approach to politics after it. Many times a minister in the early 1930s. Daladier and Reynaud disliked each other, and de Monzie disliked them both. Reynaud was arrested, tried at Riom, then passed by Vichy to the Germans and imprisoned throughout the rest of the war. He testified against Pétain at the latter's trial, where he had a vigorous argument with Weygand. After the war he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies until 1962, and held office in two governments during that time.
The Prissians brought the war to the Lightfoot doorstep; their father was killed on the train back to London after delivering his wife and their new baby Sandra to visit Mildred and Iris at Hazel Crescent. Pat Smalley, May 2001.
The Maginot Line was formulated by Pétain in 1927, constructed throughout the 1930s as an impregnable defence of French borders, except for the northern Belgian frontier, because Pétain considered its Ardennes forest as either impenetrable or easily defended. Between them Pétain and Weygand had been responsible for French military policy throughout the inter-war years, Pétain as Chief of the General Staff until 1931, when Weygand took ov
er until 1935.
General Maurice Gamelin (1872–1958): Distinguished soldier and aide to General Joseph Joffre in the First World War. Replaced Weygand as Commander of the General Staff in 1935. In early 1940 Reynaud made many attempts to replace Gamelin, Daladier's Supreme Commander of French land forces. Outraged by his failures, Reynaud condemned Gamelin as “all right as a priest or a bishop,” but no “leader of men”; but he could not afford a breach with Daladier, and until this point Gamelin remained. Finally sacked on 17 May 1940, arrested on Pétain's order in September, tried at Riom (with Reynaud amongst others), then deported to Germany in 1943. Liberated in 1945.
Keesing's Contemporary Archives, 12–19 July 1948.
This is Churchill's famous speech: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…” Still marvellous to read, decades later.
Billig, p. 84, quoting CDJC LXXIV-13,pp. 3–5.
At Pétain's trial in July–August 1945 he was accused of many treacheries, and of being on “intimate terms with the Fascist Cagoulard organisation; of having desired to set up in France a regime analogous to that of General Franco in Spain; of having, while Ambassador in Madrid (1939) got in touch with Hitler.” Historians differ as to the extent of Pétain's subterranean activities. Many of the leather-jacketed, metal-helmeted men of his personal bodyguard at Vichy came from the Cagoulards.
Horne, p. 659.
Lukacs, p. 140.
Lequerica belonged to the right-wing Spanish political group Acción Española. Bankwitz (p. 322) states: “The Germans had been aware of Weygand's and Pétain's armistice theses at least since 6 June, and were kept closely informed of the struggle within the Reynaud cabinet from this date to its collapse on 16 June.”
Pryce-Jones, p. 89.
Koestler, quoted by Horne, p. 653.
Weygand, pp. 229–30.
Les Amis de Rassinier © Gilles Karmasyn 1999. See http://www.phdn.org/ negation/rassinier/coston.html.
CHAPTER 12
Work, Family, Fatherland
INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Pierre Combes, Bill Coy, Audrey Kirby, Yvonne Lacaze, Père Lucien Lachièze-Rey, Danny Puddefoot, Simone Reste, Pat Smalley. Sources: Darquier family correspondence; AMAE (b) no. 10; AN 3W142; AN 72 AJ 292: Testimony of M. Françoise Eugène Jean Pierre Lalin, Lieutenant of the 607 régiment infanterie de pionniers, 31 March 1956; AN AG/3(2) 326(BCRA); APP GA D9, 20 January and 6 February 1941, 7 May and 13 June 1942; Archives Municipales de Neuilly, 3D19/22, Réorganisation des corps municipaux; CDJC DLVI-132, Mme Laurens; CDJC LXXV-105; Préfecture de Police, Paris, no. 1093517, 28 July 1941; SRD, Tasmania J., TNA: PRO FO 371/31990 61288; TNA: PRO FO 892/163. Publications: Agulhon, The French Republic 1879–1992; Atkin, Pétain; Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France; Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (1941–1944); Burrin, France Under the Germans; Crémieux-Brilhac, Ici Londres 1940–1944; de Gaulle, “Appeal to the French People,” BBC Radio, 18 June 1940; De Gaulle: TV documentary written, produced and directed by Sue Williams. WGBH Educational Foundation and LNK Images, 1990; l'Eclaireur (Nice), 14 January and 12 August 1943; Felstiner, To Paint Her Life; Gildea, Marianne in Chains; Gordon, Collaborationism in France During the Second World War; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944; Jardin, Vichy Boyhood; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Langer, Our Vichy Gamble; Larkin, France Since the Popular Front; Lartigaut (ed.), Histoire du Quercy; Lottman, Pétain; Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein's War,” New Yorker, 2 June 2003; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; New York Times, 28 August 1944, 6 December 1946; Ousby, Occupation; Paxton, Vichy France; Le Petit Marseillais, 9 February 1941; Planté, Un Grand seigneur de la politique; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; Ragache, La Vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l'Occupation; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; Tournoux, Pétain and de Gaulle; Warner, Laval; Weber, Action Française; Werth, The Twilight of France; White, The BBC at War; Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews; http://www.masonicinfo.com/fay.htm.
