Archivists at the Historical Archives of the European Union have completed the inventory and ISAAR authority record for the archival fonds of François Guillaume Bondy.
The materials are now available for consultation. The collection comprises 629 archival files dating from 1933 until 2005. They consist mainly of Bondy’s writings in the form of newspaper and magazine cuttings, reprints, monographs and correspondence, but also literary reviews of his work, transcriptions of interviews and speeches, and photographs. The archives were deposited at the HAEU in 2022, thanks to a deposit agreement concluded between François Bondy’s daughters Dominique Bondy and Beatrice Bondy and the Director of the Historical Archives, Dieter Schlenker.
Characterised as a masterful writer, a cultured man of letters, and a convinced European, Bondy wrote prolifically in German, French, English and Italian. He lived a varied and international life, deeply marked by the social and political vicissitudes of the twentieth century. Born in Berlin to Jewish Austro-Hungarian parents, he spent parts of his childhood in Switzerland, where he obtained Swiss citizenship, as well as France, Germany and Ticino. He was educated in Davos in his early youth, but subsequently achieved his baccalaureate in Nice after schooling in Lugano. In 1933, he began a degree in literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, whilst also working as a writer, editor, and translator. In May 1940 he was arrested and interned in the Vernet prison camp, under suspicion for his German birth. Later that year he was exiled to Switzerland, where he resumed his journalistic career writing for several Swiss and European publications. Among numerous other professional endeavours, he would go on to direct the Paris magazine Preuves, the cultural magazine founded by the anti-totalitarian Congress for Cultural Freedom, of which he was a founding member, from 1951 to 1967.
Over the course of his career, Bondy’s work, which focused greatly on Europe, was appreciated by international audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. He was esteemed for his immense culture, his tireless curiosity, his deep intellectual integrity and his brilliant style. He not only cultivated personal relationships with writers such as Witold Gombrowicz, Leopold Senghor, Jorge Luis Borges and Romain Gary, but was also esteemed by political personalities such as Willy Brandt and Alcide De Gasperi.
The new archival collection brings together the exceptionally far-reaching work of Bondy, providing insights not only into the life and thoughts of a singular public intellectual, but also the cultural, ideological and political climate of Europe before and after the Second World War.