Today in Language: Antoine Court

One of my academic interests is the Huguenots (French Protestants), and in particular the Huguenots who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to settle in North America. Antoine Court, born on March 27, 1696, never made it across the Atlantic as far as I know, but he was a significant Huguenot minister and historiographer in Europe. He fled only as far as Switzerland. 

The Huguenot exodus from France, mainly after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 under Louis XIV, went in every direction. Two amazing features of it are the severe economic impact on France as thousands of Huguenots left and the way in which the French Protestants  usually assimilated quickly and painlessly in the new societies/countries they chose as their homes.

I hope to post much more information on the (North American) Huguenots in the near future. I recently gave a presentation on the topic at the South Carolina Foreign Language Teachers' Association conference in Columbia, S.C., and I will be presenting an expanded version of that same paper at the convention for the American Association of Teachers of French in Montreal, Quebec, this July.