The death has occurred in Paris on June 2nd of the historian François Fejtö.
Born into a Jewish family converted to Catholicism in Nagykanizsa in southeastern Hungary in 1909, Fejtö was, according to his obituary in Le Monde, “a pure product of the Habsburg empire”. Taking his childhood vacations in the Italian resort of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia) Fejtö met there his cousins – who were Croats, Slovenes, Italians and Austrians. The common language was German, which the young Fejtö learned alongside Hungarian, while he was also taught French by his governess.
In 1933 he was imprisoned by the authoritarian Horthy regime for his links with the clandestine Communist Party. In 1938 he moved to Paris.
The Hungarian Communist Laszlo Rajk, executed after a show trial in 1949, had been a college friend of Fejtö’s and he wrote an article in the prestigious French journal Esprit in that year entitled “The Rajk affair has become and international Dreyfus affair”. The links he cultivated in Paris with central and Eastern European intellectuals in exile were to provide a basis for his most famous work, The History of the People’s Democracies, (which Jean-Paul Sartre refused to read). He did not return to Hungary until after the fall of communism.
In an appreciation, Jacques Rupnik, director of research at CERI-Sciences Po in Paris, where Fejtö taught for many years, recalls his irritation at the interminable French commemorations of and meditations on the student revolt of 1968. “It isn’t another seminar on 1968 we need,” he protested, “but on ‘48, I mean 1848!”
Fejtö had indeed written a study of the 1848 revolutions sixty years ago and was still convinced of their centrality: “The Old Continent poised between the nation and democracy, central Europe between Russia and Germany, that is the key date for understanding contemporary Europe.”
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