Anne Darquier

Anne Darquier (1930 – September 1970), a psychiatrist, was the daughter of the French collaborationist Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and his Australian wife, Myrtle Jones.

Shortly after her birth in London, Darquier was handed over to the care of an English nanny, Elsie Lightfoot. She grew up in Oxfordshire, unaware of her father's role in the murder of French Jews in World War II. After clinical training at London's Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, she acquired her professional role in the early 1960s. During the late 1950s, she discovered the truth about the wartime Vichy France anti-Semitic atrocities in which her father, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix had participated, and became permanently estranged from him, much as she already had from her mother, Myrtle Jones.

In 1970, she died of alcohol and barbiturates, not exactly a suicide but, as Carmen Callil wrote, "there are slow ways of trying to kill yourself not given that label."[1]

Notes

  1. ↑ Callil, quoted in David A. Bell, "The Collaborator", The Nation, posted 22 November 2006 (11 December 2006 issue, p. 28–36). p. 35.

References

  • Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, London: Cape (2006). ISBN 0-375-41131-3
  • Kathy Brewis, The villain of Vichy France, Sunday Times, 19 March 2006. (Includes a photograph of Anne Darquier as a child.)
  • Peter Conrad, Vile days in Vichy, The Observer, 26 March 2006.
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