Bad Faith
A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Bad Faith tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and con men—Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and “Commissioner for Jewish Affairs” in France’s Vichy government.Darquier set about to eliminate Jews in France with brutal efficiency, delivering 75,000 men, women, and children to the Nazis and confiscating Jewish property, which he used for his own gain. Carmen Callil’s riveting and sometimes darkly comic narrative reveals Darquier as a self-obsessed fantasist who found his metier in propagating hatred—a career he denied to his dying day—and traces the heartrending consequences for his daughter Anne of her poisoned family legacy. A brilliant meld of epic sweep and psychological insight, Bad Faith is a startling history of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bottomless corruption, political and personal, of French fascism is explored in this absorbing biography of one of its most loathsome figures Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy regime. A violent anti-Semite and paid Nazi propagandist before WWII, he helped organize the deportation of French Jews, including thousands of children, to Auschwitz during the German occupation. Callil sets Darquier's public career in an unsparing reconstruction of his sordid private life. A ne'er-do-well who sponged off his family while falsely styling himself an aristocrat, Darquier abandoned his infant daughter, Anne, to an impoverished London nanny. (Anne grew up to become the author's psychiatrist; her possible suicide in 1970 sparked Callil's interest in her family.) Callil's contempt for her subject is evident: his best features, in her portrayal, seem to be the incompetence and laziness that prompted his removal from direct supervision of deportations. Through her superbly written, meticulously researched, densely novelistic portrait of Darquier, Callil (who founded Virago press and was managing director of Chatto & Windus) takes an uncommonly penetrating look at the malignity of fascism and the suffering of its many victims. 32-page photo insert and 19 photos throughout.
