Wylie Appointed Attache To U.S. Paris Embassy

Laurence Wylie, C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France, will leave Harvard in June to serve for two years as Cultural Attache of the American Embassy in Paris. He plans to return to Harvard in the Fall of 1967.

In the last fifteen years, Wylie has spent two years and several summers in the small French villages of Roussillon and Chanzeaux, studying the inhabitants and their way of life. His best-known book, Village in the Vaucluse, resulted from his experience in Roussillon.

In appointing him head of the overall American cultural program in France, including the U.S. Information Services, the State Department is "breaking a traditional pattern," Wylie said yesterday.

"They have a deputy director of cultural affairs who'll continue what they're doing now and handle most of the administrative load," he explained. "I'm supposed to make new and different kinds of contacts, and seek more effective means of cultural exchange."

One of his responsibilities will be the chairmanship of the Fulbright Commission in France, which directs the program of official exchanges between the U.S. and France.

An Entree

"This job will give me an entree into an aspect of French life--the intellectual--that I've never seen before." Wylie said.

"I have been told by the State Department that my major duty will be 'to frequent French intellectuals, to consult with them on common problems of the intellectual community of the free world, and to transmit to them something of the major trends in American civilization.'"

Wylie plans to participate "as much as possible" in the French academic community. He will read a paper next fall at a Paris conference on social change in France. He is also arranging to help give a seminar at the Center for European Sociology in Paris.

At Harvard, Wylie teaches Soc Sci 132, which is a large undergraduate lecture course on the civilization of France, and several seminars, including French 294 (French Social Thought), and Soc Rel 108 (Social Structure of France).

Wylie's appointment apparently caused a few laughs in the Capital. "I've been a peasant for the last 15 years; every time I've gone to France I've lived in the country. In Washington, they thought it was a great joke that they were appointing a Cultural Attache who knows more peasants that intellectuals," he said.