site.btaJanuary 19, 1989: Historic Breakfast with French President Mitterrand Held in Sofia

On January 19, 1989, French President Francois Mitterrand met with representatives of the Bulgarian scientific and artistic community as part of his state visit to Bulgaria, the first by a French head of State to this country. Mitterrand arrived in Sofia a day earlier at the invitation of State Council head Todor Zhivkov.

At the French Embassy in Sofia, Mitterrand held a working breakfast with 12 Bulgarian dissident intellectuals, most of them members of the Discussion Club in Support of Glasnost and Perestroika. That meeting went down in history as the famous "breakfast with Mitterrand", because it was a key event ahead of the fall of the communist regime in this country in the autumn of 1989. Among the attendees was Zhelyu Zhelev, who later became Bulgaria's first directly elected president.

On the French side, the breakfast was also attended by Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, the French Ambassador to Bulgaria, and the Cultural Attache at the Embassy at the time.

At the start of the breakfast, there were some 30 French journalists in the room, who left right before the talks started. Discussed were problems of the public development in Bulgaria.