Raymond Coulon, 1938-2022
Many former colleagues and students were sad to learn of the recent death of Raymond Coulon, former senior lecturer in French language and French law, who retired in 1997. Raymond died aged 83 on 26 October in Cannes, France.
Raymond came to Kent in the early 1970s as a lecturer to teach French language, in days when many Kent degrees offered the opportunity to study a foreign language as a subsidiary element. With colleagues in the Language Centre he developed new courses which helped students learn French in contexts relevant to their main degree subject. Law students were among those he taught, and, when the then Law Board of Studies arranged a student exchange programme with the University of Paris Sud in 1978, he became closely involved in preparing Kent students for their year studying French law in Paris.
The English and French Law degree was one of earliest law exchange programmes which later became widespread under the aegis of the Erasmus programme, and Raymond was instrumental in extending it. Initially, it included new partners in the Universities of Grenoble and Bordeaux, and, in the early 1990s, the programme was intensified so that students obtained the French Licence (undergraduate degree), thus gaining a double qualification. This required Kent students to take courses in French law in their first and second year at Kent, and Raymond spent a year in Bordeaux studying French administrative law to enable him to teach French law to students prior to their year in France. At this point he joined the Law School, and oversaw the flourishing of these programmes for the remainder of his career. His own research and publication was also influenced by this change in direction, and he produced a (highly critical) monograph on the failure to protect the rights of aliens in French law Des droits de l’homme en peau de chagrin : le droit des étrangers dans la jurisprudence du Conseil constitutionnel, together with contributions to discourse analysis and semiotics of law.
Raymond was a rigorous, stimulating and kind teacher whose ready humour and critical insights made his classes enjoyable as well as memorable. He is remembered very fondly by his former students, many of whom kept in contact with him long after he and they had left Kent. He and his wife Martine carried on living in Tyler Hill for almost 20 years after his retirement, and he continued to meet former colleagues over coffee in Eliot Staff common room. He and Martine also spent time at the house they bought in the village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in the Lot valley before moving to the sunnier climes of Juan Les Pins in the south of France.
Raymond made one of the key contributions to opening up study at Kent to continental European influence. This change was recognised when the strapline “The UK’s European university” was adopted, and, although some things have changed with Brexit, that influence still remains strong.