BAD FAITH by Carmen Callil (Knopf)
In Germany and the countries it occupied, the Nazis had a knack for dredging up and empowering a host of weaselly charlatans, most of whom were inveterate anti-Semites and not a few of whom were degenerates, pimps, pornographers, thieves, or bully boys. But for their viciously effective patrons, most of this crew would have languished at the bottom of Europe's demimonde. But vaulted to positions of power (at least over the weak), they helped wreak terrible damage.
Louis Darquier, who served from 1942 to 1944 as the commissioner for Jewish affairs in France's collaborating Vichy government, epitomized these effluvia of Nazi rule. A mountebank (he bestowed upon himself a noble title), an improvident sponger constantly on the run from his creditors, a wife-beating womanizer, and a braggart, the gallivanting, monoclied Darquier cut a ridiculous figure even among the rabble of 1930s French far-right anti-Semites.
He had, however, some powerful benefactors even then, including the Nazis, who clandestinely helped fund his Jew-baiting propaganda before the war. After their conquest of France, they elevated him, though they found him an irksome blowhard, and eventually succeeded in foisting him onto the Vichy government, even though Marshal Petain, it's untratradionalist head of state, despised him.
As a functionary Darquier was indolent and ineffective (and one of the very few who managed to put on weight during the war). He hated Jews, but essentially left the tedious work of administerding the Final Solution to France's highly competent civil servants - most infamously Rene Boussquet, Vichy's head of the police, who was later shielded from prosecution by his friend Francois Mitterrand, the French president.
Still, Darquier spearheaded the hateful portrayal of Jews in the media and academe; he also looted Jewish property with abandon and sold certificates of Aryanization to the highest bidder. On his watch France's Jews were forced to wear the yellow star, and 12,884 of them - including 4,051 children - were hunted down in the notorious roundup of July 1942 and sent to internment camps, from which most were dispatched to their deaths at Auschwitz.
After the war he escaped to Spain, where he lived unmolested and unrepentant (he famously told an interviewer that at Auschwitz the Germans had gassed only lice) until his death, in 1980.
Callil, one of Britain's most lauded editors and publishers, came to her subject in a terrible fashion: as a young, unhappy woman, she was treated by a leading Jungian psychiatrist who, in 1970, killed herslef while Callil was under her care. That woman, Callil learned a few years later, was the daughter, whom Darqier and his alcoholic Australian wife had abandoned as an infant in 1930 during one of their low-life sprees, (really good journalism here, quite objective, NOT! - Diana) and who at adolescence had become acquainted with her father's repugnant past.
Callil arrestingly weaves the sad story of Anne Darquier's grungy life, the chaos and plitical passions of the waning years of the Third Republic, and the sleazy intrigue and backbiting of the Vichy regime.
Poster Comment:
The next book review after this one is about a book called, "A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?" by Boyd Hilton (Oxford), which outlines the supposedly dispicable behavior of the British in the period 1783 - 1846. Here is a portion of it:
"Industrialization blighted the country's North and Midlands; prompted the majority of it's population to shift from the country to putrid, overcrowded and unregulated towns and cities, with their dark, satanic mills; and caused a demographic calamity: a generation was literally stunted, and life expectancy in the industrializing areas dropped to levels unseen since the Black Death"
This long article goes on portraying the English as little more than barbaric animals.
There appears to be a trend lately to demonize all Europeans as being less than human and certainly antisemitic, even those countries who fought the Nazis and suffered and died under their rule. History is being twisted now to portray the situation as All Of Europe vs. The Jews.
It's becoming painfully obvious that as time goes on, the seething resentment against ALL Europeans only grows; it's no longer only the Germans, it's now all of us. And who ever hears of Japan's role in WWII anymore?