The son of a Jewstice (no, not a Jew himself) Minister who served the Jewish campaign to outwardly save the Jewish traitor Dreyfus and actually complete the Hebish takeover of France, Darlan rose through the protection of France's Jewish-Masonic leadership to become grand admiral. He was so infatuated, like that whole "leadership", with the Jewtish model that he craved and got the British title of Admiral of the Fleet created for him and his Navy in 1939 by the same "French" government that was to declare war on Germany illegally a weeks later, as ordered by the "British" government: "Admiral de la Flotte". He belonged to the Alpina Lodge, but I don't know whether he was still active masonically after June 1940 since his government made Masonry illegal (and yet...).

Although he fulfilled his Navy's requirements for the performance of on board commands, his naval career was mostly an office one.

That said, he nevertheless was competent  and excellently put to execution the naval construction program designed by his predecessor Durand-Viel. His Navy gave a good account of itself in 1939-1940, though without any great naval battle unless one calls the land fighting against the Germans at Dunkirk under admirals Abrial and Platon (yes, the French for Plato, and a Huguenot to boot!) to enable the soldiers of the trapped "Allied" northern armies to flee the continent. which the British rewarded on the spot by doing their damnedest to prevent the embarkation of French soldiers, which of course rankled. The French naval officer corps ( "la Royale") by and large hated the "Republic" and having been a British ally in WWI, the Crimean War and against the Chinks in 1858 which had failed, to say the least, to eliminate the accumulated hatred of wars against England over six centuries, as Joe points out.

With France's defeat of 1940 and the "civilian" "leadership" running away, the admiral suddenly found himself Naval Minister as well, whereon he gave Britain the most solemn assurances that French warships would not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Germans, and his standing order to scuttle the Fleet was indeed executed to the letter on the one occasion when the Germans would otherwise have seized some ships after Darlan had gone to the Jewish side and lost his power over said ships, on November 27, 1942 at Toulon (southern France).

Churchill, for other purposes but feigning to fear a German seizure of the French Navy, caused his Navy to attack the disarmed (under the armistice between France and Germany) French one in the harbors  of Mers-el-Kebir (western Algeria) July 3, Casablanca (Morocco) July 6 and Dakar (Senegal -- those three countries being then as much of Africa, French possessions) July 8. In agreement with the new ruler, Marshal Pétain, Darlan responded merely with a tiny air bombardment of Gibraltar on July 5. There were further British attacks, both land and naval, during Darlan's tenure as Navy Minister. Even before the last of the July 1940 British attacks on the French, the German authorities had authorized the French to rearm against the British but the  French carefully avoided availing themselves of that possibility. It is therefore remarkable that the French, despite such unreadiness, were able to inflict the losses they did to the Jewish enemy's servants in Dakar in September 1940, Madagascar in May and December 1942, without forgetting their swift annihilation at sea of the attacking Siamese navy in the summer of 1940.

All along, like Pétain, Darlan's conduct followed a variation of the WWI mindset, to stay neutral, to negotiate interminably with Germany and give nothing, while waiting for the Americans to arrive in strength, apparently without consideration of America's being the enemy of all Europe, France included (I say America for McKInley was no Jew, but of course, post-Czogold, it was Jewmerica even though President Taft needed a lesson that made him a Jew-licker for the rest of his life -- he had dared disobey the Jewish order to denounce [no, Virginia, that doesn't mean to "condemn" and tear garments, oy vey, a Jewish phrase, but is the diplomatic term meaning to bring unilaterally to an end a treaty] America's commercial treaty with the Russian empire, after all, not for nothing had the 1916 peace negotiations been aborted through a government change in England so as to make the Balfour commitment, a year before the declaration of the same name and "Christian Zionist" animal, giving Palestine to the Zionists in exchange for them delivering America to the "Allied" side, which wasn't difficult given their already exiting preponderance in the American press, Wilson's pre-existing folly and his being under blackmail from the Jewish enforcer Louis Marshall; of course, the delivery of America had to wait for the Jew's advent over Russia, a done thing by the end of March 1917).

Darlan happened to have rushed to the bedside of his son, ill with polio, in Algiers, when the Anglo-Americans attacked Casablanca, Oran (the city by Mers-el-Kebir) and Algiers November 8, 1942. The French then fought the Anglo-American invader with their meager means until Darlan became convinced, like Pétain with whom he was in secret communication, that the attackers were strong enough to hold against a German response, although both the Marshal and the Admiral were disappointed that the "Allies" had not landed in southern France, still unoccupied by the Germans then, instead. Darlan was of course to be assassinated December 24, 1942.

On the other hand, Darlan had been a prime minister from January 1941 to April 1942, at the Marshal's pleasure. On becoming such, he acquired a deputy, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who sought a French-German alliance.

Benoist-Méchin, an early pan-European National Socialist, was quite awake to the Jewmerican peril, having been Randolph Heart's secretary some years earlier had been quite educational for him before he embarked in the thirties on writing his great multi-volume History of the German Army, actually a history of Germany's resurrection from the 1918 fall, of course untranslated in English, at least outwardly. A prisoner of war in central France by July 1940, he had convinced the German prisoner of war camp authorities to let him recruit his fellow prisoners to gather the wheat harvest in the area nearby. That done, the Germans had released the lot. In the fall of 1940; he wrote and published the story of that endeavor, which showed him as indeed a capable man in adversity.

In May 1941, Benoist-Méchin obtained Pétain's consent to an alliance proposal to Germany. In hindsight one can reckon that Pétain and Darlan meant that as further procrastination, but who really knows? That project has been made  actually known but through the published part of Benoist-Méchin's posthumous memoirs on his ministerial career that came out in the early 1990s. So Darlan and Benoist-Méchin arrived in Berchtesgaden on May 11, 1941, to be first shunted to Ribbentrop's castle near Salzburg and then (seemingly) inattentively listened to by Hitler who had to hide right then his real worry for Rudolf Hess in the guise of anger at the latter. And of course Hitler would have preferred to get his long sought agreement with England, all the more so given Jewish Russia's by then unmistakable offensive preparatory measures.

In the following weeks, Benoist-Méchin was to try to develop the French-German cooperation over allowing German  warplanes to refuel in Syria, then a French possession, on their way from Greece to Iraq where Rashid Ali had overthrown Britain's local stooge Noury Said (who had to wait until 1958 to be lynched by baathist and communists) and, a bit later, Britain having attacked Syria, after their reconquest of Iraq in a few weeks, to supply ammunition through neutral Turkey to the French forces in Syria despite being hampered even by many French officers in Syria who however were keen, come July 14, 1941, to surrender to the British but not to the latter's French sidekicks, the Gaullist traitors.

All those efforts by Benoist-Méchin and some others in the French Government, although mostly the former's, were never openly circumvented by Darlan.