Bad Faith: a forgotten history of family and fatherland Carmen Callil Jonathan Cape, 614pp, £20 ISBN 0375411313

Louis Darquier de Pellepoix has always been a shadowy figure. He was commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy government from May 1942 to February 1944, during the period of the most extensive round-ups of Jews for deportation, largely undertaken by the French police. But in most histories of Vichy, his name is merely mentioned, with little comment. He hardly features in the memoirs of his contemporaries. Even in works devoted to the Jewish question, we get no real picture of what the man was like.

In this fascinating and valuable book, Carmen Callil introduces us to the banality of evil. In comparison with Darquier, even Adolf Eichmann would have appeared charismatic. That such a man could achieve importance in wartime France tells us much about the Vichy regime which employed him, and about the German occupiers who imposed him on Vichy. We also gain some insight into the obscure motivations behind the activities of some of the monsters of that period.

Callil came upon her subject by chance. When she moved to London from Australia in the early 1960s, she went regularly to a psychiatrist called Anne Darquier. In 1970, Anne died. At the funeral, Callil noted with surprise that her name was in fact "Darquier de Pellepoix", though it meant nothing to her at the time. A couple of years later, watching Le Chagrin et la pitié, a film about Vichy France, she saw someone called Darquier de Pellepoix shaking hands with Heydrich, the butcher of the Jews. This set her off on years of research, which culminated in this book.

The author has discovered a great deal about Darquier's personal life, much of it at variance with the life story that the man made up for himself at various times. Louis Darquier (the aristocratic title "de Pellepoix", to which he soon attached "Baron", being an invention) was a monocled fantasist given to unsuccessful schemes for making money. In 1928 he married Myrtle Jones (or "Lady Workman-Macnaghten") from Tasmania, also a fantasist. Both of them floundered for money - and drank a great deal - during four years in England. A daughter, Anne, was born in Old Windsor and was entrusted to an English nanny who brought her up. The nanny was paid only sporadically, and after the couple moved back to France the money dried up altogether. Anne did not see her parents again until she was an adult.

In France, Louis continued his search for easy money. He became involved with the extreme right and was injured in the riots of February 1934. This led to his formation of an "Association of 6 February 1934", the first of many "patriotic" associations he founded, most of which were used as cash cows. By the late 1930s he had become a prominent anti-Semite and was being funded extensively by the Germans. In the first years of the occupation, Darquier emerged as one of the "Paris collaborators", pro-German and obsessively occupied with the "Jewish question". In 1942, the Germans imposed him on Vichy as a successor to Xavier Vallat, the traditionalist commissioner for Jewish affairs who, though strongly anti-Semitic, had taken a far less extreme line and assumed a far less pro-German stance.

Darquier's time as commissioner was marked by incompetence and venality. Vichy despised him, and even the Germans came to despair of him. He and his staff concentrated above all on the rich pickings to be made from the possessions of deported Jews. He spent much of his time theorising about the nature of "half-Jews", to provide further fodder for Nazi demands. His ineptitude and laziness were such that eventually the Germans dealt far more with René Bousquet, the head of police who was the chief organiser of the huge round-ups of Jews in 1942. In February 1944 Darquier was dismissed.

At the end of the war he escaped to Franco's Spain, where he lived until his death in 1980. He remained the spiteful figure he had always been. In 1978 he gave an interview to a French journalist in which he not only reiterated his venom against the Jews and denied the existence of the Holocaust, but also fingered his former colleague Bousquet, by then a successful French businessman.

Callil deals movingly with the ter- rible details of the treatment of the Jews in occupied France. Even more valu- able, however, is the picture we get of Darquier himself, whom the author rightly describes as "a mountebank and a chancer". Did he believe in all his anti-Semitic propaganda or was it merely another way of "making something of himself", by joining the one area of society - the pre-war anti-Semites - where he could cut a dash and, at the same time, tap sources of money?

Whether Darquier believed what he said or not, his sub-ordination of everything to his own interests had something childlike about it. Callil describes him as "playing games, pulling wings off butterflies, dispensing cruelty like liquorice water". It was the German conquest of France that gave Darquier the opportunity to deploy these characteristics on a grand scale. 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 neces- sary phrases, and to ignore the call of humanity.

Richard Griffiths is the author of An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism (Duckworth)

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