Trotskyist intellectual Boris Fraenkel commits suicide
Published: 5/1/2006

PARIS - Boris Fraenkel, the French intellectual who initiated former French prime minister Lionel Jospin into Trotskyism, has committed suicide aged 85, his family announced Monday.

Fraenkel jumped from a bridge over the river Seine in Paris on April 23, leaving a note saying he had for some time had suicidal intentions, his family said. His body was found two days later.

Fraenkel was born in 1921 in Danzig (now Gdansk) and arrived in France in 1938.

There, he met the American philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the American psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and began translating Trotsky`s works.

He co-founded the Trotskyist International Communist Organisation (OCI), forerunner to the Workers` Party (PT), from which he was expelled at the end of the 1960s.

In 1997 Fraenkel revealed that Jospin had been a member of the group in the 1960s, a claim initially denied by the former French prime minister, who only admitted he had been a member in 2001 -- a year before he was ousted from office.

05/01/2006 16:03 GMT

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=121383