Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland, and Vichy France » (Reprint)

Carmen Callil was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1938, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1960. A book publisher, she founded Virago Press in 1972 and ten years later became managing director of Chatto & Windus. She is the author (with Colm Tóibín) of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. She lives in London.

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,” who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, “controlling” its Jewish population.

Though he is one of the less remembered figures of the Vichy government, Darquier (the aristocratic “de Pellepoix” was appropriated) was one of its most hideously effective officials. Already a notorious Nazi-supported rabble-rouser when he was appointed commissioner, he set about to eliminate the Jews with particularly brutal efficiency. Darquier was in charge of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up in Paris in which nearly 13,000 Jews were dispatched to death camps. Most of the French who died in Auschwitz were sent there during his tenure. Almost all of the 11,400 French children sent to Auschwitz—the majority of whom did not survive—were deported in his time. In all, he delivered 75,000 French to the Nazis and, at the same time, accelerated the confiscation of Jewish property, which he then used for his own financial gain. Never brought to justice, he lived out his life comfortably in Spain, denying his involvement in the Holocaust until his last days.

Where did Louis Darquier come from? How did this man—a chronic fantasist and hypocrite, gambler and cheat—come to control the fates of thousands? What made him what he was? These are the questions at the center of this extraordinary book. In answering them, Carmen Callil gives us a superlatively detailed and revealing tapestry of individuals and ideologies, of small lives and great events, the forces of government and of personalities—in France and across the European continent—that made Vichy possible, and turned Darquier into its “dark essence.”

A tour de force of memory, accountability, and acknowledgment, Bad Faith is a brilliant meld of grand inquisitive sweep and delicate psychological insight, a story of how past choices and actions echo down to the present day, and an invaluable addition to the literature and history of the Holocaust.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Bad Faith is Ms. Callil's expert investigation of [Louis Darquier de Pellepoix's] life and crimes. Though she had known that Dr. Darquier hated her father, Ms. Callil had not realized there was such good reason for the daughter's enmity. But the scope of Bad Faith makes it much more than the story of one family's dark secrets. This book becomes a quietly devastating history of Vichy France's anti-Semitic machinations…[it] is written with dry, elegant sang-froid. Ms. Callil, who lives in London and has had a long and distinguished career in publishing, makes optimum use of understatement, since the evidence of Louis's corruption, vanity, thuggishness and greed is so self-explanatory.