Georges Haupt

Georges Haupt was born on January 18, 1928, into a Jewish family in Transylvania. At the age of sixteen, his native country became Hungary again after the Second Vienna Award, and he was sent to Auschwitz. His whole family disappeared in Nazi concentration camps, except for his big brother, Mircea Haupt, colonel and political commissar in the allied Romanian division "Vladimirescu" (19,000 troops that fought against the Axis powers in the Soviet Union). Following his emancipation, he returned to Transylvania (which had once again become Romanian) and began higher education at Saint Petersburg State University, where he wrote a thesis on the relationship between Russian and Romanian revolutionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century.

After starting his academic career in the Romanian People's Republic (he lectured at the University of Bucharest, edited the journal Studii, and oversaw the Modern and Contemporary History section at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of History), he left Romania for France in 1958.

From 1962-1963, he produced a thesis on the Second International under the leadership of Ernest Labrousse, and joined the editorial staff of the periodicals Le Mouvement social and Les Cahiers du monde russe. In 1969 he became director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and, in 1976, director of the Center for Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

He started The Socialist Library Collection with publisher François Maspero in 1963, and directed it until his death.

On March 14, 1978, he died unexpectedly in Rome, leaving several projects on hold, many of which could not be completed. The Socialist Library Collection came to an end in 1981 with its forty-first title.