The History of French University 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, and French has been taught there without interruption to the present day. The creation of the Seminary also had an important cultural impact: Slovakia, which was part of inter-war Czechoslovakia, joined the French-speaking countries of Central and Eastern Europe (such as Romania, Bulgaria and others) 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 Romance seminary in these cultural relations and traces the history of French studies: alongside professors at Czech universities, it was above all the French lector Léon Chollet, Anton Vantuch and Jozef Felix who made a substantial contribution to its development. Based mainly on archive documents and unpublished correspondence, the article focuses on these founding figures and reconstructs the main stages in the history of the Seminary between 1923 and 1974.