Hungarian soldiers bear the remains of Ferenc Fejto Fejto speaks at Imre Nagy’s tomb on his return to Hungary in 1989

Ferenc Fejto, the Hungarian emigré who became a noted French intellectual, has died just two months short of his ninety-ninth birthday. Fejto was, as Le Monde wrote in their obituary of him, “a pure product of the Habsburg empire”. “Taking his childhood vacations in the Italian resort of Fiume,” the Dublin Review of Books blog writes, “Fejto met there his cousins — who were Croats, Slovenes, Italians and Austrians. The common language was German, which the young Fejto learned alongside Hungarian, while he was also taught French by his governess.” As Ferenc László of Magyar Narancs wrote, Fejto’s partrimony was “that rapidly bourgeoisifying, ethnically and culturally diverse community within a Danubian monarchy that had meanwhile disintegrated”.

Fejto became a Communist in the 1930s and was the Paris correspondent of the Hungarian Social Democratic newspaper when the Second World War erupted. He served in the French Army until the Armistice and in the Resistance soon after. After the end of the European war, he became head of the press office at the Hungarian embassy in Paris, but resigned a few years later when his good friend László Rajk was subjected to a show-trial by the Communist authorities and executed. His seminal 1952 History of the People’s Democracies condemed the Stalinist governments behind the Iron Curtain and was translated into seventeen languages.

His uncompromising condemnations of the tyranny in his native land earned Fejto the emnity of many of his fellow leftists in France. “The French Left of the day was fairly hostile to any disparagement of Stalinism,” Ferenc László explains, “or, indeed, of the Marxism of the Eastern Bloc in general”. Sartre famously refused to read it, though he did later provide a foreword to Fejto’s work on the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

Fejto returned to Hungary just once, in 1989 for the historic reburial of the dissident Imre Nagy. His secretary at the time was Ágnes Széchenyi, now a senior fellow of the Institute of Literary History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

“Quite a few people refer to Fejto as being a historian,” Széchenyi wrote recently, “but that is not right either: he was an analytical commentator on the present day, being for decades one of Agence France-Presse’s expert correspondents, which is not a lesser position than being a historian – just different.”

“And no less a person than Professor Éva H. Balázs, that grand dame of history, was willing to acknowledge that. When a group of us were editing the international Hommage à Ferenc Fejto that was put out to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, we also asked her to contribute as one of the world’s authorities on the Enlightenment, since Fejto had himself written a well-regarded 1953 monograph on Emperor Joseph II, Un Habsbourg révolutionnaire: Joseph II. Portrait d’un despote éclairé. Professor Balázs sent us an unpublished manuscript on the emperor with a note in the margin that said, “Damn that Fejto! He spent two weeks in Vienna checking sources; I spent years. However, what he writes stands up; his instincts are enviably impressive.”)”

“‘To every thing there is a season… A time to be born, and a time to die,’ says Ecclesiastes. The Lord may have given just a few months short of ninety-nine years to Ferenc Fejto, who was on fairly good terms with Him, and even wrote a book about Him, but his death still strikes one as premature.”