History: In 1970, at the funeral of her therapist, Anne Darquier, Carmen Callil discovered her full surname was actually Darquier de Pellepoix. Some weeks later, watching Marcel Ophuls's history of Vichy, Le Chagrin et la pitié, she saw the name again. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was the Vichy "Commissioner for Jewish Affairs". Her English therapist was the daughter of a French Fascist. Callil, known mainly for her influential role as a publisher, started digging and, in Bad Faith, she presents her discoveries.
The Darquiers, from Cahors in south-west France, were typical Third Republic bourgeoisie, powerful, well-connected and, in the case of Louis's mother, anti-Semitic. Of her three sons, two got the anti-Semitism virus, with Louis, born in 1897, being the most severely infected.
He had a good Great War but in 1918 was thrown out of the army in disgrace. During the 1920s, he lost a succession of jobs because of the same incompetence and delinquency that ruined his army career. But to Louis Darquier, the fault lay elsewhere. All the firms were Jewish owned. The Jews had it in for him.
At the end of the decade, he married a failed Australian actress, Myrtle, a fantasist and a boozer like he was. They saw out the Great Depression in London, where Louis, who had perfect English besides flawless German and French, wrote unpublishable novels in between flitting from hotel to hotel to escape his and Myrtle's creditors.
Anne, Callil's therapist, was born in 1930 and farmed out to a nanny in Oxford. The Darquiers were supposed to pay for their daughter but they rarely did. Nor did they see her until she was a teenager and the next war was over.
In the mid-30s, poverty drove the couple back to Paris. Money, or the lack of it, along with hatred of the Jews, was to be the principle thread of Louis's life from now on. In 1934 he was elected to the Paris city council and started his career as a professional anti-Semite, in which role he was secretly financed by the Nazis.
When war came, he was back in French uniform. He fought competently, was captured and then, the Germans recognising his value, released. After two years of scheming in occupied Paris, he finally achieved what he had striven for all his political life, power over the Jews, when he was made Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.
Louis, in post, largely avoided real work. He left the deportations to the Vichy police chief, René Bousquet. What work he did was administrative. He introduced the law, for instance, that required all Jews - French and foreign - to have the word "Juif" or "Juive" on their identity cards.
Most of his energy, though, was devoted to pleasure. He looted Jewish assets and spent his booty in the best bars, hotels and restaurants, sometimes with Myrtle, more usually with old fascist cronies or a succession of mistresses.
He and Myrtle were in that very select band of French residents who actually gained weight during the occupation.
Post-Liberation, Louis went to Madrid where sympathetic Francoist officials gave him a new identity. He also got a new mistress by whom he had a daughter. However, when Myrtle, who'd gone to England in 1945 on her Australian passport, re-joined him, he dumped the mistress and farmed the child out, exactly as he'd done with Anne.
Thereafter, Louis worked as a translator and language teacher, while Myrtle drank and wrote endless letters to her family in Australia about "Louis, her war hero". Naturally, his trial in France and the death sentence he received there were never mentioned.
Myrtle died, unmourned except by her husband, in June 1970. Louis also seemed destined for an obscure death and this would have been his fate except that, in 1978, he gave an extraordinary interview to Philippe Ganier-Raymond of l'Express. Its title, a quotation from the interview, was: "In Auschwitz they only gassed lice", and its substance was Holocaust denial of the vilest type. The interview provoked a scandal in France, destroyed Bousquet (then a successful businessman protected by François Mitterrand) and led to calls for Louis's extradition to France. But, slippery to the end, he died in 1980 before anything was done.
Louis's enemies dubbed him the Vichy Eichmann. He wasn't. Goebbels would be the better comparison. His work was polemical not practical. He created the climate that made mass murder possible while preferring not to bloody his hands.
On a personal level, he was a brutal husband (he beat Myrtle mercilessly though he also loved her, as she acknowledged) and, with Myrtle his equal here, he was an appallingly neglectful parent. Anne's reaction to both parents was a mix of fury and despair and she found the hurt they had inflicted unendurable.
In August 1970, Myrtle having just died, she saw her father in Madrid and, early in September, after a night of booze and barbiturates, she died on her bathroom floor a few hours before Callil rang her bell. It was suicide in all but name.
This important book, detailed, scrupulous and fair minded, will be a challenge to all Holocaust deniers. It's also a hugely readable book that tells a story that is more incredible than the stories told in most modern novels. But then the truth so often is, which explains both why non-fiction currently supersedes fiction in the affections of so many readers, and why this book will enjoy considerable success, which it deserves.
Carlo Gébler is the Writer Fellow at Trinity College. He is currently working with Patrick Maguire jr on a book about the 1974 Guildford bombing
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland By Carmen Callil Jonathan Cape, 614pp. £20