Françoise Dior

Marie Françoise Suzanne Dior (7 April 1932 – 20 January 1993) was a French socialite and neo-Nazi underground financier.

Marie Françoise Suzanne Dior was born on 7 April 1932, the daughter of Madeline Leblanc and Raymond Dior, a left-wing journalist and the brother of French couturier Christian Dior and Resistance fighter Catherine Dior.

Her father Raymond, who had been employed at the family business headquarters in Paris for some years, was a Communist International sympathizer, to the despair of his own father Maurice Dior, a fertilizer industrialist.

Raymond was involved with the satirical gazette Le Crapouillot and embraced radical ideas, advocating the '' conspiracy theory, that is the belief that 200 French industrial and financial families are responsible, in his own words, "for all the ills of the land".

Raymond was bisexual, and scholar Graham Macklin notes that Françoise's biological father could have been Valentin de Balla, a Hungarian nobleman.

Dior's attraction to Nazism emerged in her childhood, during the Nazi occupation of France.

According to historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, "one of the sweetest memories" of Dior was the compliment "What a beautiful little Aryan girl" made to her by an SS-man in Paris.

She was initially a fervent royalist and took an interest in the study of pre-Revolutionary France.

Dior came to believe that the ideals of the French Revolution were in reality a cover for a global conspiracy led by international elites whose aim was national degeneracy.

On 27 April 1955, Dior married Count Robert-Henri de Caumont-la-Force, a Grimaldi descendant of Prince of Monaco Honoré III, with whom she had a daughter.

Dior came to be disappointed by traditional aristocracy and her marriage turned out to be unhappy.

The couple divorced in 1960.

Having heard in the press of the Trafalgar Square rally held by British neo-Nazi activist Colin Jordan, she travelled to England in the summer of 1962 and became a frequent visitor of the London headquarters of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a neo-Nazi organisation led by Jordan.

The latter began courting Dior and introduced her to Savitri Devi; Dior and Devi became close friends from that moment.

Dior used her fortune and social network to support the creation of the French chapter of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS), an Anglo-American neo-Nazi organisation established by Jordan and George Lincoln Rockwell at the Cotswold Camp in August 1962.

Upon her return to France, she began to head the national section of the WUNS.

While Jordan was imprisoned following a 1962 conviction for establishing a paramilitary group, Dior became engaged for around a month in June 1963 to another NSM member and friend of Jordan, John Tyndall.

Savitri Devi was unable to attend the wedding; she had been banned from Britain following the Cotswold founding camp of the WUNS in 1962.

Only three months after her wedding to Jordan, the couple separated, again attracting sensational coverage in the press.

Dior-Jordan, as she was by then calling herself, was rapidly disillusioned by her husband's leadership qualities and publicly dismissed him as a "middle-class nobody".

The Daily Mirror ran a front-page headline reading, "Nazi Told: 'Marriage is Over'", with the subheading "You're no Leader, says Françoise".

The next day, the paper ran another story with the headline "Please – I love you says Führer", quoting Jordan as he reportedly begged Dior to "please, please, please come home".

Dior and Jordan reconciled once she was convinced of his ability to lead the NSM, which had proven to easily fall into factionalism.

Dior remained influential within the NSM in London.

She was the niece of French fashion designer Christian Dior and Resistance fighter Catherine Dior, who publicly distanced herself from her niece after she married British neo-Nazi activist Colin Jordan in 1963.

She was a close friend of Savitri Devi.

Dior brought former Waffen SS officer Claude Jeanne to the movement, who founded the West European Federation (FOE) in 1963 – a WUNS branch encompassing France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Spanish Basque Country and Romandy.

However, her success in recruiting former high-ranking Nazis and members of the social elite turned out to be limited.

Jordan proposed to her in September 1963 during a flight to Britain; his relationship with Dior soon took priority over the movement.

After a civil ceremony held in Coventry on 5 October 1963, where demonstrators hurled rotten eggs and apples at the couple as they gave the Nazi salute, Dior and Jordan had a second wedding on 6 October at the NSM headquarters in London.

The photographs and newsreel footage of the ceremony – illustrating them mingling blood after cutting their ring fingers with a dagger before letting a "unity drop" fall over an open copy of Mein Kampf – were published widely by the press.

The guests gave the Hitler salute and the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" was played.

Dior also stated, "All I want is little Nazi children."

Dior's mother rejected the marriage, saying, "We want to have as little to do with this sad affair", and adding that she would not allow Jordan into her home.

Following the media coverage of the events, her aunt Catherine Dior, a Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor, issued a press release denouncing "the publicity given by the press and television to [her] niece Françoise Dior's nonsensical statements. The fame of [her] brother Christian Dior must not be used to highlight the scandal and risk tarnishing a name carried with honor and patriotism by members of my family."

By the time the police dissolved the FOE in May 1964, the group had only 42 members, most of them social misfits.

That event contributed to a growing feud between the two allies, which led to a split within the NSM in 1964.

Upon Jordan's release, however, Dior chose to marry him instead.

On 31 July 1965, she was involved in an arson committed by six NSM members against the Ilford and Lea Bridge Road synagogues.

Dior was also the official WUNS representative in France by that year.