Bernard Faÿ
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This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia. (August 2011) Click [show] on the right for instructions.
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Bernard Faÿ (3 April 1893, Paris - 31 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 Thomson, who owed to Fay his access to French intellectual circles, for Faÿ knew most of the people in musical and literary Paris.[6] In 1935 Fay wrote La Franc-Maçonnerie au XVIIIe siècle, soon translated as Revolution and Freemasonry 1680-1800, where he asserted 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 replaced Julien Cain as general administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the occupation[7], 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 Philippe Pétain was convinced were at the heart of all France's troubles;[8] 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.[9] 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 suspected of being 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.[10] 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,[7] funding to facilitate his prison breakout coming from Alice B. Toklas. Fay was pardoned by French President René Coty in 1959.,[11] Appointed to an instructorship at the Institut de la Langue française in Fribourg, Switzerland, he was later forced to resign in the face of student protests. He taught French literature to American junior-year-abroad students in the 1960s at the Villa des Fougères in Fribourg, run by the Dominican sisters of Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois. During this time he also taught at a girls high school, Le Grand Verger, in Lutry, Switzerland, a short distance east of Lausanne on the northern border of Lake Geneva (Lac Leman). There he instructed American and other national girls in American History. His method consisted of notecard lectures and knowledge he carried in his head. He particularly shone in his art history class where he taught from illustrated postcards of paintings, drawings and sculptures. In European fashion of the time, he demanded precise and voluminous feedback of his lecture material in tests. (ref on Le Grand Verger entry by former student, Janine Dawn Lieberman, 1962) In 1969, Fay is credited with being one of those who convinced Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, then the retired Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, to start a new seminary in Fribourg for traditional Catholics disquieted by the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council in the formation of priests.[12]
Barbara Will's book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma," was published in September 2011 by Columbia University Press.
In 2009, Gallimard published a book on Faÿ: Antoine Compagnon's Le Cas Bernard Faÿ.
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[edit] Works
[edit] History and literary history
- 1925 : Bibliographie critique des ouvrages français relatifs aux États-Unis (1770-1800)
- 1925 : L'esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
- 1925 : Panorama de la littérature contemporaine
- 1926 : L'Empire américain et sa démocratie en 1926
- 1927 : Faites vos jeux
- 1928 : Vue cavalière de la littérature américaine contemporaine
- 1929 : Benjamin Franklin, bourgeois d'Amérique
- 1930 : Le Comte Arthur de Gobineau et la Grèce
- 1930 : Essai sur la poésie
- 1932 : George Washington, gentilhomme
- 1932 : La Gloire du Comte Arthur de Gobineau
- 1935 : La Franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle
- 1937 : Les forces de l'Espagne : voyage à Salamanque
- 1939 : Civilisation américaine
- 1939 : L'Homme, mesure de l'histoire. La recherche du temps
- 1943 : L'Agonie de l'Empereur (récit historique)
- 1952 : De la prison de ce monde, journal, prières et pensées (1944-1952)
- 1959 : La grande révolution
- 1961 : L'École de l'imprécation ou Les Prophètes catholiques du dernier siècle (1850-1950)
- 1961 : Louis XVI ou la fin d'un monde
- 1962 : L'aventure coloniale
- 1965 : Naissance d'un monstre, l'opinion publique
- 1966 : Les Précieux
- 1969 : La Guerre des trois fous, Hitler, Staline, Roosevelt
- 1970 : L'Église de Judas ?
- 1970 : Beaumarchais ou les Fredaines de Figaro
- 1974 : Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou le Rêve de la vie
- 1978 : Rivarol et la Révolution
- Prefaces
- Le duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg, premier baron chrétien de France, fondateur du Grand Orient : sa vie et ses archives de Paul Filleul
[edit] Pseudonyms
Bernard Faÿ used the pen name Elphège du Croquet de l'Esq[13] for the work :
- "Pensées, maximes et apophtègmes choisis des moralistes français et étrangers à l'usage de la jeunesse studieuse" (1954) for Du conquistador in 1957, with a preface by Bernard Faÿ.
[edit] Translations
- 1933 : Co-translation and preface for the French edition of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress
- 1934 : Translation for the French edition of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
[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 Pablo 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".
- ^ a b Alan Riding (2010). And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978030726897.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Antoine Compagnon (2009). Le Cas Bernard Fay. Paris: Gallimard.
- ^ Bernard Tissier de Mallerais (2004). The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre. Kansas City: Angelus Press.
- ^ Source BnF
[edit] External links
- Masonicinfo.com:Bernard Fay, a negative view.
