13 Night in Prague 1981–1982
Ever since the crushing of the Prague Spring, in August 1968, the
situation in Czechoslovakia had been especially grim. President
Gustáv Husák had imposed a ‘normalization’ process that made
the country one of those most closely aligned with the USSR. In
December 1976, a petition with the title ‘Charter 77’ started to
circulate, demanding that the government respect its own commit-
ments to freedom. Among the authors and fi rst signatories of the
Charter were the dramatist and future president Václav Havel, the
diplomat Jiri Hajek, the writer Pavel Kohout, and the philosopher
Jan Patočka, a former pupil of Husserl and Heidegger. However
minimal the demands expressed in the Charter, the authorities
rapidly came down hard on its instigators. After a long, brutal
interrogation, Patočka had to be hospitalized and died of a brain
haemorrhage on 13 March 1977.
In Oxford, in 1980, a group of teachers set up the Jan Hus
Educational Foundation, which took its name from the Czech
religious reformer who had been burned as a heretic in Constance
in 1415. Its aim was to aid Czech universities by organizing secret
classes and seminars, bringing in banned books, or giving fi nancial
support to the publication of samizdat literature. One of the found-
ers of the association, Alan Montefi ore, was then dividing his time
between Britain and France. His wife, Catherine Audard, also a
philosophy professor, soon launched the French branch of the
association. Its statutes were laid down on 4 August 1981. The great
historian and former member of the Resistance Jean-Pierre Vernant
was elected president, while Derrida took on the post of vice-presi-
dent; he was particularly sensitive to the question of Czechoslovakia
as he had travelled there several times and was kept regularly
informed of the situation by the maternal branch of Marguerite’s
family.
The organizers of the Jan Hus Foundation did not merely send
money. They took it in turns to visit Czechoslovakia, even though
they knew that the risks involved in travelling there were far from