French Studies

Fluency in a second language is a valuable skill in the United States, and is both attained and cultivated by those who choose to take the courses necessary to complete a concentration in it. French was for centuries the language of diplomacy both for its precision of expression and because it was the second language favored by the educated classes. Exploration and colonization brought the language to New France (Quebec and Nova Scotia), the Caribbean, the South Pacific (Tahiti), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia), West Asia (Lebanon, Syria), and Africa, from the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria) through Senegal and West Central Africa to Madagascar and the Reunion Island. In these regions French is still the first or second language spoken. Clearly, French is one passport to the world!

French is also the language of philosophy, literature and the arts, and in their classes concentrators will focus on important intellectual and historical moments, such as the Middle Ages (Chrétien de Troyes, Christine de Pisan) and the Renaissance (Rabelais, Montaigne, Ronsard), Le Grand Siècle (Molière, Racine, La Fontaine), the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Montesquieu, Graffigny, Voltaire, Rousseau), Romanticism (Chateaubriand, Hugo), the 19th-century realist novel (Balzac, Flaubert), the existentialists (Sartre, Camus), contemporary literature (Robbe-Grillet, Duras), and the Francophone world (Africa, Quebec, Caribbean).

If you are asked to free-associate upon hearing the word "French," you might immediately just think of Paris, the musical, Les Misérables, and a few other details that have become the stereotypes of that culture. Our interest at the College of William & Mary is to push beyond those simple equations and to show that studying French means more than "sounding French" or "Parisian." Our mission is intertwined with our unique role in history as the oldest Modern Languages and Literatures Department in the country. Over the 300 years of its existence, the Modern Languages and Literatures Department has been a national leader in curriculum development and teaching innovation.