Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fa%C3%BF and the Vichy Dilemma

What was Gertrude Stein, that inimitable Jewish-American doyenne of experimental writing, doing translating for American audiences the speeches of Marshal Philippe P%C3%A9tain, the head of the WWII collaborationist Vichy regime? In this brilliant and fascinating study, Stein specialist Will (Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of "Genius") answers this question through a close reading of Stein's writings, a detailed examination of Stein's and Bernard Fa%C3%BF's attraction to P%C3%A9tain's conservative politics, and Stein's friendship with Fa%C3%BF, a Frenchman who moved in both artistic and far right-wing circles and collaborated with the Nazis. Will demonstrates that the pair were reactionary modernists who believed that the democratic ideas of the French Revolution ushered in the decadence characteristic of the early 20th-century French Republic and that the U.S. was going through a similar decline. P%C3%A9tain captured the pair's imagination and allegiance by articulating a program for returning France to the vitality and pioneering spirit of its pre-Enlightenment agrarian roots. Will shows that Stein never publicly affiliated herself as a Jew, especially after she moved to Paris in 1903. This exceptional study provides new insights into previously hidden corners of Stein's life. Photos. (Sept.)