Anne Darquier

Who was Anne Darquier?

Anne Darquier, a psychiatrist, was the daughter of the French fascist Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and his Tasmanian wife, Myrtle Jones.

Shortly after her birth in London, Darquier was handed over to the care of an English nanny, Elsie Lightfoot. She grew up in Oxfordshire, unaware of her father's role in the murder of French Jews in World War II. After clinical training at London's Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, she acquired her professional role in the early 1960s. During the late 1950s, she discovered the truth about the wartime Vichy France anti-Semitic atrocities that her father, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix had participated in, and became permanently estranged from him, much as she already had from her mother, Myrtle Jones. In 1970, she died of alcohol and barbiturates, not exactly a suicide but, as Carmen Callil wrote, "there are slow ways of trying to kill yourself not given that label."