why no francoise dior e-girl????

what a basically self-published 2013 memoir tells us about the psychology of post-war nazism

Francoise Dior – niece of the designer Christian and prominent 1960s Nazi – has a bad reputation. Or, from another perspective, very possibly the one she might take, she has a good reputation.

In the 2021 television series Ridley Road (based on Jo Bloom’s 2014 novel of the same name), about British fascists in the 1960s, she is portrayed as extremely glamourous and extremely evil, a purring French fashion heiress and unreconstructed Nazi. In the BBC audio series The Lovecraft Investigations, her occult practices take centre stage: she’s an offscreen villain, implicated in the suicide of her own daughter and described, along with her friend Savitri Devi, as an important post fascist and as being among “the most reprehensibly human beings who ever walked the Earth”. Daniel Trilling’s book on the history of the British far-right, Bloody Nasty People, is not sensationalist, but still sketches a portrait of her as a “wealthy heiress” before relaying a contemporary account of her 1963 marriage to British neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan (she wore a diamond encrusted Swastika necklace and the pair, “over a Swastika draped table, swore that they were of untainted Aryan blood, cut their fingers and let the mingled drop of blood gall on to an open page of a virgin copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf”. Jordan viewed the ceremony as more press event than anything else). There was a spike in interest in Francois Dior when John Galliano, the creative director of the fashion house founded by her uncle, resigned following an antisemitic outburst (reportedly saying, “I love Hitler”), and black and white videos from the 1960s circulated of the well-dressed, heavy-lidded Francois espousing her fascist beliefs. It’s this sultry and ideological image of Dior that animates one question I found posted online by a politically suspect twitter user: Why no Francoise Dior e-girl?

Dior is not a well enough known figure for the claim that she has been substantively misunderstood or misrepresented to hold real weight; she would need to be more understood and more represented for that to be the case. None of the facts most commonly repeated about her, with the possible exception of the assertion that she was uncomplicatedly wealthy, are untrue. She was beautiful; she was a Nazi and an occultist; her engagements to the two most prominent British fascists of the day in short succession – first John Tyndall and then Colin Jordan – led to a rift that would have lasting impacts on the British far right. She did have a sexual relationship with her own daughter and then goad her into a ritual suicide.

But pictures can be accurate and still misleading; damning facts can still be coaxed into an impression the subject might find flattering, leaving online Nazis wondering why she’s never been e-girled. This is what is happening when one stumbles across the Dior laid out as an evil, aristocratic heart breaker, and an important figure in a sinister international network. It all sounds a little like Tyndall’s view on her during their brief engagement (“She is a beautiful, Nordic blonde, of French aristocratic background, and a fanatical Nazi”, he told George Lincoln Rockwell in a letter), and I am not sure, with such people, one wants posterity to sound so much like praise.

A different picture of Dior emerges, however, in the memoir of a man named Terry Cooper. Active in Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement in the 1960s, Cooper began an affair with Dior (he was cited by Jordan in the divorce filing) that was to last the better part of 20 years, living with her in London and then in France. His memoir, Death by Dior recounts their life together.

Cooper’s relationship with Dior began in the house on Princedale Road in Notting Hill that served as the headquarters of Jordan’s operation. He was 19 and working as her secretary; she was a 33 year-old divorcee. Cooper is a strange and probably unreliable narrator, and one who feels little need to impose a traditional narrative structure on the events of his life. The book’s subject is Dior, but we also learn about Cooper’s mystical obsession with cathedrals; his lurid teenage sexual adventures with the girl next door, and her mother; the job market in 1960s London; his later careers in France as, among other things, veterinary technician, ambulance driver, bomb maker for Breton nationalist groups, and even, he claims, sometime agent for the French secret police. The overall impression is of an amoral man attracted to extremes rather than an ideologically committed Nazi. He’s also, and at no point is this satisfactorily explained, friends with former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

According to Cooper, Dior was inducted into Nazi beliefs by the Swedish diplomat Ragnar Kumlin, with whom she had a relationship. He came to Paris in 1956, and interestingly, Cooper is the only source I could find suggesting Kumlin was an avowed fascist. Cooper asserts that was only some time after Christian Dior’s passing in 1957 that Francoise became convinced that a Jewish plot was behind the death of her beloved uncle. After her marriage to Jordan ended and she returned to France, she became interested in the occult via the works of Rene Guenon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cooper’s accounts of Tyndall and Jordan are not sympathetic. The men were involved in a litany of hate crimes and violent disturbances across the 1960s, and both spent time in prison (Jordan was also punched in the face by Labour cabinet minister Dennis Healey at a hustings in the run up to the 1965 Leyton by-election), but it’s their personal failings, not their political activities, that Cooper derides. Dior viewed Jordan as a “Fuhrer in carpet slippers”, and Cooper’s view of him is of a similar mould, citing the fact that he brought his mother on his honeymoon as one of the signs of Jordan’s sexual and emotional disfunction. Jordan, for his part, dismissed Cooper as a “homosexual who could get [Dior] drugs”. Tyndall, today best remembered as the founder of the British National Party, is depicted as a huge crybaby: when he heard the press reports of her marriage to Jordan he “cried his eyes out for over a week in his cell”, and on another occasion is depicted crying at his mother’s house, when nobody will pay attention to him during his birthday party. His idol was Oswald Mosley, the Labour MP turned leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists; Tyndall would dress up and spend hours impersonating Mosley’s speeches in front of the mirror (at his mother’s house, obviously).

