Word: darlan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While the British Navy still seemed to rule the seas, Darlan favored the British. He had been Chief of the Naval General Staff since 1936, and at the beginning of the war he was indeed so floridly Anglophile that Vice Admiral Emile Muselier (now an ardent De Gaullist) cabled him: "You are renouncing the whole of the French naval policy dating back to the 18th Century and abandoning the sovereign rights of France." In 1939 fluently English-speaking Admiral Darlan reviewed the British Reserve Fleet at Portland with King George. After Dunkirk, King George gave Darlan a special decoration...
...real ascendancy began when he became Assistant Chef de Cabinet under his Godfather Leygues at the Ministry of Marine. Under Godfather Leygues there were never delays in Darlan's promotions. At 48 he became the youngest rear admiral in 50 years of French naval history. Godfather Leygues gave him the Order of Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in 1933 left the Admiral most of the big Leygues fortune. When Darlan became Chief of Staff he recommended himself for the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Since the fall of France Marshal Pétain has given...
Everybody's Friend. The Admiral has constantly and glibly shifted his politics to suit his career, always obliging the man in charge-whether Blum or Chautemps or Daladier-just as today he obliges Adolf Hitler. Whenever Governments changed, Darlan usually called in the newspapermen and asked them to forecast him as the next Minister of Marine. He is a great eater and drinker, and on the night France collapsed he luxuriated so heartily and publicly at Bordeaux's Chapon Fin that the next day a number of his brother officers, with an ethical fastidiousness almost Japanese, resigned their...
...Darlan's political intrigues have brought him few if any friends among France's naval aristocracy, which, by tradition at least, keeps its mind on warships. He has a wife, as retiring as the Admiral is not, and a son, Alain, who recently quit the Navy, where he had been a code officer, in favor of the insurance business. Social superiors of Darlan like to call attention to his French-bourgeois habit of wearing a wing collar, which has earned him the nickname of "The Tax Collector." But all this the Admiral can and does ignore...
Last week Vichy put on sale throughout Unoccupied France 50,000 handsome portraits of Vice Premier Admiral Jean Francois Darlan-suitable for framing...