Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland

by Carmen Callil

Carmen Callil is a publisher and writer and she found out that somebody she knew was related to this man who at the time was the Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, an absolutely awful man in every way – not just in his anti-Semitism, but in his private life and everything else. There’s a lot in the book about the person Callil knew – the guilt and the family story afterwards. But the elements in it about collaboration and how the collaborators – and a very unpleasant collaborator in particular – lived, about that kind of existence, are very vivid and very graphic and very moving.