Cold War Intellectual Warrior François Bondy

The Sunday Times – François Bondy (June 16, 2003):

FOR nearly 20 years François Bondy edited the prestigious literary journal Epreuves, one of the decisive weapons of the west in the cultural cold war with the communist East.

He took the chair there in l951, at the height of the Cold War. At stake in Europe at that moment was the allegiance of the influential French intelligentsia, which was felt to be wavering dangerously. The loyalty, especially of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence was worth many a battalion, was in serious doubt. So Bondy’s first job was to give Epreuves, the French-language counterpart to Melvin Lasky’s dominant Encounter, unassailable authority.

He did so by ferreting out on the literary fringe a new generation of writers of Nobel prizewinning potential. He helped to transform Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet from struggling marginals into mainstream neo-classics. He did the same for the Italian writer Italo Svevo, and introduced Jorge Luis Borges to a European public. To prove that liberal values know no frontiers, he gave the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz a Western platform.

He demolished Sartre as a guru by accusing him of changing his views so often that no one could know where he stood at any moment. And towards the end of his reign at Epreuves, he wiped the intellectual glitz off the l968 student revolt when he dismissed it as an “elixir for ageing left-wing intellectuals”. With that he helped to win the Cold War intellectually long before it was won politically.

Bondy knew his enemy because as a prewar Sorbonne student himself, he had briefly joined the French Communist Party. 

An excerpt from, “François Bondy archives deposited at the Historical Archives” European University Institute, September 14, 2021:

Born in 1915 in Berlin, François Bondy grew up in Switzerland and France. A journalist and political writer, in 1940 he was arrested in Paris and briefly interned at the concentration camp in Vernet. He would later report on the conditions that he found there.

Bondy was part of federalist circles in the first decade after WWII, and was a member of the Union of European Federalists. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Bondy remained a free intellectual over the course of his career, playing an informal role in the creation of a unified Europe.   

As a journalist, public intellectual and cultural critic, Bondy published essays and articles in the foremost newspapers, magazines and journals of the day, in both Europe and North America. In 1950 he founded and edited his own political and cultural journal, Preuves, in Paris, and managed it until 1969.  In an edited collection of Bondy’s articles, European Notebooks, Melvin J. Lasky, Bondy’s good friend and intellectual contemporary, described Bondy as “a liberal and humane democrat from the center of the Western heartland free of every totalitarian temptation, sturdy and unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order.”

An excerpt from, “Autobiography of a spy” by Mary Bancroft, William Morrow and Company, 1983, Pg. 145 – 146:

Francois Bondy was a Swiss journalist, and I myself had often been impressed by his articles. . . He had an encyclopedic knowledge not only of Europe but actually of the world, as well as familiarity with the history of various nations and cultures that was dazzling. . .Having Francois as a friend was better than having a library of reference books and a team of researchers. It was certainly much more agreeable. His knowledge was based on solid scholarship. When he wrote about current events, he did so either as an eyewitness or from information provided by an impeccable source with whom he had talked personally. He never indulged in flights of fantasy when writing journalistically about real situations. If he labeled a report “an eyewitness account” that was precisely what it was. He spoke fluently at least six languages and could write equally well in most of them.