Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland

"Carmen Callil is a publisher and writer and she found out that somebody she knew was related to this man who at the time was the Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, an absolutely awful man in every way – not just in his anti-Semitism, but in his private life and everything else. Actually, there’s a lot in the book about the person Callil knew – the guilt and the family story afterwards. But the elements in it about collaboration and how the collaborators – and a very unpleasant collaborator in particular – lived, that kind of existence, are very vivid and very graphic and very moving. Because again the whole collaboration side has been swept under the carpet in France. Obviously de Gaulle swept a lot of it under the carpet immediately after the war. It took time to come out, bit by bit. Even Mitterrand, when he was president, from 1981 to 1995, he protected the Vichy police chief, René Bousque. Bousque was a great friend of Mitterrand’s – but he was the man who actually staged the Jewish round-up in Paris in 1942. This man became a deputy after the war, he was the director of a newspaper, he got the Legion d’Honneur. He was assassinated in the end – though not because of the war. But the whole collaboration thing was something people didn’t talk about very much in France. De Gaulle’s line, when he reasserted the state in 1944, was that Vichy, and everything done under Vichy, had been illegitimate, so it didn’t exist. He had had the state with him in London. And when Pétain and Laval were tried after the war, the whole anti-Semitic thing, and the Holocaust, was not mentioned at the trial. It was all about the armistice of 1940, how they’d betrayed France by making peace with the Germans. Through the 1950s and 1960s it was not talked about. The French most certainly hadn’t come to terms with it – Mitterrand keeping up this friendship with Bousque who was absolutely terrible. Jacques Chirac was the first President who said: ‘Yes, look, we have to face the fact that we were part of the Holocaust, and what the collaborators did.’ For all his faults, Chirac was the person who really came forward and said that. For a long time, at the Gare d’Austerlitz – from which a lot of Jews were transported to Auschwitz – there was just one little tiny plaque, where you could see that this had happened. Under Chirac there was much more, there’s a memorial; there’s much more awareness recently. But then, you’ve got a new twist: the relationship between second-generation North African Arab immigrants, who are Muslims and Jews in France and you get flare-ups between them. It’s a very uneasy part of French history, still. It was the combination of the collapse and defeat in 1940. People would say: ‘Oh, it’s overdone, Britain would have collapsed too.’ But Britain didn’t actually, there was a difference. Not just the French army was defeated. The amazing thing is the French actually had more planes and tanks than the Germans – and bigger and heavier tanks. They were just hopeless at their tactics and how they used them. It was a complete collapse of morale by the army and by millions and millions of civilians who just fled. The refugee floods along the roads just blocked everything up. It was like the collapse of a nation, in 1940, of the Third Republic system, which had really given people nothing to fight for at all. There’s this feeling that France imploded and then you have the Jewish persecution on top of that – and the collaboration. There were quite extreme cases of collaboration, particularly towards the end of the war. All this is something that France has found very difficult to get to grips with. At a press conference after the Six Day War, he spoke of Israel and the Jews as a dominating, sure-of-themselves people. That appeared to be anti-Semitic but for de Gaulle that was probably actually praise – he liked dominating people who were sure of themselves. He had a bit of a cloth ear about this kind of thing, so he was genuinely surprised by the reaction that it aroused. It was still a very live issue. Then you had heavy French support for Israel earlier on, and supply of weapons – Mirage planes to Israel. You had a definite link through Algeria, because a lot of the Algerian settlers who were Jewish were very anti-Arab, anti-independence. I just wrote a piece for the Jewish Chronicle here, ‘Was de Gaulle anti-Semitic?’ And the answer is no, but you could make the case… He never said anything about the Jews in World War II or apologised. There were various attacks on the horrible ideology of Nazism, but for de Gaulle – and this was his world view – this was part of the ongoing struggle between France and Germany. Several times, in conservation with Churchill, he would say: ‘It is Germany, it is the German people who are our enemy – they are always France’s enemy.’ He very rarely said the Nazis and I don’t know of any reference to the Holocaust that I found in de Gaulle."