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This book is at times fascinating and at others rather dull. It is the burden of the biographer to follow the subject's trajectory through life without deviating from the facts, whether those facts make diverting reading or not. The self-styled Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, born simply Louis Darquier, was an unscrupulous self-serving opportunist who, having failed at everything else, made a career of antisemitism and presided over the extermination of thousands of French jews. His laziness, incompetence and venality lost him the respect even of his associates in villainy, and only a succession of fortuitous circumstances and a certain instinctive cunning kept him in office for so long.

This is a curious book. The biography of this thoroughly wicked man is bookended by another biography, that of his wronged but admirable daughter Dr Anne Darquier, to whom the author professes a debt of gratitude. Reading the early chapters was uncomfortable for me because the storyline felt contrived, distorted by an emphasis on someone who, while having personal importance for the author, appears not to be otherwise very significant. I had a strong suspicion that Callil would have done better to have written a biography exclusively about Louis Darquier "de Pellepoix", and to have left her friend quite out of it. I need not have worried. Anne's life justifies her place in the book. It rounds out her father's story by bringing the reader close to one who he hurt firstly through neglect and latterly by the horror which she was to learn to be his legacy.

Callil's research is very impressive, and it is not hard to forgive her a couple of dubious generalisations about Australian life and mores (Anne's mother was Australian). Her grasp of French political actors and events, particularly on the antisemitic right, is nothing short of compendious. I think I could not have read this book without frequent reference to wikipedia in French, for the actors, ideas, movements, parties and events are just too bewilderingly numerous to make sense of without the necessary background information. Given the sheer complexity of the story which Callil has to tell, it is a blessing that her written expression is so very clear. I don't think I found a single typo or non-sequitur in the entire 400+ pages of the book, which is further enriched with photographs, family trees, maps, appendices, index and bibliography.

I would recommend this book to anyone with a strong interest in French antisemitism, the Occupation, the Vichy government or the rather lackadaisical post-war pursuit of French war criminals. Callil makes clear the important distinctions between French and Nazi antisemitism and between Roman Catholic and secular dictatorships. I was also quite struck by one particular remark, and it may one day serve me as point of departure for my honours dissertation in French, if I should ever go so far:
"In one sense the years 1940 to 1944, for the French people, had little to do with the world war raging outside their occupied territory, but much to do with what the French did to the French, and how they ended the long civil war which had begun with the Revolution in 1789" (p. 373)

This is an admirable book about a despicable but centrally placed mid-level actor at a very dark time in French history.