Pierre Rousselin
Le Figaro 13/07/2008
Both man of spirit and action, and committed scholar, Polish Bronislaw Geremek has been through his time at the forefront of the fight for freedom . Both
man of spirit and action, and committed scholar, Polish Bronislaw Geremek has been through his time at the forefront of the fight for freedom.
Photo credit: AFP
The intellectual and Polish MEP Bronislaw Geremek, a figure of anti-union Solidarity during the 1980s, died Sunday in a car accident in Poland. A historian by training, former adviser to Lech Walesa, former foreign minister, he was 76 years old. Francophone and Francophile, he contributed his share to bring down the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Europe.
He was extraordinarily bright and at the same time very simple. Able to listen with patience and warmth anyone tell him about what he knew better than anyone. And so competent that he made available to all the intricacies of the complex history and politics.
blue eyes sparkling, her voice hollow, pipe between his teeth, the tweed jacket, Bronislaw Geremek was a regular conferences, seminars and television programs. It is disputed because it was the European intellectual par excellence, a great humanist, one of those extraordinary people who, for Montesquieu, punctuate the story our continent.
Both wit and man of action, and engaged scholar, he crossed his time at the forefront of the fight for freedom, first in the epic hero of Solidarity in Poland, then builder of our new Europe.
Born March 6, 1932, the child grows up in the Warsaw ghetto. Son of a rabbi, he managed to escape in 1943 with his mother while his father died at Auschwitz. Back in Warsaw, he studied history and specializes in the Middle Ages, less subject to Marxist dogmatism.
Several times, the French government grants enable to go to Paris, where he became perfect French and Francophile sustainably. The historian has a passion for the work of the Annales school, alongside Fernand Braudel, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby, and became one of the world of exclusion and marginality in medieval France.
In 1950, he joined the Polish Communist Party (Stern). He will leave eighteen years later, after an anti-Semitic purge led by the Party leaders in March 1968, and after the crash in August, the Prague Spring by the Red Army, which is integrated detachment Polish. He then moves closer defense workers.
In August 1980, Professor Geremek arrived in Gdansk in the company of another prominent intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki, to seal the alliance between the opposition and academia worker. This is the great strike in the shipyards. The two men will find themselves alongside the small electrician Lech Walesa, propelled to the head of Solidarity. They will be his main political advisers.
Bronislaw Geremek suffers from the time the red of the secret police. In 1983 he made two months in prison on remand. He is expelled from his university and accused of spying for the United States, then belonging to an illegal organization, Solidarity. The union is wary of him: the anti-intellectual sling prevents him from being elected a full member of management.
This ostracism did not prevent him from playing in the shadows, a leading role. During the sixteen months of the existence of the union, it exerts a moderating influence. Despite this, he is despised by the regime, who sees in him the image of the militant anti-intellectual in the pay of the United States.
After the coup of 13 December 1981 and the declaration of a state of war by General Jaruzelski, Geremek was placed in camp internment. Simultaneously, the subject of particularly heinous attacks from Radio Warsaw. It is presented as a "Jewish chauvinist" with links to the "International Freemasonry" and portrayed as a clever impostor to the appearance but would be a "specialist subjects such as prostitution scabrous" the Middle Ages.
interned for a year, and then imprisoned again for three months in 1983, he was dismissed for "anti-Soviet" of his teaching position at the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
In 1989, during negotiation of the Table discussion between the government and Solidarity, he is one of the main mediators. His knowledge of the Party, he attended the inside for eighteen years, it is valuable to drive an unprecedented process to considerable historical consequences.
conducted under the threat of intervention by Moscow, the discussions eventually lead to in effect by the fall of the communist regime in Poland, leading all the satellites of the Soviet Union in a gear that has caught the leaders Solidarnosc, as indeed most European observers.
In the first election "semi-democratic" June 1989 Geremek joined the Diet. He chairs the parliamentary group of Solidarity, the Committee on Reform of the Constitution and the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament. Thus began a parliamentary career he will pursue, from 2004 until his death in Strasbourg and Brussels.
Poland came this year in the European Union. Bronislaw Geremek was one of the great architects of the European roots of his country since he was foreign minister from 1997 to 2000 and he especially had to negotiate the accession of Poland to NATO.
With the humor of an old sage, he handled the derision to relativize the difficulties of European construction: "When I study a European directive, he said, I put a Bach cantata, and it is already much better. "
apostle of reconciliation between Germany and Poland, a supporter of an agreement with Russia, convinced European, Bronislaw Geremek was primarily a Polish patriot, a major battle of his country to freedom.
The need for a political Europe was to him so obvious that the institutional crisis initiated by the failure of the Constitution inspired him this remark: "After making Europe, we Europeans need to do now. Otherwise, we risk losing it "(1).
(1) "Europe in crisis". Preface of the book "Visions of Europe", published by Odile Jacob in September 2007.
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