Des études universitaires à l’enseignement du français en Italie dans les années 1950

In the fifties of the twentieth century, after the Second World War, the prestige of the French language in Italy was restored to its former glory. Many candidates with a Master's degree in French language and literature became French teachers. Trying to reconstruct the linguistic training they received and the courses they taught provides an insight into a segment of the history of modern language teaching in Italy. The example of the two universities in Milan where French was taught as part of a complete curriculum - the Università degli Studi di Milano and the Università Commerciale “Luigi Bocconi” - will be taken into consideration, as will the Catalogue of Italian Libraries, which records around 500 'manuals' published in Italy between 1950 and 1959 for the teaching of French. We can consider that there was indeed a gap between teacher training and the need to teach French for specific purposes, due to the country’s economic boom.