top of page

Reconnaissance

A vast amount of material relating to the life and work of Samuel Pozzi, his family, and the Bourdet and Cazalis families, has been collated and conserved by Pozzi’s great grandson Nicolas Bourdet in the 4 th arrondissement of Paris.

Click on images for captions

Inheritance of this material had largely been, first via Thérèse and Jean Pozzi, and Cathérine Pozzi and her husband Edouard Bourdet, then to Claude Bourdet, son of Cathérine and Edouard, and finally to Nicolas, son of Claude and Ida Adamoff.

 

Nicolas trained as an architect and has lived and worked in Paris all his life.

 

The archives include several hundred letters from the late 19 th and early 20 th century to and from Pozzi himself, including correspondence with Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Clemenceau, Charles Darwin, Guy De Maupassant, Alfred Dreyfus, Joseph Reinach, Robert Proust, Georges Clairin and many many others. There are the journals kept by Emma Fischhof during her extended travels with Pozzi in Germany, Italy, Greece and elsewhere. There are hundreds of sepia and black-and-white photos, as well as photos on glass taken by Pozzi both in Paris and abroad. There are portraits of Pozzi and other family members. All of this has been meticulously catalogued by Nicolas Bourdet.

 

There is also an extensive collection of correspondence which belonged to Claude Bourdet, writer, journalist, human rights activist and Resistant in World War II (he was imprisoned for two years in Buchenwald), who continued to be an active member of the French left until his death in 1996. Claude’s wife Ida was a champion tennis player, among the ten top female players in the world in 1935.

 

Both Claude and Nicolas have made the contents of the archives freely available to Pozzi scholars and others interested in Pozzi and/or other family members. There is an extended family of Pozzi descendants living in Paris, elsewhere in France , the United States (including American composer Professor Pozzi Escot, of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston) and other countries all of whom take a keen interest in family history and are happy to assist and provide information, particularly to research students who have investigated various aspects of the life and times of Samuel Pozzi.

 

Claude Bourdet was closely involved with Claude Vanderpooten in the selection and writing of material for Vanderpooten’s 1993 biography Samuel Pozzi –Ami des Femmes.

bottom of page