Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa, painter and advertising artist, father of former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012), died on Saturday March 4, at the age of 94. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, married to the former head of state, announced it on her Instagram account on Sunday.
Born on May 5, 1928 in Budapest into a Hungarian gentry family, Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa saw his family life disrupted by the Second World War. His parents left the town of Szolnok with him for Budapest, before another move to southern Austria and then a return to Szolnok, where his father died suddenly, at the age of 51, in 1948. To avoid Being enrolled in military service on the Russian side in communist Hungary, Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa decides to go west via Germany and arrives in Paris in December 1948, where he finds a maternal great-uncle.
Two years later, he married Andrée Mallah in France. The couple will have three children: Guillaume (1951), Nicolas (1955) then François (1957). His younger brother will become, in 2007, the sixth president of the Fifth Republic. Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa obtained French nationality in the 1970s and then ran an advertising studio. When he retired, his paintings, produced with the German artist Werner Hornung, were exhibited in several countries and at the International Contemporary Art Fair. At 81, Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa said to our journalist Franck Johannès, on the occasion of a portrait published in Le Monde in 2009: "I have a great advantage over you (…) I cannot die young . »
