Bernard Faÿ

Bernard Faÿ (3 April 1893, Paris – 31 December 1978, Tours) was a French historian of Franco-American relations, an anti-Masonic polemicist who believed in a worldwide Jewish-Freemason conspiracy, and, during World War II, a Vichy official.

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 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 Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and of the American composer Virgil Thomson, who owed to Faÿ his access to French intellectual circles, for 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, 1940–44. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He escaped after five years and resumed teaching history in Switzerland, in Fribourg, Ouchy and Lutry. M. Fäy taught European History, American History and Cultural History.

At the beginning of the Second World War Faÿ was a professor at the Collège de France. During the 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 this 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 these 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 in order to induce public opprobrium. Faÿ 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.

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