The conference ‘The French Language in Russia’, which marked the two-hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the national resistance to Napoleon’s grande armée, duly took place from Wednesday 12 to Friday 14 September 2012 at Clifton Hill House in the University of Bristol. The conference was one of a number of academic events associated with the AHRC-funded project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ that is based in the University of Bristol over the academic years 2011-14.

The conference was attended by 56 delegates. The University and the project team were pleased to welcome so many visitors from overseas, including 15 who are based in Russia, 10 who are based in France and others from Italy, Switzerland and the US, as well as many from the UK.

The business of the conference was conducted in three languages (English, French and Russian), with delegates using whichever language they felt most at ease in for delivery of their paper, for asking or responding to questions in the panels, or for conversation with other delegates.

Two speakers, Peter Burke of the University of Cambridge and Wladimir Berelowitch of the University of Geneva, delivered plenary lectures and 36 others delivered 20-minute papers, including two in absentia. The papers were distributed among 13 panels, arranged as in the final version of the programme published shortly before the conference, except that Panel C in that programme did not take place and Carole Chapin’s paper was included in Panel D instead.

The papers covered a wide range of topics in the fields of linguistic, social, political, cultural, intellectual, literary, educational and architectural history and spanned a long period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, with a strong focus on the ages of Catherine II and Alexander I.

Abstracts of all the papers can be found in the conference booklet (PDF, 669kB). You may also access sound recordings of the plenary lectures and all the papers as they were delivered, with the exception of the paper by Svetlana Maire, which is available on video.

The project team are exploring the possibility of publishing written-up versions of as many of these papers as possible in clusters of related articles or as chapters in one or more coherent volumes of proceedings.

On the morning of 12 September, before the beginning of the conference, Jessica Tipton, with the help of Vladislav Rjéoutski, led overseas delegates who had already arrived in Bristol on a tour of places in the city that were visited by Princess Dashkova during her visit to England in 1770. These places include St Mary Redcliffe Church and what is now the University’s Goldney Hall. We publish here extracts from Dashkova’s account of her visit to the English West Country (Office document, 21kB) and Jessica’s commentary on Dashkova’s visit (Office document, 4,180kB) (a text with maps and other visual images). Jessica will in due course publish an edited English translation of Dashkova’s account of her journey.

A number of photographs of delegates at places visited during the Dashkova tour and of the conference itself are also available on this site.

We wish to thank Sam Barlow and Hannah-Marie Chidwick of the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts, which is based in the University’s Faculty of Arts, and Amanda Bowden of the University’s Conference Office for their considerable help in the organisation of the conference. We also thank the staff of Clifton Hill House and Goldney Hall for the care with which they looked after the delegates.

Most of all, we thank the academic participants in the conference for the quality of their papers, the seriousness of the discussions that took place after each paper and the spirit in which they collaborated throughout this event.