150 della ‘lingua di Molière’ a Ca’ Foscari

For 150 years, from the foundation of the High School of Commerce to the present day, the French language has played a central role at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, due to the considerable number of students who have chosen to study it and to its importance in the life of the university. The professors, even with their personal stories, their ideas and activities, the educational planning of their courses, and the shifting balance between language and literature, are a sign of the cultural and didactic progress some meaningful aspects of which this article aims to highlight. Following the historical reconstruction from a diachronic perspective, many important factors of discontinuity and continuity will naturally emerge. Our proposal is to focus on those language factors that remain constant over the years, in particular on that early liaison between teaching and the professors’ didactic/scientific production.