One hundred years of French language teaching at university. Founders and first teachers. The beginnings of Romance studies in Slovakia

Abstract

French language teaching at university is celebrating its centenary in Slovakia. The Romance Seminary (now the Department of Romance Studies) in the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava was set up in March 1923 as one of the first language departments in Slovakia, shortly after the founding of the Seminary of Slavonic Studies, and French has been taught there without interruption to the present day. The creation of the Seminary also had a major cultural impact: Slovakia, which was part of inter-war Czechoslovakia, joined the French-speaking countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s, where linguistic, but above all cultural and diplomatic relations with France played an essential role. The article examines the place of the Comenius University and the Roman Seminary in these cultural relations and traces the formation of the foundations of university teaching of French. Alongside professors from Czech universities, it was the French lecturer and later professor Léon Chollet who made a substantial contribution to laying the foundations for the teaching of French at university. He worked at the Seminary from its foundation until 1950, when he was forced to leave Czechoslovakia for political reasons. His contribution and teaching methods played an important role and resonate to this day, although they have not yet received sufficient attention. In the post-war period, Anton Vantuch and Jozef Felix contributed above all to the development of the teaching of French literature, language, and culture at the Seminary. These two personalities can be regarded as the founders of modern French studies in Slovakia, although their political fate was just as complicated. Based mainly on archive documents and unpublished correspondence, the article focuses on these founding figures and their cultural activities and reconstructs the main stages in the development of French studies at Comenius University between 1923 and 1974.