The son of a captain in the gendarmes, Henri Berthelot was born on 7 December 1861 in Feurs, in the Loire. He graduated from Saint Cyr fourth in his year, and opted to join the Colonial Army. As a sub-lieutenant in the 1st Regiment of Zouaves of Koléas, Algeria, he was sent to Indochina, where he had his baptism of fire. Promoted to lieutenant in 1886, he became a Knight of the Order of the Dragon of Annam in July 1887. A fever prompted his return to France, where he joined the 96th Infantry Regiment at Gap.

Admitted to the École Supérieure de Guerre, he obtained his General Staff Brevet and was promoted to the rank of captain in 1891. He then left for Austria to improve his German. He became General Joseph Brugère’s aide-de-camp in the 132nd Infantry Regiment at Reims, then in the 8th Army Corps at Bourges. After a spell with the 2nd Army Corps at Amiens, he was reassigned to the 132nd Infantry Regiment at Reims in 1897, then transferred to the 115th Infantry Regiment in July 1899.

Returning to General Brugère, now military governor of Paris, Berthelot supervised the organisation of the army pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Promoted to chef de bataillon (major) in November that year, he accompanied Czar Nicholas II on a visit to Reims in 1901, as Brugère’s aide-de-camp.

In 1903, he became commander of the 20th Battalion of Chasseurs à Pied in Baccarat. Recalled by Brugère in January 1906, in December he was appointed to the 2nd Bureau of the Directorate for Infantry. Made a lieutenant-colonel in March 1907, in October he became secretary of the Army Staff Technical Committee. He was promoted to colonel in 1910, and took over command of the 94th Infantry Regiment of Bar-le-Duc the following year. In 1913, he joined the staff of Joffre, the Chief of the General Staff. Involved in drawing up Plan XVII, the plan for the mobilisation and concentration of the French Army in the event of war, he did not believe the Germans would invade via Belgium.

In 1914, he was made General Joffre’s chief aide-de-camp in charge of operations. In disgrace following the failures of August, Berthelot received notice of transfer to the command of the 5th Reserve Divisions Group on 21 November. In January 1915, he led an offensive at Crouy, near Soissons. After fierce fighting, he was forced to retreat behind his starting positions.

From 3 August 1915 to 19 September 1916, he was in command of the 32nd Army Corps (32nd CA), or the “Berthelot Group”, which took part in the Champagne offensive in September-October. In March 1916, the 32nd CA was at Verdun, where it was tasked with taking back Mort-Homme and Hill 304. The 32nd CA left Verdun in June to serve in the Vosges then on the Somme.

On 14 October 1916, Berthelot led the French military mission in Romania, with nearly 2 000 officers and NCOs in his command. He reorganised the Romanian Army, which had been severely impacted by Germany and was resisting with difficulty in Moldavia. Cut off from the Allies after Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict, Romania signed the Armistice of Focșani on 9 December 1917..

Following his return to France, General Berthelot was put in command of the 5th Army by General Foch, from 5 July to 7 October 1918, taking part in the battles of Reims and Épernay.

On 7 October, he was recalled to command another Romanian mission. This time, his role was as much diplomatic as military. Now with a modernised and reorganised army, Romania took up arms once again on 10 November, just as the Central Empires were crumbling. This new military intervention succeeded in containing the pressure from the Russian Revolution in the Balkans, as well as satisfying certain Romanian claims, namely regarding Transylvania and northern Banat.

Following the German defeat, Berthelot was tasked with fighting the Russian Bolsheviks in Bessarabia, then the Hungarian Bolsheviks in Transylvania during the Hungarian-Romanian War of 1919. He went on to become military governor of Metz until 1922, then of Strasbourg from 1923 to 1926.

He died in Paris in January 1931, and is buried in Nervieux, in his native Forez.

He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre 1914-1918 with three palms, the Médaille Militaire, the 1914-1918 Inter-Allied Victory Medal, as well as many foreign decorations.

Ministère de la défense/SGA/DMPA

(Jassy, Romania, 14th November 1898 - Auschwitz, 2nd or 3rd October 1944)

Benjamin Wechsler (or Vecsler) chose the name B. Fundoianu to start out as a writer. Writer from an early age, he left a considerable amount of work behind in the Romanian language. Fondane belonged to this line of Romanian writers attracted by the influence of French literature. He arrived in Paris in 1923 under the name of Fundoianu and became Benjamin Fondane. Despite the hopes he placed in it, Fondane never fully supported surrealism. In 1928, he joined the "Discontinuité" group and appreciated René Daumal's "Grand Jeu".

But it was his meeting with Léon Ghestov which was decisive for Fondane, influencing his life and works. From then on, all of his work was written in French. In 1933, his poem Ulysse and his essay Rimbaud le voyou, were published: existential thought, in opposition to the interpretation of Breton and the surrealists. Regarding Faux traité d'esthétique (1938), although it contains a lively critic of surrealism, it presents existential poetry.