In 1965, Dior became the French representative for the World Union of National Socialists, an organisation formed by Jordan and George Lincoln Rockwell. In his book on the Nazi occultist Savitri Devi, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports that Dior’s position, by dint of their friendship, bolstered Devi’s connections with the international fascist movement. According to Cooper, Dior’s position as a leading French Nazi seems mostly seems to consist of advertising in the far right newspaper Rivarol and being unhappy with the responses, and having to deal with Savitri Devi coming to stay for long periods. Death by Dior features a large cast of Nazis, criminals, child abusers and former concentration camp guards, none of whom receives treatment anything like as withering as that reserved for Devi, who is depicted as (like pretty much everyone else in the book) sexually weird and completely incompetent, getting them in needless trouble with the police, never washing, and ordering a thousand of tins of cat food by mistake. Cooper reports that, secretly listening in on an allegedly high level meeting Devi had with a visiting South African Nazi, all he heard were banalities and a request for a kind of laxative you couldn’t get in France.

Despite her insane friends, bizarre and abusive sexual habits (she particularly liked to seduce old ladies and struck up an affair with her daughter, itself a reflection of a relationship she’d had with her nanny as a young child), and obvious stupidity, Cooper’s love for Dior is clear. “I would have blown up the Eiffel Tower for her”, he writes, a romantic statement that has real weight when it comes from a former bomb maker. When, not long after the beginning of their relationship, she was arrested in relation to a series of arson attacks on synagogues, Cooper loyally visited her every day in Holloway prison. His view of Dior is not, however, uncritical. He is not blind to her witlessness and the shallow nature of her commitments, both politically and to other people. During her time in prison Dior was taken in by a con-woman, and is bailed out by her mother – who had previously pimped out the teenage Francoise to any willing aristocrats – only on the condition that she is no longer allowed to manage her own finances. Cooper looks after her in the aftermath, and they moved to the small Normandy town of Ducey, where he ran the household and she meditated, without much success (“somehow the spirit always missed her”).

If the memoir has a denouement, it is the plot by Francoise and Cooper to convince Dior’s teenage daughter Christiane to kill herself. There is no material motivation – money, inheritance, blackmail – for this; they are just sick of her. Sometimes children just have bad vibes. Francoise and Christiane had become avowed Satanists, and the couple convince Christiane that the way for her to ascend to the next spiritual level was to hang herself, which, after a failed attempt, she does. They face no material consequences for the plot, and Cooper lays out his culpability remarkably clearly (something he absolutely does not do in regards a bank robbery that left two dead for which he was fingered by the French police, involvement in which he strenuously denies in the memoir). Perhaps the statue of limitations on Christiane’s death has passed, or perhaps Meghan Markle-hating royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell’s Dynasty Press, who published the book, had lawyers read it over (seems unlikely). Christiane’s ashes were entombed in Pere Lachaise cemetery, but when after a time Francoise runs short of cash to pay for the memorial, they’re dumped in a mass grave. Dior and Cooper separate not long after, seemingly amicably (he marries and has a son; she marries for the third time), but she becomes increasingly haunted and regretful about Christiane’s death. Cooper is not a man who seems to believe in very much, but he does seem to believe in the potency of Satanism, and reports that on her deathbed in 1993, Dior was convinced that she was being consumed by flames.

While the temptation to depict such people as suave and sinisterly considered is understandable, Dior’s utterly irredeemable life stands as a reminder that reckoning with people as dangerous does not mean hiding from the fact that they are also maladjusted, incompetent and profoundly stupid. Succession’s fictional billionaire Logan Roy famously rebukes his children by telling them that they are not “serious people”. He’s right, they aren’t; but does it matter? Francoise Dior was not a serious person; she could not manage her own life or finances, was taken in by everything and everyone. This did not stop her doing evil things. I find myself thinking of this Dior conundrum often: that how considered or capable, how serious, a person might be is not ultimately a relevant moral consideration.

Serious person or not, the question remains: why no Francoise Dior e-girl? There’s room for her, you’d think, on the feeds that mingle fashion with eating disorders with fascism. She could be looking out at you from a mood board, with her Swastika pendant and her peroxide hair: the aesthetics work. I think the reason why she’s never been claimed in this way is because she was too earnest: the modus operandi of the e-girl is plausible deniability, a coating of irony applied to all statements that makes them slippery. There is none of that with Dior, who was too blunt and too stupid and too disinclined to couch her beliefs in anything but morbid sincerity. If Dior’s paramours were poor men’s Mosley’s, Dior doesn’t make the cut as the poor man’s Diana Mitford, Mosley’s society beauty wife; she’s closer to Unity, Diana’s insane younger sister who shot herself at the outbreak of World War 2. The people looking to make online idols of historical figures need to be able to convincingly paint them as cool, hot, desirable, and there’s just nothing hot about shooting yourself for Hitler, or whatever it was Francoise Dior was doing.

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Along with Terry Cooper’s Death by Dior, this piece was informed by the following:

Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasm for Nazi Germany 1933-39 by Richard Griffiths

Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo by Paul Jackson

Failed Fuhrers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right by Graham Macklin

Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right by Daniel Trilling