Bad Faith. A Forgotten History Of Family And Fatherland

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2006
Edition: First Edition

Description: 614 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout. The only exception are some light age marks on page edges. Responsible For Sending Many Jews To The Gas Chambers, After The War Lived In Spain And Never Brought To Justice.

Publishers Description: This brilliant book tells the story of one of historys most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, who managed the Vichy governments 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. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, social cachet, women and drink, he became one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War, and after it was over he decamped to Spain, never to be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews, men, women and children, to the camps. 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 an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story of honourable but exhausting ambition is woven through the narrative. In Carmen Callils masterful and harrowing account, Darquiers ascent to power during the years leading up to the Second World War comes to mirror the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. It is a portrait of a society as fragmented and desperate as any before the war, trading miserable second-rate philosophies in search of meaning and power, and of how the people of Vichy turned a blind eye to the shameful things being done under their noses. Epic, elegiac, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance, in a world in which man-made horrors challenge the very idea of justice. Author Biography Carmen Callil is Australian and was born in Melbourne in 1938. She came to the U.K. in 1960. A book publisher, in 1972 she founded Virago and ten years later became Managing Director of Chatto & Windus. She is the author (with Colin Toibin) of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. She lives in London.

ISBN: 9780224078726