Biography | Bernard Faÿ

Bernard Faÿ

“The director of the Bibliothèque national, Bernard Fay, was appointed ‘delegate of the French government to liquidate masonic lodges’, with a separate registry of France’s fifty thousand Freemasons and a dedicated unit to police them. In October 1940, an exhibition on Freemasonry—the Exposition Maçonnique — was opened at the Petit Palais, attracting over a million visitors in Paris and when it toured the provinces, come to gawp at aprons and triangles and the revealed names of those who really ran things.” ³

April 3, 1893- December 5, 1978
French historian and Nazi collaborator under the Vichy government, Prof. Bernard Marie Louis Faÿ was reponsible for the arrest or death of almost a thousand freemasons.
Appointed Professor of History at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1922, he later chaired the Department of American Civilization at the Collège de France. He travelled in the United States where, under the pretext of preparing a book on Benjamin Franklin, he was given access to several Grand Lodge libraries.¹
Named general administrator of the Bibliothèque nationale on August 6, 1940, and later appointed head of the Bureau des Sociétés Secrètes by the Vichi government in 1941, Faÿ took possession of the headquarters of the Grand Orient of France, organized an anti-masonic exposition in the Petit Palais in October and November 1941, and was directly responsible for the interrogation of some 6,000 freemasons, resulting in the deportation of 989 freemasons to concentration camps and the death of 545 freemasons by firing squad, gas chamber, or captivity.²
Although not credited, he provided much of the information for the short film Forces Occultes, Vichy France’s attempt at Nazi propaganda, accusing French freemasons and Jews of deliberately pushing France into war against Germany.
In December 1946 Faÿ was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to perpetual hard labour by the Court of Justice of the Seine. On 30 September 1951 he escaped and fled to Switzerland.⁴ Pardened in 1953, he continued his writing career.
Anti-mason