Nicolas SARKOZY

Biography

Sarkozy is a Frenchman of mixed national and ethnic ancestry. He is the son of Pál István Erno Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa, (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; some sources spell it Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál István Erno) a Hungarian aristocrat, and Andrée Jeanne "Dadu" Mallah (b. Paris, 12 October 1925), who is of French Catholic and Ottoman-Sephardic Jewish descent. They were married at Saint-François-de-Sales, Paris XVII, on 8 February 1950 and divorced in 1959.

Pál Sárközy was born on 5 May 1928 in Budapest into a family belonging to the Hungarian nobility, his paternal line deriving from an ancestor who was ennobled on 10 September 1628 for his role in fighting the armies of the Ottoman Empire. The family possessed about 705 acres of land (reduced from having an estate of 2000-3000 acres in the 18th century), and a small castle in the village of Alattyán, near Szolnok, 92 km (57 miles) east of Budapest. Pál Sárközy's father and grandfather held elective offices in the town of Szolnok. Although the Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (nagybócsai Sárközy) family was Protestant, Pál Sárközy's mother, Katalin Tóth de Csáford (Hungarian: csáfordi Tóth Katalin), grandmother of Nicolas Sarkozy, belonged to a Catholic noble family.

As the Red Army entered Hungary in 1944, the Sárközy family fled to Germany. They returned in 1945 but all their possessions had been seized. Pál Sárközy's father died soon afterwards and his mother, fearing that he would be drafted into the Hungarian People's Army or sent to Siberia, urged him to leave the country and promised she would eventually follow him to Paris. Pál Sárközy fled to Austria and then Germany while his mother reported to authorities that he had drowned in Lake Balaton. Eventually, he arrived in Baden Baden, near the French border, where the headquarters of the French Army in Germany were located, and there he met a recruiter for the French Foreign Legion. He signed up for five years, and was sent for training to Sidi Bel Abbes, where the French Foreign Legion's headquarters were located. He was due to be sent to Indochina at the end of training, but the doctor who checked him before departure, who was also Hungarian, sympathised with him and gave him a medical discharge to save him from possible death at the hands of the Viet Minh. He returned to civilian life in Marseille in 1948 and, although he asked for French citizenship only in the 1970s (his legal status was that of a stateless person until then), he nonetheless gallicised his Hungarian name into "Paul Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa". He met Andrée Mallah (known as Dadu) in 1949.

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