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| Bad Faith is a book of passion and anger which, nonetheless, manages to keep its head as a significant work of history
Mark Bostridge Independent on Sunday
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Bad Faith tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier ‘de Pellepoix’, Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’, who managed the Vichy
government’s dirty work, ‘controlling’ its Jewish population.
Born into an established, politically moderate family, Louis Darquier (‘de Pellepoix’ was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to dissemble his way to power, continually reinventing himself in conformity with an obsession with racial purity and the latent anti-Semitism of the French Catholic Church. As Commissioner for Jewish Affairs he was responsible, with other men of Vichy, for the despatch of Jews to the death camps and for the confiscation of their property. Thousands of children went alone to the gas chambers. After the Second World War he decamped to Spain, never to be brought to justice.
Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under a mantle of silence. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative.
In Carmen Callil’s masterful, harrowing and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier’s ascent to power during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, elegiac, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance.
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| Bad Faith represents eight years of astonishing research…a remarkable book
Antony Beevor Sunday Telegraph
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| A meticulous work of scholarship… [an] astonishing biography
Adam Thorpe Guardian
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| A superb exploration of the fractured mind of French anti-Semitism
Simon Heffer Literary Review
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| A work of phenomenally thorough, generous and humane scholarship... Callil understands anguish, and lays bare its causes with clarity and precision. Bad Faith exemplifies what Primo Levi called the ‘continuous intellectual and moral effort’ that is the only adequate response to the events described here
Hilary Spurling Daily Telegraph
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| Extraordinary…touching…a masterpiece of lacerating satire
Peter Conrad Observer
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| In providing such a detailed picture of one of the functionaries of the Nazi empire, Callil has brilliantly shown how such a system could encourage and promote nonentities who were prepared to mouth the necessary phrases, and to ignore the call of humanity
Richard Griffiths New Statesman
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| The story she has uncovered is so strange and powerful that it would be an unusual reader who was not profoundly moved
Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday
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| We cannot know what Anne Darquier would have thought of Callil’s book, but my guess is that she would have been as moved, astonished and impressed as any other reader
Ruth Scurr The Times
More
Information
Jonathan Cape • Biography: historical • Previous
ISBN: 0224078100
Publication date: 06/04/2006 • 640 pages • 228mm x 149mm • EAN: 9780224078108 |
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| Buy Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
and other great titles from rBooks.co.uk. |
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