De Gaulle, “Appeal to the French People,” BBC, 18 June 1940. Agulhon, p. 258.
Around four million people fled. This chaos produced no agreement about the number of refugees involved and many historians believe that as many as six, eight or even ten million people took to the roads in this exodus.
St.-Paul-de-Loubressac was formerly known as St.-Paul-la-Bouffie.
Tasmania J.
The other sections: i) northern sections were sliced off as a Zone rattachée and joined up with Belgium under German command; ii) below it a forbidden zone which included Calais and, later stretched down the Atlantic and Channel coasts; iii) Alsace-Lorraine was taken into the Reich and separated from the rest of France by iv) fifteen départements given different administration as a Zone réservée.
For a brief period the two major partitions were called the Zone Occupée (ZoneO) and the Zone Libre, the Occupied Zone and the Free Zone, but the Germans correctly dismissed any concept of freedom that Pétain's zone might fancy with a decree in December 1940 that it should be called the Zone Non-Occupée (Zone NonO).
Planté, p. 307.
Fifty-seven percent of socialist deputies and 58 percent of Radical deputies voted for Pétain.
De Gaulle, TV documentary written, produced and directed by Sue Williams.
Pétain's Quatre Années,p. 49, in Bankwitz, p. 316.
Larkin, p. 92; Pater Noster by Georges Gérard, Larkin, p. 83.
Pierre Laval (1883–1945) was a class above Pétain in his origins—he was the son of the innkeeper and postmaster-proprietor of the small village of Châteldon, near Vichy.
Warner, p. 152, and Lottman, p. 152.
Quoted by Burrin, p. 61.
Langer, p. 116.
BBC, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac gave two broadcasts about Louis Darquier. For 14 May 1942, see AN AG/3(2) 326 (BCRA) and AN 3W142; for 1 July 1942, see Crémieux-Brilhac's Ici Londres. See also White, pp. 33ff.
The Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich controlled France through the Armistice Commission in Weisbaden: see chart of German Command, p. 213. The first military Commander-in-Chief was Otto von Stülpnagel, who was replaced in February 1942 by his cousin Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Otto was the harsher of the two, prone to the shooting of hostages whenever his men were attacked “by men in the pay of Anglo-Saxons, the Jews and the Bolsheviks,” as he put it.
Ousby, p. 54. Goebbels came to Paris in July 1940. See also Pryce-Jones, p. 88.
Billig, p. 23.
Abetz's French henchmen, among them Jean Luchaire and Fernand de Brinon, arranged this encounter on 19 July 1940. The third go-between was Jean Fontenoy, a morphine addict who could also have been of help to Myrtle.
He may have been staying in rue Laugier, as one document implies. This, however, is most unlikely, as he had not paid the rent for years and it had been occupied by German troops. The police were often wildly inaccurate in their reports about Darquier.
Paxton, p. 249.
Marcel Déat (1894–1955): Decorated First World War veteran. A professor of philosophy and former socialist deputy and political journalist who wrote the famous article in 1939 as Poland was about to be abandoned: “Must One Die for Danzig?” in l'Oeuvre, 4 May 1939. Déat's collaborationist Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), which he ran with Deloncle until 1941, and Doriot's PPF were the only political parties permitted by the Nazis. He joined the Vichy government as Minister of Labour and National Solidarity in March 1944. Fled to Sigmaringen in 1944, then to Italy to escape the death sentence handed down in absentia in 1945. Given refuge in a Catholic convent in Turin until his death.
Gordon, p. 338, quoting Paxton, pp. 352–57.
Occupation newspapers: Pre-war newspapers such as Le Matin reappeared—its editor liked to add “Heil Hitler ” to his
copy. Vogue was permitted to continue on the condition that it had no “Jewish capital or attachments.” Henri-Robert Petit started up his Le Pilori again, but was swiftly removed for embezzlement and for his suggestion that Laval was a Jew. The paper flourished however, renamed Au Pilori and achieving under Jean Lestandi an anti-Semitic frenzy in a class of its own. Au Pilori was the French Der Stürmer, producing cartoons of outstanding obscenity and providing a comfortable journalistic home for all professional anti-Semitic writers, from Coston to Drault.
New intellectual journals were created, and the best of those already in existence were appropriated and turned to the Nazi cause. The most renowned of such papers, the Nouvelle revue française, fell into the hands of that high-flying collaborationist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a fervent anti-Semite dressed in the uniform of 1920s Oxford. In 1941 Brasillach returned from prison camp to turn Je suis partout into the most successful weekly of the time. New newspapers and journals were created. Abetz placed his favourite, Jean Luchaire, as head of the Paris Press Corporation and funded his daily evening newspaper Les nouveaux temps.
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