Michel Fougeres (1924-2014) was an associate professor emeritus of French at Carnegie Mellon University. Fougeres was orphaned at an early age and, as the son of a Dutch mother who was Jewish, found himself as a young man trying to stay alive in World War II by driving trucks for the Germans throughout Europe.
After the war, he returned to Paris and served in Indochina for the French Colonial Army from 1946 to 1948. When he returned to Paris, he was so upset about what he had seen that he began writing under a pen name, denouncing what he saw as French atrocities. He ultimately moved to Israel, back to Paris and then, in the early 1950s, on to New York City, where he started a new life. In the U.S., he served as a photographer for the Army and became a naturalized citizen in Honolulu.
In 1969, a few years before he earned his doctorate at New York University, he came to CMU to teach French and French literature. There he met his wife of 44 years, Regine Dalchow Fougeres, who was born in Berlin and taught Russian at CMU.
Mr. Fougeres wrote French literary criticisms and a couple of books, including one in French called “Cho’Quan” about the hallucinations he experienced in Indochina after stepping on a spike and contracting gangrene.
