Thursday, February 4, 6-8 pm

From Columbia to Vichy: The Fall of Bernard Faÿ. Literature and Collaboration Revisited

Antoine Compagnon, Alice Kaplan, Robert Paxton, Phil Watts

Please join us for a panel discussion on literature and collaboration on the occasion of the publication of Antoine Compagnon's new book, Le cas Bernard Faÿ, du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale (Gallimard, 2009). In this book, Professor Compagnon studies the intellectual destiny of a former professor at Columbia and at the Collège de France, who, from 1940-1944, actively supported the Vichy government and its repression of Freemasons. Panel participants include: Antoine Compagnon, the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and professor at the Collège de France; Alice Kaplan, who is the John M. Musset Professor of French at Yale University, and author of several award-winning books including The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000); Robert Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and author of Vichy France (1972) and, most recently, Anatomy of Fascism (2004), and guest curator for a 2009 exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation; and Phil Watts, Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.