Bernard Faÿ

Bernard Faÿ (bɛʁnaʁ fa.i; 3 April 1893 – 31 December 1978) was a French historian of Franco-American relations, an anti-Masonic polemicist who believed in a worldwide Jewish-Freemason conspiracy (see: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory) and during World War II a Vichy official. Faÿ had first-hand knowledge of the United States and had studied at Harvard. He translated into French an excerpt of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and wrote his view of the United States as it was at the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. He also published studies of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Faÿ was a friend of Stein, Alice B. Toklas and the American composer Virgil Thomson, who owed to Faÿ his access to French intellectual circles since Faÿ knew most of the people in musical and literary Paris. He was active in compiling files on and attacking and imprisoning Freemasons during the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He escaped after five years and resumed teaching history in Switzerland, at Fribourg, Ouchy and Lutry, where he taught European History, American History and Cultural History. Fay was born in Paris. At the beginning of the World War II, he was a professor at the Collège de France. During the French Occupation, he replaced Julien Cain as general administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale and director of the anti-Masonic service of the Vichy Government. During his tenure of his office, his secretary, Gueydan de Roussel, was in charge of preparing the card indexes, containing 60,000 names drawn from archives seized from Freemason and other secret societies (Marshal Philippe Pétain was convinced that the indexes were at the heart of all France's troubles). Lists of names of Freemasons were released to the official gazette of the Vichy government for publication, and many Catholic papers copied these lists to induce public opprobrium.