Bernard Faÿ

Bernard Fay (1943)

Bernard Faÿ (born April 3, 1893 in Paris , † December 5, 1978 in Tours ) was a French historian , opponent of Freemasonry and collaborator in the Vichy regime . He was known for his extreme right-wing views and had a reputation as an anti-Semite.

Life

Pre-war period (1893-1939)

Faÿ, the fifth of seven children of a wealthy royalist Catholic family, attended the Lycée Condorcet from 1907 to 1911 and from 1911 to 1914 studied the humanities ("lettres classiques") at the Sorbonne , which he graduated with the Agrégation des lettres . As a war volunteer , he was a member of the army medical service from 1914. He was awarded the Croix de guerre for his work in the Battle of Verdun . Contacts with members of the American expeditionary force during the war aroused his interest in the USA . With an American scholarship , he studied at Harvard University from 1919 to 1921 , where he obtained a Master of Arts degree . In the following years he taught first at Columbia University , then at the University of Iowa . He developed into a specialist in Enlightenment literature and a comparative literary scholar . In 1925 he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne on the revolutionary spirit in France and the United States of America at the end of the 18th century. In the late 1920s, Faÿ published biographies in English on Benjamin Franklin and George Washington with great success , which were later translated into French. He stayed regularly in the United States and stood up in books, in numerous lectures and in contributions for French and American newspapers and magazines with increasing anti-Americanism in the French public for a better mutual understanding of the two nations and also early on for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policy .

Due to his numerous personal acquaintances and the contacts of his family to contemporary artists, Faÿ campaigned for avant-garde art. Since the early 1920s the homosexual Faÿ was close friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas ; he was one of the few Stein not to fall out with in the course of her life. It was through her that he met Pablo Picasso . He campaigned for Stein's publications in France and in 1933 translated an excerpt from Stein's The Making of Americans as well as her autobiography by Alice B. Toklas into French. Through his busy lecturing activities in the USA, he contributed a lot to the early fame of Marcel Proust , with whom he was just as well known as with André Gide . Faÿ introduced his friend, the American composer Virgil Thomson , to the Parisian artistic circles in which he frequented, and put Thomson a. a. Contacts with the Groupe des Six (especially with Darius Milhaud , Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger ), but also with Erik Satie , Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet . Faÿ translated works by Sherwood Anderson and Eugene Jolas into French and wrote a successful introduction to modern French literature, which was then translated into English with just as great success.

In 1932 Fay was appointed to the newly created chair for "Civilization américaine" at the Collège de France . While dealing with current issues, e.g. B. the effects of the Great Depression on the USA, or with the career of La Fayette or Vergennes , he increasingly made secret societies on the topic in his seminars , in particular the activities of Anglo-Saxon and French Freemasons in the 18th century. He published the results of his research in a comprehensive work in 1935.

Conduct during the German occupation (1940–1944)

After France's military defeat, Julien Cain , director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France , was relieved of his position by the Vichy regime in August 1940 and Faÿ was appointed his successor. With the decree of August 13, 1940, the Vichy regime dissolved all secret societies, as Marshal Pétain made them responsible for all problems in France. Faÿ, who shared Pétain's assessment, was appointed head of the Vichy regime's anti-freemason agency. The Center d'action et de documentation (CAD) compiled a file of 170,000 members of secret societies, 60,000 of whom were persecuted. During the four-year occupation of France, Faÿ published the anti- Masonic magazine Les Documents Maçonniques . He was responsible for 520 deportations to German concentration camps , where 117 of the deportees were executed or perished. During the occupation, on the occasion of their stays in Paris, Fay was in direct contact with Paul Dittel , the Freemason specialist of the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) , with his superior Franz Alfred Six and with the constitutional lawyer and political philosopher Carl Schmitt .

Despite his anti-Semitism , Faÿ, who was registered as an agent of the Gestapo under the registry VM FR1 (Confidante French # 1), protected Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas . Gertrude Stein showed her appreciation for this by translating speeches by Marshal Pétain and writing a foreword to encourage understanding, but these texts were never published.

