Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland - Hardcover

Callil, Carmen

3.89

140 ratings by Goodreads

9780224078108: Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224078100 ISBN 13: 9780224078108

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2006

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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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Review:

"astonishing book" -- Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

"superb exploration of the fractured mind of French anti-Semitism" -- Simon Heffer, Literary Review

A meticulous work of scholarship... [an] astonishing biography" . -- Adam Thorpe, The Guardian

A significant work of history. -- Independents on Sunday

A work of great power and originality that shines a light on a shadowy period of French history. -- The Sunday Times

Bad Faith represents eight years of astonishing research...remarkable book’ -- Antony Beevor, Seven Sunday Telegraph, 9 April 2006

Books of the Year. Chosen by George Melly.
-- The Sunday Telegraph

Extraordinary...touching... a masterpiece of lacerating satire. -- The Observer

Gripping immediacy -- Christopher Hudson, Evening Standard, 03 April 06

‘Bad Faith represents eight years of astonishing research...remarkable book’. -- Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph

From the Publisher:

The story of one of history's most despicable villians told by a brilliant author

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