Marshall Chair of French - Marshall Professors of French

Marshall Professors of French

In 1919, the Marshall Lecturer in French, Charles Martin, became the first Marshall Professor. He was succeeded in 1937 by Alan Boase, a graduate of Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne, and an authority on influential French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne. He was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French government and in 1979 won the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française, awarded by the Académie française. Under his leadership, the department grew into one of the largest and most dynamic in Britain. Boase retired in 1966 and died in 1982.

Boase was followed in 1966 by Austin Gill, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford who had previously been the British Council's Representative in North Africa and Director of the British Institute in Paris, and had been awarded a CBE in 1955. Gill was a specialist in French literature of the 19th century and particularly the work of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He retired from the Chair in 1971 to focus on this research, being succeeded by Henry Barnwell, and died in 1990.

In 1980, Colin Smethurst was appointed to the Chair from the University of Liverpool. He was made an Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes académiques, the second of three grades of that Order. Smethurst retired in 1998 and Noël Peacock was appointed to the Chair, holding it until his own retirement in 2010.