A Forgotten Figure in the Promotion of Romanian Culture in France: Marcel Montandon and His “Lettres roumaines” in Mercure de France (1905–1914)
From 1896 to 1940, the “Lettres étrangères” section of the Mercure de France magazine presented foreign literatures and cultures in the form of more or less regular columns aimed at a cultivated Frenchspeaking readership. Romania made its debut in 1905 under the pen of Marcel Montandon, a Swiss art critic and columnist born in Bucharest and living in Munich, who delivered 38 in-depth and regular articles until 1914. The presentation of this little-known corpus and its author provides an insight into the wealth of Romanian cultural production during this period, the arguments of the time and the choices and opinions of the author, standing as a cultural mediator between two intellectual worlds.
