Plural: History, Culture, Society (Jun 2019)
Școala Română din Paris (Fontenay-aux-Roses) – file semnificative din istoria unei instituții românești dispărute în negura timpului
Abstract
The beginning of the twentieth century was strongly marked by the First World War. Among the unexpected results of this conflagration we can observe an exponential growth of cultural relations between the states involved in the conflict on the same side. If we explicitly look at the Romanian-French cultural relations from this perspective, it becomes obvious that we are dealing with an exceptional example of cultural collaboration on the European continent. The first concrete step of this process was the signing in Bucharest, on June 15, 1919, of The Poincaré-Angelescu Educational Convention, a document according to which the French state provided its support for the consolidation of Romanian education, especially in the new provinces that entered the Romanian state. Thus, in Bucharest, the French university mission was created as a separate entity, as a result of this convention. Later, in 1924, it was reorganized into the French Institute of Higher Studies. Through these two concrete actions, the French state took the initiative and offered its promised support for its ”Latin sister in Eastern Europe”. In the same period, the actions of the Kingdom of Romania in this sense were much slower and more indecisive, requiring a private initiative of the historian N. Iorga. This initiative led to discussions held in Bucharest concerning the establishment of two Romanian Schools in France and Italy. In the case of the Romanian School in France, historian N. Iorga took care of all the organizational efforts aimed at establishing this institution, e.g.: choosing a building in the picturesque suburb of Paris – Fontenay-aux-Roses, which he bought on behalf of the Romanian state, proposing a special law for creating these schools in the Romanian Parliament, lobbying and negotiating in the French political milieu, seeking all the available ways to make sure the project was fulfilled, and supervising the entire educational process for the rest of his life. The official inauguration of the Romanian School in Fontenay-auxRoses took place on June 1, 1922. Since then, this locality and the school became the most important places for Romanian students in France. The functioning of the school facilitated the access of Romanian doctoral students in the humanities to the resources indispensable for study and research, while most of the Romanian historians with important works written during the interwar period benefited from scholarships there.
