Marcel Aymonin, a Czech passion

On the occasion of the publication of Trajectoire déconcertante entre Dijon, Prague et Paris (1911-1984) (Eur’Orbem, 2025), CEFRES & the French Institute in Prague invite you to a Great Interview with the author Antoine Marès.

When: Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 6 pm
Location: French Institute in Prague, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
Language: French with simultaneous Czech interpretation
Moderator: poet, director and writer Bertrand SCHMITT

A student of the Lycée Carnot in Dijon when he contracted the “virus” of Czech culture, Marcel Aymonin (1911-1984) traversed the turbulent history of the previous century as a mediator between France and Czechoslovakia. After his time as teacher at the French Lycée in Prague between 1933 and 1939, he returned to the Czech capital in 1945 as the director of the Ernest Denis French Institute after taking part in the “mission Leclerc” to Prague for Bastille Day (14th July). Transferred to Bulgaria in 1950, he returned to Prague in 1951 by spectacularly denouncing French cultural institutions and obtaining political asylum. After teaching at Charles University and the University of Algiers, he returned to France in 1967, where he distinguished himself as a teacher of Czech culture and translator (in particular, of Milan Kundera and Václav Havel). The aim here is to decipher and shed light on a complex journey which reveals much about the 20th century’s conflicts – both hot and cold, the political and cultural exchanges between East and West, as well as the pitfalls of translation. A bewildering trajectory that tells a story of the 20th century.

Antoine Marès, emeritus professor of contemporary history (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University) and member of UMR SIRICE, is a specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, author or editor of some fifty volumes, including Le Paris des étrangers (co-edited), Imprimerie nationale Éditions, 1989; History of the Czechs and Slovaks, Tempus, 2005 (to be republished in 2026); Edvard Beneš: From Glory to the Abyss. A Drama Between Hitler and Stalin, Perrin, 2015 (published in Czech by Argo in 2016); The Czechoslovak Shockwave: 1968 in Central and Western Europe (co-edited with Françoise Mayer and Jacques Rupnik), Institut d’études slaves, 2020. He is currently preparing a history of Czech-to-French translators (Chance, Passion and Necessity: Translating from Czech into French. A History of Trajectories since the Beginning of the 20th Century) and a two-volume History of Franco-Czechoslovak Relations (1918-1992).