Carmen Callil
Carmen Callil founded the Virago Press and is now a critic and writer. Her latest book, Bad Faith, is about Vichy France and Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. She is currently working on Oh Happy Day, a book about about 19th-century England, Ireland and Lebanon, and her ancestors’ lives there at that time.
Books by Carmen Callil
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.
Interviews with Carmen Callil
The best books on The Other France, recommended by Carmen Callil
Author and founder of Virago Press decries the absolute silence of the church during the Holocaust, and discusses five books on the “dark and murky side” the French have now “faced up to”
Interviews where books by Carmen Callil were recommended
The best books on The French Resistance, recommended by Jonathan Fenby
The historian and author chooses five books on de Gaulle and the Resistance. He says the British tried to veto de Gaulle’s famous 1940 speech from London calling on the French to stand up to German occupation
