Bretty Dangel

Béatrice  “Bretty” Dangel, Lover of Georges Mandel, guardian of Claude Mandel, George Mandel’s daughter,  actress and member of the Société de la Comédie Française.  As shown here, Bretty was the first female television announcer in France, in the mid-1930s.

Bretty Dangel was an actress who became the lover of Georges Mandel, one of the few Jewish French politicians in the 1920s and 1930s.  Unlike Leon Blum,  the first Jewish Prime Minister in France and Mandel's contemporary, Mandel was center-right in his political leanings.  But far earlier than most French politicians of the right or the left, including Blum, Mandel became an opponent of appeasement.  By 1934, Mandel realized the great danger the rise of Hitler and German ambitions in Europe posed to European peace and constantly, albeit fruitlessly, urged his fellow ministers to take a stand against Hitler.  His views endeared him to Winston Churchill but won him few friends in France, and the everlasting hatred of Hitler.  

Mandel had a daughter, named Claude, who was only ten years old in 1940 when the Germans invaded France.  Mandel was a strong believer in resisting the Germans and vehemently opposed the Armistice and the rise of Petain.  In June, 1940, Mandel brought Claude, Bretty, and their Senegalese servant Baba Diallo aboard the Massilia, a ship the French government had commissioned to take those politicians who wanted to continue the fight against the Germans by establishing a government-in-exile, to French Morocco.  Tragically, Winston Churchill tried to persuade Mandel instead to flee to London, where Mandel, who had more cachet and political expertise than De Gaulle, could have led the French Resistance.  Instead Mandel chose to remain in French territory, and it was while he was at sea that the fateful vote was taken in France that gave full powers to Petain and established the Vichy regime.  When Mandel returned to France, he was arrested and interned, along with a number of Third Republic political figures, including Marx Dormoy, the subject of our new project, Vengeance:  Vichy and the Assassination of Marx Dormoy.  Dormoy and Mandel were the only two of these detainees to be assassinated, Dormoy in 1941, and Mandel by members of the French Milice in 1944, ironically, just before the Liberation of France. The Nazis also despoiled Mandel's apartment in Paris, as they did those of many other Jews, and took at least one painting and a Chinese commode, both of which were brought back to France and eventually returned to Claude Mandel.

Bretty and Claude were assigned to residence in the same hotel in the city of Montelimar, the Relais de l'Empereur, where Marx Dormoy was sent, and Bretty and Claude, and Baba Diallo were there when Dormoy was killed.  Claude and Bretty later went to the city of Pau, from where Claude wrote a heart-wrenching letter to Petain after her father's assassination.  Link to Claude Mandel's letter to Petain. 


Addition from Annette:  Bretty Dangel (real name, Anne-Marie Bolchesi, 1895-1982) and Claude Georges-Mandel (1930-2003) guarded faithfully Mandel's memory and papers all their lives.  Nicolas Sarkozy wrote a book about Mandel in the 1990s that was made into a TV film:

http://philippepoisson-hotmail.com.over-blog.com/article-le-dernier-ete-de-claude-goretta-un-certain-georges-mandel-65410582.html

I spent a wonderful day in the Forest at Fontainbleau in 1986 with a group of friends, running, climbing rocks and picnicing. Today I learned that Mandel was assassinated in that forest.  He was a great French hero, never once swayed by the attraction of the Nazis---always a defender of democratic society.  As a politician he suffered because of the power of the right in France during the war.  As a Jew, he felt the full force of antisemitism in his time.