Bernard Faÿ

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Bernard Faÿ (3 April 1893 - 5 December 1978) was a French historian of Franco-American relations^[1] and an anti-Masonic polemicist. He knew the United States at first hand, having studied at Harvard, and translated into French an excerpt of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans^[2] and wrote his view of the United States as it was at the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.^[3] He also published studies of Benjamin Franklin^[4] and George Washington.^[5] Faÿ was a friend of Gertrude Stein and of the American composer Virgil Thompson, who owed to Fay his access to French intellectual circles, for Faÿ knew everyone in musical and literary Paris.^[6] In 1935 Fay wrote La Franc-Maçonnerie au XVIIIe siècle, soon translated as Revolution and Freemasonry 1680-1800, to prove that the Freemasons were responsible for the French Revolution.

At the beginning of the Second World War he was a professor at the Collège de France. He was appointed administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the occupation, and Director of the anti-Masonic service of the Vichy Government. During his tenure of this office, his secretary Gueydan de Roussel was in charge of preparing the card indexes containing 60,000 names drawn from archives seized from secret societies, which Marshal Pétain was convinced were at the heart of all France's troubles;^[7] lists of names of Masons were released to the official gazette of the Vichy government for publication, and many Catholic papers copied these lists in order to induce public opprobrium. Fay edited and published during the four years of the Occupation a monthly review Les Documents maçonniques ("Masonic Documents") which published historical studies of Freemasonry together with essays on the role of Freemasonry in society and frank anti-Masonic propaganda.^[8] Fay was reputedly responsible for the death of many Freemasons, and nearly 1,000 deportations to concentration camps in Germany.

Despite his anti-semitism, Faÿ, who was gay and dated a Gestapo agent for much of the occupation, had protected Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the time. Stein wrote a letter on Faÿ's behalf when he was tried as a collaborator following the Liberation.^[9] In 1946, a French court condemned him to dégradation nationale and forced labour for life, but the historian managed to escape to Switzerland five years later. Appointed to an instructorship at the Institut de la Langue française in Fribourg, he was later forced to resign in the face of student protests.

Barbara Will is completing a book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma.

[edit] Notes

^ Fay, Bibliographie critique des ouvrages francais relatifs aux Etats-Unis (1770-1800 (1925) and L'Esprit revolutionnaire en France et aux Etas-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1925).
^ Fay was reported as saying that the three people of first-rate importance he had met were Picasso, Gertrude Stein and André Gide ("Gertrude Stein Articulates at Last", The New York Times, 3 September 1933
^ Fay, Roosevelt and His America: A Frenchman Surveys Present-Day America (1933).
^ Fay, Franklin, the Apostle of Modern Times (1929).
^ Fay, George Washington, Republican Aristocrat (1931).
^ Paul Wittke, "Virgil Thomson - Vignettes of His Life and Times: I. the Beginnings".
^ Fay also served as an adviser to Pétain. Historia Thématique: "Aux heures sombres de Vichy".
^ Historia Thématique: "Aux heures sombres de Vichy".
^ Michael Kimmelman, "The Last Act" (review of Janet Malcolm, "Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice"), New York Review of Books, Vol. LIV No. 16 (Oct. 25, 2007), pp. 4-5.