Bad Faith Read online

  After a pushchair accident as a baby, de Monzie limped all his life; he was physically deformed and formidably ugly. His vast bald head, with a protuberance which he covered with a Basque beret, was compared by Colette to “an unassuming Japanese volcano”; nevertheless, “you could not be in his presence without falling under his charm: he was very brilliant, very gentle, he talked so well. He was also absolutely immoral.”12

  De Monzie mixed enthusiastically in the Parisian intellectual salons of the time; he wrote and published voluminously, and was in charge of the committee of the French Encyclopaedia, “l'Encyclopédie Monzie.” Closely linked to the world of big business, industry and banking, he wove all these threads into a political life which was above all apolitical. He seems scarcely to have believed in the republic he served for so many years. He dealt with Mussolini, corresponded with Trotsky, but in his involvement in European politics, particularly with Russia and Italy, neither communism nor fascism mattered to him. The British assessed him, correctly, as a “scintillating but corrupt figure.”13

  If Pierre Darquier was an enthusiastic woman-chaser, de Monzie, described as “one of France's greatest cocottes,”14 was more than enthusiastic. Half a century later people in Cahors still talk about his baisodrome,a special little house he is said to have kept on the outskirts of the village for his sexual encounters with the local girls. “He kept nude women in his château,” one gossip recalled. “The priest couldn't say anything because de Monzie gave him money not to.”15

  Louis' later habit of equally indiscriminate copulation perhaps contributed to de Monzie's fondness for him, and they also shared the instability noted mildly in de Monzie, rampant in his protégé. De Monzie liked to be surrounded by handsome youths, and he was much in evidence as guide and protector to the young men of the Lot. For Louis Darquier he became éminence grise and alternative father, and as patron, role model and saviour he provided dangerous tolerance of Louis' singularities.

  Louis' troubles with his father never ceased. “He is not my father,” Louis used to say of Pierre, “he is a wolf.” Pierre Darquier was a strong man, given to violent tempers, a trait he passed on to his second son. Because of the tension between them, in 1909 Louis was sent across the street to board at the Lycée, but he was home again the following year, for at school his vehement personality and unpredictable temper, and his inability to fit in with teachers or fellow pupils, were all too obvious. In his last year at school, 1913–14, Louis was doing his baccalaureate in mathematics, but also won a prize for English, in the form of a visit to England. The outbreak of war in August 1914 seems to have put paid to this, as it ended most things for the Darquier family.

  The photographs of Louis as a child show the man he was to become: he stares straight ahead, reckless, with a bold and impudent eye. The descriptions given by those who knew him as a young man are much the same as those of his Vichy colleagues: “You must understand that Louis Darquier was a phenomenon… proud, pretentious…a swelled head, a gambler, a gadabout, an idler.”16 Although his mother's fluttering influence was obvious, no Cadurciens blamed his parents or his education for the man Louis Darquier became. “It was rather the atmosphere of the time, when anti-Semitism was normal and in no way shocking…it was the norm, the result of the anti-Semitism of reaction”17—reaction to the republic and its values.

  Louis Darquier's anti-Semitism flowered under the influence of a particular French tradition, imbedded in a dark side of the Catholic Church. The anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church is still a touchy subject, but in recent years the taboo surrounding its consequences has been broken and apologised for, by both the late Pope John Paul II, in uneasily vague terms, and by the prelates of France most specifically.

  Anti-Semitism has always been an integral part of Catholic instruction, based on the view that the Jews murdered Christ, always ignoring, and in some extreme cases denying, that Christ himself was a Jew. France, the eldest daughter of the Church, has sometimes distinguished itself by a tentatively independent, rational, not to say occasionally snappish, attitude towards its Vatican parent; indeed by 1914 only a quarter of French Catholics practised their religion.

  The Lot had no more than fifteen Jewish families before 1940, and Cahors was not openly anti-Semitic, at least until the decades of the Dreyfus affair. “I am not what you would call an anti-Semite ‘by tradition, ’ ” wrote Louis in 1938. “To tell the truth, I knew absolutely nothing about Jews until I became an adult. My father, a Dreyfusard and Radical mayor of a small provincial capital, was imbued with egalitarian and humanitarian ideals, and as we only had one Jew in the entire town (he was a little haberdasher who wore a fur hat in winter), he could not cause any trouble.”18 In 1978 however, he contradicted himself: “In Cahors we have never liked Jews…An ancient tradition.”19

  The Dreyfus case was the dominant event in French public life during Louis' childhood, a bitter crisis which polarised further a country of intransigent political and religious differences. The affair erupted in 1894, when an obscure Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly accused of selling national secrets to Germany, and after a secret court-martial was shipped by the army to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, in French Guyana. The case almost led to civil war, as those who rightly defended his innocence—Dreyfus was framed—fought the army and the Church. The furore dragged on for twelve years, and the acrimony for much longer, pervading the atmosphere in which Louis Darquier and his Vichy compatriots grew up.

