site.btaFrench Institute to Mark 35th Anniversary of Meeting of Bulgarian Dissidents with Francois Mitterrand in Sofia

A conference-discussion on "Past and future of dissent: 35 years after the breakfast with President Francois Mitterrand" will take place on January 18 in the Slaveykov Hall of the French Institute in Bulgaria. Michel Eltchaninoff and Koprinka Chervenkova will participate in the Forum on Thursday, the organizers and hosts of the event said. The moderator of the conference-discussion is Luc Levy, Director of the French Institute in Bulgaria.

The famous "breakfast with Mitterrand" was a meeting of visiting President Francois Mitterrand with twelve leading Bulgarian dissidents, including Bulgaria's first democratically elected president-to-be Zhelyu Zhelev. Held at the French Ambassador’s Residence in Sofia on January 19, 1989, the breakfast was a harbinger of the collapse of totalitarianism in Bulgaria which happened some ten months after that.

Michel Eltchaninoff is a professor and PhD in philosophy, editor-in-chief of the French monthly Philosophie Magazine. He is the author of several books on contemporary ideologies and the history of ideas, including Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen, and Lenin Walked on the Moon.

Koprinka Chervenkova was born in Sofia. She graduated from the French High School in her hometown and the Higher Theatre Institute in Moscow. Since 1975 she has been working at the newspaper Kultura. In 1989, she attended the meeting with President Francois Mitterrand. Because of her participation in the "Club for the Support of Glasnost and Reconstruction", she was dismissed from the newspaper at the end of 1989, and on December 24, 1989 she was also expelled from the Communist Party. From 1990 until June 2018, when Kultura was suspended, she was its editor-in-chief.