Bernard Faÿ Add a review

Marie Louis Emmanuel Bernard Faÿ (French pronunciation: [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. During World War II he was an official for Vichy France.

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 Gertrude Stein and 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, 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.