What Is Nicolas Sarkozy's Family Background?

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French centre-right candidate in France's 2007 presidential elections and current Minister of the Interior, was born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bocsa in 1955. Sarkozy's father, Paul Sárközy, was a Hungarian immigrant, who arrived in France after fleeing Hungary in 1944.

Members of the Nagybócsay-Sárközy family were landholding aristocrats in Hungary's eastern Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county in the period before World War II. The Sárközy family, like all other aristocratic families, lost all of their land after the Soviet army occupied Hungary in 1944.

Sarkozy's mother, Andrée Mallah, is of Sephardic Jewish origin and her parents arrived to France from Greece. Paul Sárközy married Mallah, who was then a law student, in 1949. The young Nicolas, however, was baptised a Roman Catholic in Paris.

Nicolas Sarkozy does not actually speak Hungarian, mainly due to the fact that his father left his family when Sarkozy was still growing up and no effort was ever made to teach Nicolas Hungarian. Although he has referred on numerous occasions to the immigrant roots of his family, he rarely speaks about his Hungarian heritage in public.