Ernest Denis was a French historian. Denis became known as a specialist of Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and Bohemia

Bohemia

Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...

, and played a major role in the establishment of the Czechoslovak

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

 state in 1918. Along with Louis Léger

Louis Léger

Louis Léger was a French writer and pioneer in Slavic studies. Léger studied under Aleksander Chodźko at the Collège de France, whose position he eventually succeeded in 1885 by taking up the Slav Literature and Language chair of Adam Mickiewicz, which he occupied until 1923...

, he is considered to be one of the most highly regarded twentieth-century historians of the Slav

Slavic peoples

The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...

 world in France. Upon his death, the Czechoslovak state bought his residence in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 in order to create an institute for Slavic studies.