Exile and Interculturalism – The Case of Five French Writers of Romanian Origin

The influence of French culture over the Romanian language has been the subject of an impressive number of books; our purpose in this paper was to choose the opposite way and to prove to which extent a small, isolated Romance culture, located in the Balkans, such as the Romanian culture, was able to offer the great French culture thinkers that were capable of innovating it, of leaving their mark where everything seemed to have been said.In order not to fall into the trap of subjectivism, our research has addressed a double perspective – Romanian and French, focusing on five Romanian personalities, belonging to different eras and streams and who have decisively left their mark upon French literature: Tristan Tzara, Panait Istrati, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionesco and Virgil Gheorghiu.