Living in French at UVA: La Maison Française celebrates 40th Anniversary

For four decades, the Queen Anne-style mansion on Jefferson Park Avenue has served as a center for French cultural life at the University of Virginia. La Maison Française celebrated the 40^th anniversary of its existence as a University residential house for students seeking an immersive French experience earlier this month.

The Oct. 4 open house and dinner at the Boar’s Head Resort brought together current student residents, Department of French faculty and alumni returnees sharing their French House memories.

The milestone celebration drew 100 people, including emeritus faculty and about 50 UVA alumni French House residents and their guests. One of the notable returnees, alumnus and novelist and musician Ritt Deitz, now a distinguished teaching faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered an impromptu concert and storytelling hour.

“It was really a lovely day, and I think more than a few of my colleagues were touched to see so many different generations of French House residents mingling and talking up their love of what is truly a special, shared common space,” said Ari Blatt, professor and chair of the Department of French.

In his opening remarks at the anniversary celebration’s dinner, Blatt said la Maison Française serves as more than just a cultural center and hub for various events to bring together the UVA community’s francophones and francophiles.

“More than just a simple dwelling place, a place where one stays or abides … our maison is a space that fosters belonging, community, and a sense of connection. Connection between the people who live there (and, now, to people who lived there) as much as a connection to the larger constellation of people and places in the department, at UVA, in Charlottesville, and even throughout France and the francophone world, in which the maison finds itself centrally located,” Blatt said. “We’re so glad that so many students — by our calculations over 800 at this point — have called the French House a home for so many years.”

Originally built in 1896 by Dr. Paul Barringer, the French House mansion was renovated in 1984 and opened its doors to its first cohort of French-speaking UVA students in the fall of 1985. Shortly before the founding of the French House, former UVA French professor Robert Denommé had to fend off lobbying efforts by the School of Medicine to tear down the old Barringer Mansion to make room for a new wing of UVA Hospital, Blatt said.

“From what I’ve been told, Denommé was a master lobbyist in his own right and brought together a group of a dozen or so investors independent of the University and of the Commonwealth who agreed to pay for the Maison — with a tax write off, of course — for the first decade or so before it reverted back to the state,” Blatt said at the anniversary dinner. “In the interim, the Department of French managed to negotiate a deal that would sustain the vision of its founders — and, not inconsequentially, of the University’s founder, Mr. Jefferson — for decades to come.”

In a typical academic year, the French House serves as home to as many as 27 undergraduate students, one or two graduate-level exchange students from France and an undergraduate or graduate student who serves as a resident language advisor.

Rachel Geer, general faculty associate professor of French, has been the French House’s director since 2015.

“The French Department oversees the academic mission of the French House, which is sort of the raison d’etre, as we would say in French,” Geer said.

“What I love about the French House is that when you’re learning a language, you can get to a certain point in the classroom. But at some point, you have to get past the point of raising your hand in a class discussion and take it ‘out on the street’ and use it in a more everyday way.

“The French House does that for students, and what I love about it is watching those students when they first arrive and they’re still academic with their French, and they’re a little nervous trying to have a conversation. But the French House is a space where speaking the language really becomes a part of their personalities and changes how they think of themselves.”

Geer said the alumni who returned for the open house and Boar’s Head anniversary dinner seemed to draw as much enjoyment from hearing about the current residents’ experiences as the current residents did from hearing the stories from decades past.

“It was delightful to watch as alumni heard that some of the traditions that they had started are still carrying on,” Geer said. “And then the way that the current students were able to understand the French House from a different light, I know they came back very inspired.”