JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 375
Continuing my series of posts on The History of Blank and Empty (and Missing) Things, I come to this beautifully designed French pamphlet of 1931. The design is of less interest than what happened to its author, the exceptionally problematic and traitorous Jacques Doriot. Now Doriot (1898-1945) started off liberally enough, shooting out soon thereafter to explore the very furthest reaches of The Deep Left, and then, when that didn't quite work out for him, blasting off to the nether regions of the wincingly bad singularities of The Deep Right. He scratched at the edges of political extreme idealisms, waiting for something to happen, something that would get him greater fame or more-reaching political power, but his fate would intercede.
Doriot began his career as a Communist and would do fairly well, politically speaking. A member of the Communist Party since 1902, he would become Mayor of St. Denis (near Paris) and a member of the Chamber of Deputies. A difficulty would arise and he quit the party, becoming a Fascist over the next few years. On the invasion of France, Doriot became a Nazi firebrand, committing himself to the cause, and living in lickspittle Vichy France.
Like another fellow ex-pat (Ezra Pound), Doriot made vicious anti-French/communist and pro-Nazi radio broadcasts from Paris in 1940 and 1941. In that year Doriot would take an uncommon step, a step towards disappearing, when he and Marcel Deat founded the Legion des Volontaires Francais (contre le Bolshevisme) (LVF)), which was a combat unit of French Nazi sympathizers that fought with the Wehrmacht.(Over time and the wear of war it was also known as The 33. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne (französische Nr. 1) and Charlemagne Regiment, as new elements were formed to replace the lost.) I could imagine that no one saw them as anything but pathetic, even their Nazi commanders, who would put them into the meatginder on the Eastern Front. The LVF was decimated and all but gone by the end of the war, though Doriot, somehow, survived it (with an Iron Cross awarded him in 1943), until he was killed by a strafing plane on 22 February 1945. The survivors of these groups met bad ends at the hands of the French (and the Soviets of course); some were imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor; many were summarily executed.
Groups like the LVF take their members and spin off towards oblivion, much like the Spanish pro-Franco troops that went to fight for the Nazis and were disappeared, or the poor black slaves of the (Western Band of) Cherokees who were made to fight with their Indian masters for the Confederacy, a deeper, darker place I could not well imagine.
(A detail of the crowd scene of the pamphlet on Communism and Unemployment.)
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