In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein
embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life:
translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe
Pétain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From
1941 to 1943, Stein translated thirty-two of Pétain's speeches, in which
he outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements"
from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with Nazi
occupiers.
Unlikely Collaboration pursues troubling questions: Why and under what
circumstances would Stein undertake this project? The answers lie in
Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ,
Stein's apparent Vichy protector. Faÿ was director of the Bibliothèque
Nationale during the Vichy regime and overseer of the repression of
French freemasons. He convinced Pétain to keep Stein undisturbed during
the war and, in turn, encouraged her to translate Pétain for American
audiences. Yet Faÿ's protection was not coercive. Stein described the
thinker as her chief intellectual companion during her final years.
Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, noting
possible affinities between Stein and Faÿ's political and aesthetic
ideals, especially their reflection in Stein's writing from the late
1920s to the 1940s. Will treats their interaction as a case study of
intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's
place in the Vichy imagination. Her book forces a reconsideration of
modernism and fascism, asking what led so many within the avant-garde
toward fascist and collaborationist thought. Touching off a potential
powder keg of critical dispute, Will replays a collaboration that proves
essential to understanding fascism and the remaking of modern Europe.
