Bad times in Vichy France

A good book can be driven by a great hatred, as this one is: the “bad faith” of the book’s title is the Catholic Church, to which Carmen Callil ascribes every hateful, odious and vile episode in Vichy France. Such episodes there were aplenty: and it is impossible to revisit the account of the children of Drancy without descending into a kind of despair for the whole of humanity. Yet, in Ms Callil’s canon, even the Nazis come a pale second to “the great unpunished” – the Vatican, and the centuries of anti-Semitism to which she ascribes France’s stained record during the Vichy years.

But credit where it is due: Ms Callil happened upon an extraordinary story, and turned it into a voluminous quest over many years and several countries, producing a work of 614 pages which is an important addition to the studies of Vichy.

The starting story was this: several decades ago, Carmen Callil (Australian-born feminist and publisher) had a London psycho—analyst called Dr Anne Darquier. For seven years, Ms Callil visited Dr Darquier to heal what she calls the purgatory of her childhood. One morning in 1970, Anne Darquier was found dead from an overdose, possibly accidentally. She was an unhappy person who had “gone to pieces”.

At the cremation, Callil noticed that the woman’s full name was Anne Darquier de Pellepoix: and when she saw Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la Pitié she glimpsed a Vichy official, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, shake the hand of the murderous Reinhard Heydrich. The quest had begun of tracking the life of Louis Darquier – Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs – and his Australian, alcoholic wife, Myrtle. It soon emerges they were a ghastly pair who had abandoned their daughter Anne to be brought up by a child-minder in England.

As a prelude to the nastiness of Louis Darquier, comes the nastiness of the Catholic church: that, as Callil sees it, was the seedbed of virtually every element of collaboration, racism and fascism in French society. The author does history a disservice by not explaining the back story to the hostilities between the Church and the Third Republic when church schools were forcibly closed, religious orders attacked physically, and the State confiscated monastic assets such as the Grande Chartreuse.

Neither does she give proper consideration to the complex economics behind the rise of French anti-Semitism, which really started in the 1870s with a desperate recession: it seemed that while weavers, milliners and small artisans were starving, big banks and department stores associated with Jewish names were visibly thriving.

Nothing excuses anti-Semitism: but where there are hatreds, the roots have to be examined truthfully. The Marxists were not wrong in saying economics are central in these matters. Callil denounces the author Celine – and he was a stinker – and yet his book Mort a Credit is a key text about the starvation wages of the small artisans at a time when big business was into an early phase of globalised profitability.

And so she intersperses the life of Louis Darquier and Myrtle Jones through the “belle époque”, the First World War, the 1920s and the darkening 30s. Sometimes her evidence contradicts her thesis. Louis Darquier is associated with Catholic anti-Semitism, yet he grew up with radical and republican traditions: his education was secular: and his family were pro-Dreyfus. Something happened to him around 1934 which turned him into an obsessive anti-Semite. Callil places much emphasis on the influence of Charles Maurras of Action Française. She constantly links Maurras with right-wing Catholicism, only once slipping into the text that Maurras was an atheist: and the Vatican anathemised Action Française in 1926. For Callil, this was “tardy” – though well before Darquier’s involvement with Maurras.

Anne Darquier grew up in England with her child-minder, sometimes supported by Australian relatives (Protestants, but also anti-Semitic), and managed to get to Oxford. Her parents never properly reclaimed her, and she was rather a pitiful loner. At the end of the war, her father escaped to Madrid, where he survived for nearly four more decades, giving the French magazine L’Express a highly disturbed interview in 1978. He is described as little better than a conman: but he was a lot worse, and a problem with this story is that the central characters seem to have no redeeming traits whatsoever.

But the book has: it is written with passion and researched with industry. It takes on a huge canvass, and the picture, even if distressing, is rich in detail and story. Yet the central theme - that it was the “bad faith” of Catholicism which produced French anti-Semitism and all that followed - is ludicrously over-simplified. If it was so, why were so many dreadful anti-Semites secular or atheist – Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, Maurras, Rabatet, Celine - and not a few – Laval, Doriot, Deat - former Communists or Socialist-Pacifists?

Callil’s text opens the way for another study of Vichy, which examines the Catholic church’s failures, errors, and sins of omission and commission with painful honesty: but with the attention to complexity and nuance which are missing from this partisan tome. ENDS.

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland. By Carmen Callil Jonathan Cape. Price £20.

The Tablet: 15 April 2006.