Life after 1944

When Faÿ was brought to trial as a collaborator after the war , Gertrude Stein intervened with a letter in his favor, but he was sentenced to a lifelong loss of honor and to a labor camp. The professorship at the Collège de France was revoked. After five years he was able to escape from custody and to Switzerland, allegedly with the help of money that Alice B. Toklas had given him. He had to give up a lectureship at the University of Friborg (Switzerland) , which he had obtained through the mediation of his friend Gonzague de Reynold , due to student protests. He then gave French lessons to American students. In 1959 he was pardoned by President Coty . Faÿ returned to France and published several books and magazine articles in right-wing publishers.

His biographer Antoine Compagnon summarizes Faÿ:

"Faÿ was anything but an exemplary, yes, he was even a very unpleasant person, an intellectual who sacrificed the morals of politics, but his life, which was neither lacking in novel-like episodes nor passionate about-turns, remains deeply worrying."

Fonts

• The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America . Tr. Ramon Guthrie. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
• The American experiment. (with Avery Claflin), Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.
• Franklin: The apostle of modern times ... Little, Brown, New York, Company, 1929.
• George Washington: Republican Aristocrat . Houghton Miflin, Boston 1931.
• The great revolution in France 1715-1815. Callwey, 1960.
• Louis XVI or the fall into the abyss , 1961
• The great days: Beaumarchais or the wedding of Figaro. List, 1973, ISBN 3-47177513-7 .

literature

• Antoine Compagnon : Le cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale. Editions Gallimard, 2009, ISBN 978-2-07012619-4 .
• Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. Columbia University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0231152624

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bernard Faÿ: L'esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis A la fin du XVIII, siècle . Champion, Paris 1925 (Revue de littérature comparée. Bibliothèque de la Revue de littérature comparée 7.1), supplemented by a bibliography critique des ouvrages français relatifs aux Etats-Unis (1770-1800) . Champion, Paris 1925 (Revue de littérature comparée. Bibliothèque de la Revue de littérature comparée 7.2)
2. ↑ z. B. Bernard Faÿ (together with Avery Claflin ): The American experiment . Harcourt, Brace, New York 1929
3. ^ Bernard Faÿ: Roosevelt and his America . Liitle, Brown, Boston 1933, at the same time in French Roosevelt et son Amérique . Plon, Paris 1933
4. ↑ Janet Malcolm : Two Lives. Gertrude and Alice . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-42034-8 , p. 43.
5. ↑ Bernard Faÿ: Panorama de la littérature contemporaine . Ed. du Sagittaire, Paris 1925; engl. Since Victor Hugo, French literature of to-day . Little, Brown and Co., Boston 1927
6. ^ Bernard Fay: La Franc-Maçonnerie et la revolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle , Ed. de Cluny, Paris 1935, simultaneously in English: Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680-1800 . Little, Brown and Co., Boston 1935
7. ↑ Julian Jackson: The Dark Years: 1940-1944. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-19-820706-9 , p. 190.
8. ↑ Carmen Callil: Bad Faith: A Forgotten history of family, fatherland and Vichy-France. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2006, ISBN 0-375-41131-3 .
9. ↑ Different information from masonic info and the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon , s. Web links
10. ^ Antoine Compagnon: Le cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale . Editions Gallimard, Paris 2009; Pp. 139-147
11. ↑ Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration, Columbia University Press, New York 211, p. 170
12. ↑ Carmen Callil: Bad Faith: A Forgotten history of family, fatherland and Vichy-France. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2006, ISBN 0-375-41131-3 , p. 204 f: "the murderous Bernard Faÿ, the great friend and protector of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas."
13. ↑ Linda Wagner-Martin: Favored Strangers. Gertrude Stein and Her Family. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey) 1995, ISBN 0-8135-2169-6 , pp. 246-247. Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration, Columbia University Press, New York 211, p. XIII
14. ^ Antoine Compagnon : Le cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale. Editions Gallimard, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-07012619-4 , p. 9 (foreword): " Faÿ fut un individu peu recommandable et même très déplaisant, un intellectuel qui sacrifia la morale à la politique, mais son itinéraire reste profondément déconcertant , outre qu'il ne fut pas non plus sans quelques épisodes romanesques ni rebondissements passionnés. "

Web links

• Masonicinfo.com: Bernard Faÿ
• Bernard Faÿ at the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon
• Michel Sender on "Le Cas Bernard Faÿ" by Antoine Compagnon (French)