Fondane's poetry, as discovered in Ulysse (1933) and Titanic (1938), is bitter and prophetic. All of his poems together under the title Le mal des fantômes form a sort of existential odyssey where the dominant figure is an errant poet who embodies the destiny of man, of the poet, and of the Jew. In 1936 La conscience malheureuse was published, his first philosophical book, containing essays on Ghestov, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Fondane was passionate about theatre and he wrote several plays: dramatic poems, metaphysical dramas (Le festin de Balthazar, Philoctète), etc. He worked at Cahiers du Sud, where he wrote the "Philosophie vivante" section.

He obtained French nationality in 1938 and was drafted in 1940. He was taken prisoner, but escaped; taken again, he was then freed for health reasons. He spent winter 1942 writing Baudelaire et l'expérience du gouffre. At the same time, he began L'Être et la connaissance, essays on Lévy-Bruhl, Ghestov and Lupasco. His last essay Le lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire was a philosophical testament. He exposed his philosophy of freedom, of the possible of the dazzling victory over History conceived as a necessity.

He was arrested in March 1944. He was imprisoned in Drancy and deported to Auschwitz, where he was assassinated in a gas chamber on 2nd (or 3rd) October 1944.

A plaque is affixed at 6 rue Rollin in Paris, his home between 15th April 1932 and 7th March 1944.

The name Benjamin Vecsler is written on the Memorial de la Shoah.

Eléments de bibliographie :

Rimbaud le voyou (1933) , Le lundi existentiel, Baudelaire et l'expérience du gouffre, Le Mal des fantômes, Le Voyageur n'a pas fini de voyager, Faux-traité d'esthétique, Essai sur Lupasco.

François-Joseph was brought to power in Olmütz on the 2nd December 1848 following the revolutionary uprising of 1848, succeeding his uncle Ferdinand the Ist. He was the eldest son of the archduke François-Charles and princess Sophie of Bavaria. He married Elisabeth of Bavaria in 1854. The victories of his chancellor, prince Schwartzenburg and general Radetzki was to re-establish Austrian domination over the Hungarians and Italians (1849). Allied by Russia, he was to impose an authoritarian military regime, hostile to national minorities, however he was to lose this support in 1855 because of his hesitation during the Crimean War. The emperor was overthrown in 1859 by the troops of Victor-Emmanuel and Napoleon III (during the battles of Solferino and Magenta). He was forced to give up Lombardy as part of the Zurich treaty (10th November 1859). The rivalry with Prussia over the domination of the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein, seized from Denmark in 1864), gave the latter a reason to declare war in 1866. Defeated at Sadowa on the 3rd July 1866, he made peace with Prussia (Prague treaty, the 23rd August 1866), thus relinquishing his rights in Northern Germany to the victor and renouncing all involvement in the unification of Germany - the government of Vienna having crushed the "Little Germany" movement inspired by Prussia. He was also forced to give up Venetia to Italy, via France (treaty of Vienna, 3rd October 1866), who were allied to Prussia following the secret meeting between Napoleon III with Bismarck in Biarritz (October 1865).

To quell nationalist movements in his empire, he passed a statute in 1867 which effectively transformed Austria into a dualist, essentially federalist monarchy (Austro-Hungarian). The territories of the former Austrian empire were separated into two parts either side of the Leithasont to make up Cisleithania around Austria and Transleithania around Hungary. Cisleithania was made up of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Gabissia, Slovenia, Istria, and the territories along the Dalmatian coast. Universal suffrage was granted to men. Eastern Transleithania was formed of Hungary, Croatia, the territories around Temesvar, and Trans-sylvania. There was no male right to vote here, fact which gave the other people under the domination of Budapest an advantage. The emperor was still torn between an authoritarian rule (inspired by Germany), and the federalist politics of Ministers Taaffe and Badeni. François-Joseph accepted this situation of interior political deadlock.

The policy of rapprochement with Prussia led by Andrassy resulted in a rallying towards Bismarck's politics: in 1873 the alliance of the three emperors (Germany, Russia, Austria), who were to become the Dual Alliance in 1879 (Germany and Austria), and finally the Triple Alliance in 1883 when Italy joined - this is even spoken of in terms of "diplomatic subordination of Germany", from 1892-1893 onwards. Austria occupied (in 1878) and annexed (1908) Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to limit the Russian influence in the Balkans which since leaving the alliance had led to Pan-Slav politics, intensifying and thus becoming involved itself in the affairs of the Dual Monarchy. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina resulted in an international crisis. The problem with Bosnia appeared to be linked to that of Serbia and the situation of the southern Slavs under the domination of Budapest, who tended to be turned more towards Belgrade. Torn therefore between Pan-Slav and a dominant Pan-German politics, François-Joseph failed in his attempt to embody the middle way in central-eastern Europe. His long reign of 68 years saw him endure the execution of his brother Maximilian in Mexico in 1867, the suicide of his son Rodolphe in Mayerling in 1889, the assassination of his wife in by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898 and that of his nephew and presumed heir, François-Joseph, on the 28th June 1914 in Sarajevo, the event which triggered the first world war. The dual monarchy was thus relatively stable politically when it entered the war. His sovereign succeeded in imposing a certain dynastic sense of loyalty on most of his subjects and also among the army and other institutions. Austro-Hungary had suffered far heavier losses due to the war and its million victims than the antimonarchist movements by the time its founder passed away.