The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History

By Gesine Argent Many accounts of life in the Russian empire, especially the empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, express the idea that French was a universal language for the higher echelons of Russian society. French, so the story goes, was adopted by the Russian nobility in the eighteenth century, and became the only acceptable language for communication among this social group. However, the language fell out of use in the nineteenth century as a result of the Napoleonic wa..