Died 14 June 1976, Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France | ||
Rosa Bailly (14 March 1890 – 14 June 1976), known also as Rosa Dufour-Bailly and Aimée Dufour was a French teacher, journalist and writer closely tied throughout her professional life to the cause of Poland and its literature. She was also a poet.
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Biography
Bailly was born in Saint-Florent-sur-Cher in a modest family of farmers and artisans. She completed her education at the École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres, France. Although destined to become a school teacher, she never forgot the history lessons in primary school when she learned to her lasting horror of the partitions of Poland and its obliteration as a state. Later, she was to tell her colleagues:
« Apprenez à vos éléves que le démembrement de la Pologne en 1772 a sauvé la France, dites leurs que maintes fois le sang polonais à coulé à flot pour notre salut. Montrez leur la beauté de cette race intelligente, artiste et généreuse, son patriotisme et sa vitalité , son grand rôle historique … » - 'Teach your pupils that the dismemberment of Poland in 1772 saved France, tell them that Polish blood flowed many times to save us. Show them the beauty of that intelligent and artistic nation, its patriotism and its vitality, its great role in history ...'
She became a leading light of an association she founded in Paris, in 1919 under the name of Les Amis de la Pologne - The Friends of Poland, whose General Secretary she was for many years. In 1921 she became an activist in the matter of a plebiscite about Upper Silesia joining the rest of a newly independent Second Polish Republic. She both translated into French and had published the works of many Polish writers, among them, Maria Konopnicka, Julian Tuwim, Leopold Staff, Zofia Nałkowska, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, Zenon Przesmycki, Wacław Berent and Boleslaw Leśmian.
During World War II, Rosa Bailly organised assistance for Polish prisoners of war and soldiers in France. She continued her Polish contacts after the war and well into retirement, but the intensity and the welcome had waned with the advent of Polish communism. She visited there one last time in 1959 and wrote a history of Warsaw. She was also a great lover of the Pyrenees and finally settled in that region. She died in Pau in 1976, aged 86.
Works about the author
Portraits of her are by Nina Alexandrowicz, Zbigniew Więckowski ( in oil) and Maja Berezowska (water colour). The sculptor Francis Black has made a bust of her, which is in the Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris see "cracovia-leopolis" .