  After Dreyfus, anti-Semitism became a “known thing” amongst the Catholic bourgeoisie. The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere, “to fight the religion of Jesus Christ and to dominate the world by the power of money.”20 Abuse like this was unceasing in the violently un-Christian polemics of certain Catholic newspapers, such as the popular Le Pèlerin and the daily paper of the Assumptionist order, La Croix, which happily claimed to be “the most anti-Jewish newspaper in France.” In the years of Louis' childhood these papers, with vast circulations, issued instructions in language of vitriolic hatred to “Black France”—the Catholic faithful—many of them, like Louise Darquier, members of the upper bourgeoisie. In the catechism used by the chaplain at the Lycée Gambetta—and in Catholic institutions worldwide throughout the centuries—Catholic propaganda shaped “the Conversion of the Jews” into a subject for childhood prayer. “Oremus”—“Let us pray for the perfidious Jew.”

  In Cahors, the priests at the cathedral were so bitterly divided during those years that “in the courtyard of the seminary, there was one part of it called “The Royal Walk,” frequented by those who were rather Action Française, and the democrats had another section of the courtyard, but they never mixed.”21 After the Dreyfus case, however, “The Church in Cahors was anti-Semitic.”22 The practising Catholics of Cahors usually went to eleven-o'clock Mass on Sundays at the cathedral. While hoi polloi gathered in the body of the church, the wealthy Catholic notables of the town, Louise Darquier among them, in descending order of importance, paid for pews near the stalls of the clergy.

  The Catholic journal Le Pèlerin, 3 January 1898 (© Archives du CDJC—Mémorial de la Shoah)

  Every week from 1897, the year of Louis' birth, the Catholic weekly of the Lot, La Défense, as virulent as La Croix and Le Pèlerin, was sold to devout parishioners after Mass, delivering the Church's instructions both political and spiritual. This was a successful weekly newspaper, its circulation, thirteen thousand, equal to that of the thrice-weekly paper of Louis' grandfather, the Journal du Lot. The faithful were directed to oppose the republic and all its institutions, to disapprove of socialism, and to be tolerant of parties and leagues of the extreme right. Strikes were the “insupportable tyranny of a group of irresponsibles,”23 irreligious school textbooks were denounced as “abominably doctored and distorted.”24 These messages continued through the decades. “We must bring an end to the corruption of the race,” La Défense announced in August 1940.

  Catholic France was by no me
ans the only source of the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, or of Louis Darquier; it had its own, French, philosophers. The Catholic Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in the mid-nineteenth century, friend of Wagner and a potent influence on Nietzsche and Hitler, was one such. Maurice Barrès, nationalist and populist orator at the turn of the century, who bequeathed to his followers a profound sense of decadence and decay, was another. But the father of French anti-Semitism was édouard Drumont,25 who, with the help of the famous nineteenth-century novelist and republican Alphonse Daudet, published his notorious book La France Juive in 1886, and whose La Libre parole became one of the most influential daily newspapers of the 1890s.26

  Drumont was a representative of Catholic anti-Semitism at its most un-Christian. He divided his Catholic world into pure and heroic Aryans, and impure and scheming Talmudic Semites. His best seller popularised the notion that Jews controlled French banks, property, universities, letters, theatre, press, media, prostitution—that in fact they controlled everything, and that France was now an enslaved nation in their thrall. Drumont linked Jews and Freemasons together, and his influence was at its apogee during the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s.

  Temperamentally, however, Darquier's true model was Drumont's contemporary and fellow anti-Semite the Marquis de Morès, the first French “national socialist.”27 This sombrero-hatted, red-shirted young aristocrat married an American heiress and spent some formative years in the North Dakota badlands, cattle-rustling and bringing ill fortune to the town of Medora, which he founded and named after his wife. After various disasters in the United States—for which, like Darquier in similar cir cumstances, he blamed the Jews—he consigned America to his personal mythology as Darquier would do later with Australia, and returned to France in 1887. Morès was fond of forming associations; he was a brawler and a ruffian who careered around with groups of bully boys and killed people himself rather than leaving it to others, as Darquier was to do. Both Morès and Darquier were self-publicists and sought money from Jew and Gentile alike. Darquier constantly made reference to Morès, and imitated both his aristocracy and his violence.

  But since the end of the nineteenth century the most important ally of the French Church—one it could often have well done without—was Action Française. If the Church gave Vichy France its belief system and language, Action Française, born of the Dreyfus affair, provided its rhetoric and its political blueprint. Action Française the movement, and Action française its newspaper, derived their character from the fanatical teachings of the classicist and intellectual Charles Maurras, and its journalistic genius from Léon Daudet, son of Alphonse. Léon Daudet was an erudite man of noisy charm, merciless yet given to occasional kindnesses, while Maurras, almost deaf from childhood, was the isolated—and thus revered—intellectual giant of the movement.

  Philosopher and poet, Maurras was also, crucially, a talented propagandist and, through Action française, published daily in Paris from 1908,he and Daudet incited the nationalist right to action. But despite the fact that Maurras considered the idea of a “Jewish Christ” unpalatable, and despite being an atheist himself, he nevertheless saw in the hierarchical arrangements of the Catholic Church the key organising force for those who would not accept the Revolution of 1789 and the republic which it established. So firm was his belief that everything engendered in 1789 was an aberration, an outcome of English and German influences with Jewish overtones, that he refused to call the Revolution “French.”

