tale of a nazi chemist

L’Oréal, the French cosmetics giant, whose advertising campaigns proclaim “because you’re worth it”, was found guilty of racial discrimination for considering black, Arab and Asian women unworthy of selling its shampoo.

France’s highest court was told that the group had sought an all-white team of sales staff to promote Fructis Style, a haircare product made by Garnier, L’Oréal’s beauty division.

via. Some things don’t change. L’Oreal’s founder, Eugene Schueller, was also an early member – and major funder of - La Cagoule, a rightwing French terrorist outfit in the thirties. Schueller later went on to found the Social Revolutionary Movement, a pro-Nazi group which amongst other things bombed eight synagogues one night in October 1941. Other members went into the Milice, the Vichy paramilitaries. Some eventually wound up in the OAS.

Postwar, Schueller used his company as a kind of jobs laundry for collaborators, appointing wanted war criminals to foreign subsidiaries and finding posts in the French operation for less prominent Vichy figures, including a certain Francois Mitterand.Mitterand went on to bigger things, but L'Oreal had a number of French nazis hanging round in executive positions till the early nineties. It's hard not to believe that this had a certain long term effect on the company's culture.

Comments

[dsquared]

Oooh, Cagoule! I ought to do that in Secret Society blogging! As you know Bob, the slightly silly name actually just means "Hood" in French; the society took its inspiration from the Ku Klux Klan.

They believed in "synarchy"; basically a system of government which took Marxism, took Catholicism, took nationalism and said "all of these guys have points, but what they're all missing is a lot of weird occult hippy bollocks and an amazingly bogus prehistorical pedigree going back to the ancient Indo-Europeans". Nobody on the internet seems to have made the link between synarchism and the Cao Dai in Vietnam btw, but it's obviously there, so this is also a case where Empire started coming back to infect the mother country.

[jamie]

"Nobody on the internet seems to have made the link between synarchism and the Cao Dai in Vietnam btw, but it's obviously there,"

That's a fascinating thought. Maybe some similarity to the way that the early radical right in Britain saw the imperial Indian government as a model.

[Phil]

Nobody on the internet seems to have made the link between synarchism and the Cao Dai

Thanks to a faulty memory, I've just spent a quarter of an hour chasing down the link between Arnold Toynbee and Soka Gakkai, neither of which has anything to do with synarchism - although there are dozens of LaRouchite pages denouncing synarchism (considered as a conspiracy to impose world government) which also denounce Toynbee.

So, er, never mind.

[jamie]

Sometimes I really like my comment boxes.

[Chris Williams]

_Sometimes_? God, man, we make this blog. Without us you'd just be one of the two or three best journalists in northern England.

There are rather a lot of interesting police-related blowbacks from empire as well - I wrote half a half-decent article on this a couple of years ago. Yr man Graham Greene was also aware of this tendency - in _It's A Battlefield_ (one of the early, commie ones) he gives us the sinister ex-Indian Police, Assistant Commissioner.

[ejh]

Without us you'd just be one of the two or three best journalists in northern England.

More likely without us he wouldn't be.

Do the LaRouchites denounce Arnold's granddaughter too? Everybody else does.

[Phil]

I think she gets a mention. They're the kind of conspiracists who don't like people to feel left out.

[ajay]

Ah, the Cao Dai! Definitely one of the odder religions of the world. I visited their main temple or whatever they call it in the Mekong Delta last year. Covered with eyes, within and without, like something out of the Book of Daniel. Decent regalia too. They basically ran (IIRC) Can Tho province for several years before the Saigon government moved in and hammered them back in the late 50s.

And I've been keeping a weather eye open for counterinsurgency tactics popping up back in the US - though given the normal approach of US local government and policing, a bit of FM 3-24 would probably count as a distinct improvement, if not intolerably left-wing.

So that's L'Oreal and Hugo Boss both off the shopping list then. Anyone else?

[Richard J]

The guys who made those cool-looking German half-tracks ended up getting taken over by Massey Ferguson, which should influence your next tractor choice.

[ejh]

It's all John Deere round my way.

[jamie]

So that's L'Oreal and Hugo Boss both off the shopping list then. Anyone else?

Taittinger, Coty, Dior, Renault, Chanel...just on the French side.

[Richard J]

ajay> This seems vaguely relevant to your point re: counter-insurgency seeping back in...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22741

[Alex]

Boss, Chanel, Dior; Mussolini did say he was going to give Italy style, after all. Which raises further questions.

(Perhaps this is why I spend so much time in a Fred Perry shirt? Only worn by neo-nazis.)

[Richard J]

I'm tempted to see if I can pitch for a new series with Adam Hart-Davies - 'What the Nazis did for us'.

(If he can do one about the Romans...)

[ajay]

Chanel and Boss, yes, but what's the story with Dior?

Vidal Sassoon, OTOH, is OK - authentic London anti-fascist streetfighting boy.

[jamie]

Wrong Dior, possibly. Thinking back I may have mixed up Christian with his nephew Francoise, who married Colin Jordan. Dior senior was a small scale collaborator though, at the level of dressing SS officers wives, etc.

[jamie]

Sorry, that should be "dressing the wives of people who mysteriouysly found themselves in Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht".

[ajay]

I'm tempted to see if I can pitch for a new series with Adam Hart-Davies - 'What the Nazis did for us'.

Actually, "what the Jews did for us" would be rather an interesting one. Ep 1, the House of Rothschild and the Napoleonic Wars. Ep 2, the Manhattan Project...

[Richard J]

Ep 3 American popular and literary culture.

I can't help but feel it might be slightly-counterproductive, mind...

[ajay]

Very possibly. OK, I'll scrap it.