French Historiography and Oskar Halecki

Oskar Halecki’s reception in French historiography is one of the interesting examples of diffi-culties in understanding Polish historical thought in France. As one of the leading authors of the concept of East‑Central Europe in world historiography, a descendant of the Viennese aristoc-racy and an ambassador of Polish humanities in the League of Nations Committee on Intellec-tual Cooperation, he promoted the history of the countries of the region, considering their independent of Russia cultural specificity, deeply connected with the values of the Christian Europe. Meanwhile, after the Second World War, the socio‑economically oriented historiogra-phy of “Annales” was gaining more and more popularity in Paris – and in Warsaw itself ...