France was, as for many other authors at that time, a refuge and the beginning of a second stage on the life and literary career of Milan Kundera. Died this Wednesday in Paris, he emigrated from his native country, the Czech Republic, in 1975, when he had already suffered reprisals, censorship and had been expelled from the Communist Party, where he had been a member. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen and it was a time when the French intelligentsia still viewed socialist revolutions with romantic eyes. Kundera always defended that all those small countries of Central Europe would survive if the influence of their culture and their letters remained.
He activism against the communist regime and his exile they marked what has probably been the most important stage of his life and work. France was not only his second homeland, it was where he lived for 48 years, it was where he was able to freely develop his pen, to the point that he chose French as his writing language, many years later.
In this convulsive context of the late 1970s, France gives Kundera the place that he has not been able to find in his country, with which he always had a conflictive relationship: he lost his nationality, it was restored years later, when he already had the gala. He was even accused of having betrayed a dissident to the communist police.
Critical of communism, before going into exile he was first expelled from the Party and later suffered reprisals, especially after the outbreak of the Prague Spring in 1968. In France he lived, first in Rennes, then in Paris. It is, in fact, where he publishes some of his best-known works, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
In the 1980s, when French intellectuals of the time were leaving behind, or at least debating, the role of a more multicultural France, Kundera addressed the need for a national identity. The socialist François Mitterrand had just come to power.