Simon Heffer
SWEPT UNDER THE CARPET
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
By Carmen Callil (Jonathan Cape 614pp £20)

The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation
By Richard Vinen (Allen Lane The Penguin Press 448pp £25)

There are two problems with the Dunkirk myth, and the passing of sixty-six years seems to have done little to solve them. The first is whether it is a myth at all, or whether a huge victory really was snatched from what, on paper, looks to have been a pretty serious defeat for the British, escaping after an ignominious retreat. The second is how far the French betrayed the British, or the British the French, or how far the fortunes of war made everything mutable. This substantial and highly readable book by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore helps the reader towards a reliable estimate of both points, which is not the least of its virtues.

Attitudes, though, have never been black and white. After the purges of 1944-45, whose climax was the execution of the Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval and the sentencing to death (commuted to life imprisonment) of the 89-year-old Marshal Petain, French society seemed to draw a veil over what, to put it mildly, had been an unhappy episode. War criminals who had helped the Nazis deport Jews and round up dissidents went unpursued, even when tried and sentenced in absentia. It became impolite to discuss such things, as the Fourth and Fifth republics set about constructing and maintaining the myth of social unity as a means of recovery from the trauma.

That was why in 1969 Marcel Ophuls' four-and-a-half-hour documentary Le Chagrin et la pitie - which recounted events during the occupation in France in general and the Auvergne capital of Clermont-Ferrand in particular - caused such outrage that it was not shown on French television until 1981. Throughout the documentary, a series of interviews demolishes the myth brick by brick, as interviewees reveal their contempt for other sections of French society and expose the frequently less-than-heroic behaviour engaged in at the time. France's rampant Anglophobia is also exposed, with the occasional expression of the view that, after the capitulation, France was better off as a neutral bystander while the two apparently equally appalling nations of Britain and Germany slugged it out.

Worst of all for those who chose to avoid reality was Ophuls' use of newsreel footage, showing (for example) French functionaries shaking the hand of Heydrich as they busily went about his mission of removing Jews from the face of the Third Reich.

One such functionary, pictured in full obsequiousness in the film, was the preposterously named (indeed, mostly self-named) Baron Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Darquier - to give him his real handle - is the subject of Carmen Callil's superb exploration of the fractured mind of French anti-Semitism. His estranged and neglected daughter, Anne, was Callil's psychiatrist in the 1960s. It was only when Callil attended Anne's funeral in 1970 (she seems to have committed suicide at the age of just 40) that she saw her full name of Darquier de Pellepoix. Further investigations revealed her to be the daughter of a man who, having spent the 1930s leading various fascist and anti-Semitic rabbles in France, found himself abundantly qualified to be Vichy's Commissioner with special responsibility for dealing with the Jewish problem. To say - as is true - that Darquier organised the notorious round-up of Jews in 1942 at the Velodrome d'Hiver, and in the end facilitated the transfer of 75,000 French Jews to the death camps, suggests a man of far greater meticulousness than was really the case.

The man called 'the French Eichmann' was a drunk, a braggart, a womaniser, a fantasist and someone whose devotion to his duties, while absolute in principle, was less so in practice. Even the low-life Vichy Government found him repellent, and he was cold-shouldered by them. At the end of the war he and his bizarre ex-actress Australian wife, Myrtle, managed to escape to Spain, where for some years he taught English. Tracked down in the 1970s by journalists, he tried to put his own gloss on the hideous events in which he had participated. Great shame too, however, falls upon the French authorities, who never sought to bring Darquier to justice except in absentia, acting on behalf of a people whose own complicity in his murderous acts was greater than many of them would still care to admit. The gradual pursuit of French war criminals such as Maurice Papon and Rene Bousquet (Darquier's colleague and rival in the messy business of ethnic cleansing) from the mid 1970s was largely driven by the media, not least because so many politicians of the period had much to hide.

Callil gives the full story of Darquier, from his birth to a popular and successful doctor and his wife in Cahors in 1897, through his brave if unreliable service in the Great War, to a life bordering on fantasy (in which he sponged ruthlessly off his family), a life that he constructed with the equally dishonest Myrtle. Like too many disaffected after the Great War, he made the Jews an easy scapegoat for his and his country's troubles. A sojourn spent in cheap hotels in England, forever fleeing from creditors, saw the birth in 1930 of Anne, who was immediately dumped on a nanny whom the Darquiers soon stopped paying. It was only thanks to this woman's humanity and self-sacrifice that Anne was not consigned to an orphanage, and managed to have a career. Meanwhile, Darquier had used some largely bogus genealogical research to tack on the de Pellepoix suffix to his name, and to make himself a Baron. Callil's researches give a valuable insight into this irredeemable man, and therefore into a whole poisonous subculture that actively seems to have welcomed the Nazi overthrow of France. But they also suggest that, whatever the revenges of 1944-45, the French never did more than just go through the motions of dealing with their pro-Nazi elements, which is partly why the sore remains so livid even now.

Richard Vinen's book is a refreshing contrast to those stodgy histories of the Occupation that deal solely in the high - or, more often, low - politics of the period. This is a history of the French people under occupation from their point of view, using their own accounts and records of everyday life. After dealing with the humiliation of 1940 and the establishment of Vichy, he looks in detail at the lives of significant groups of the French, though with less emphasis on the Resistance than is usual in such works. Vinen's aim is not to concentrate on either the heroics or the frequent wickedness of daily life under the Germans, but to present a picture of what was a remarkably normal existence for a majority of people, who chose simply to get on with their lives.

He mentions the often surprisingly courteous relations that the Wehrmacht had with the conquered people, contrasting them with the barbarism of the Gestapo towards the Maquis and the terrifying reprisals that took place - such as the slaughter of whole villages - as the Germans were being driven out in the summer of 1944. He examines the fate of Jews, though not in such a specific fashion as Callil, and reveals how certain hill towns in the south became havens for Jewish refugees - the Germans lacked the right vehicles to access them, and so never bothered. He deals with the everyday survival of the French people - much of their food and wealth were being sent to Germany throughout the occupation, as, before long, were many of their workers. There was also the fate of prisoners of war, many of whom were disappointed when not repatriated immediately after their country's capitulation; and he writes with tact and without prurience about the other great feature of the occupation, that of horizontal collaboration, and the women who found themselves abused, paraded (often naked) through the streets, their heads shaved in the orgy of self-righteousness that followed the liberation.

Finally, Vinen deals with the other great postwar French myth: that the French had, somehow, liberated themselves. Vinen's is an immaculately researched, well-written and original book, so compelling in its narrative that one regrets he did not carry the story on to the attempt by de Gaulle to govern France, and up to the failure of the attempt in 1946. Soon these events, part shameful, part heroic, will no longer be part of living memory. It is as well they are recorded as carefully and honestly as possible in preparation for that day.