  Maurras' political philosophy (known as “Integral Nationalism”) called for the return of royalty, for a king who would bring about the return of the “real France” and banish “legal France,” the verminous republic and its democratic practices. He rejected parliamentary democracy and those he considered to be its rulers—Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and métèques, a word Maurras invented and which was speedily absorbed into the French language to describe all foreigners who lived in France.28

  This political stance Maurras adopted “like a religion.” He shared the views of the Church on authority, an alliance appreciated by the French Church for many years. The Catholic hierarchy printed articles from Action française for dissemination to its flock, used its arguments in sermons, and gave Maurras, his movement and his newspaper active and loyal support in public and in private. As Pope Pius X told Maurras' mother: “I bless his work.”29

  Both Maurras and Drumont became Louis Darquier's demigods, all the more so because Drumont insisted that Gambetta, Cahors' great hero of the republic, was in truth a Jew, and worse, a German Jew. The immense contemporary importance of Maurras is difficult to appreciate today, as is the reverence in which he was held as an intellectual. This was a man who attacked the 1926 film Ben Hur for being pro-Jewish, and who was “struck, moved, almost hurt” on his first arrival in Paris to find street names which he considered to be foreign and Jewish because they included a “K,” a “W” or a “Z.”30

  In the years in which the Darquier boys grew to manhood, Maurras was the leading nationalist figure. Action Française came to southwest France in 1904, when a branch opened in Toulouse, and later in Cahors and Montauban. By the time Louis was thirteen and Jean fourteen, the movement was holding badly attended meetings in the rue du Château du Roi in Cahors, though its influence was negligible. In Cahors its work was done by the Church and in the pages of La Défense.

  However, the Holy See was not always happy with its unruly ally, and with the advent of Pope Pius XI, in 1922, the Vatican tardily moved against its rival. Action Française was banned in December 1926, dismaying the thousands of priests, the hierarchy and the faithful who were its fervent followers—including eleven of France's seventeen cardinals and archbishops. But by then it was too late; the language of Action Française had entered the Church Militant, and given a certain kind of Catholic their marching song.

  With his colleague Maurice Pujo,31 Maurras composed the battle hymn for his movement:

  The Jew having taken all,

  Having robbed Paris of all she owns,

  Now says to France:

  “You belong to us alone:

  Obey! Down on your knees, all of you!” Insolent Jew, hold your tongue…

  Back to where you belong, Jew…32

  Insistence on purity of blood was only one of the doctrines Louis Darquier borrowed from Action Française. He also adopted their fixation on genealogy; in their attachment to the principle of monarchy, many members of Action Française assumed nobility, and bought, begged or lied about ancestors who would permit them to add a particule to their names. Denunciations of such assumed aristocracy by the vraie nobility were frequent, but Louis Darquier got away with it.33

  Gascony is the region to the south and west of Quercy, whose inhabitants are noted for their panache. Two of the most popular stories of Louis' childhood were Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, tales of daring Gascons, younger sons unfavoured by the gods, misunderstood, courageous, outspoken and heroically belligerent.

  When he appropriated his noble title—Baron Darquier de Pellepoix— Louis took it from the Darquier nobility in Gers, Gascony, and so claimed to be a Gascon. Anatole de Monzie was a true Gascon, but Louis Darquier's only fragile link to the region was provided by two of his great-great-great-grandparents, a baker and his wife of the name of Darquié or Darquier who lived in the little Gascon town of Tournan in the early eighteenth century. The name Darquier, and its variants Darquié, Darcher, Darqué, Arquier and d'Arquier, is found in state and parish registers in Toulouse and throughout many of the southwestern departments which surround it, including the department of Gers, ancient Gascony. In documents and records, many hundreds of these Darquiers rise from the past as servants, cooks, carpenters, chair porters, plasterers, hosiers, tinsmiths, tailors, secondhand clothes dealers, hat-makers and candle-makers.

  There was a noble family of Darquier/d'Arquié in southwest France, and it was two of its bachelor members whom Louis purloined for himself. One was
the famous astronomer Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix of Toulouse, who discovered the first planetary nebula in 1779—Darquier's Nebula.34 Antoine derived his name from his estate of Pellepoix, south of Toulouse. Louis' great-great-grandfather was a cobbler and street porter at the time the noble Darquiers flourished in that city, but a claim to being a mere by-blow was not on Louis' agenda. He appropriated the entireclan, and proudly added links to the bachelor Baron François Isidore Darquier, a Baron d'Empire, a Napoleonic title.

  Louis would work at his noble Gascon persona as he worked at nothing else, and to the end continued to claim absolute proof of his noble blood. Gascons were known for their boastfulness, bragging and unreliability, so that to “faire une offre de Gascon” in French means to raise false hopes. Louis Darquier was thus a spiritual Gascon, if nothing else.

  2

  The Convicts' Kin