" Rather, a rela- tively small number of them
simultaneously
invented this problem and kindled a desire to solve it.
Cult of the Nation in France
And they sought to do it by transforming the very character of the people who lived within this space by giving them new attitudes, opinions,
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? and habits--and also, crucially, the same attitudes, opinions, and habits, to ensure that they acted as a single body. Education, the theater, the press, and the festivals were all mobilized to this end.
But as France's revolutionary assemblies recognized on many different occasions between 1789 and 1794, even a successful transformation of the French national character might not suffice to arrive at the desired state of harmony. For within France there existed, so they believed, another deadly source of division, misunderstanding, and conflict, a deeper one that de- stroyed any chance of achieving true republican homogeneity and might lead even the best of republican citizens inadvertently to threaten the safety of the republic. Overcoming it would require an effort as arduous as any proposed by the radical educational reformers, perhaps more so. This source of division was language itself.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
CHAPTER 6
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
The poor of this country should be able to say, like the poor of other nations such as the French, Spanish, Italian, &c. : "we dare to speak in our own language of the grandeurs of God and of the articles of our Faith. " . . . What flaw might the language of Toulouse have, not to be worthy of expressing the word of God, just like all others? What could the poor people of this country have done, not to deserve the consolation and honor of hearing of a matter as great as eternal sal- vation in their own language? To speak truly, experience . . . teaches us that there is no tongue which reaches further into the heart, and that touches more to the quick, than the maternal.
--la douctrino crestiano meso en rimos
[christian doctrine set to rhymes] (toulouse, 1641)
Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us break these instruments of injury and error.
--bertrand bare`re (1794)
? On July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the French staged one of the most impressive displays of national unity ever seen in Europe, in the first of the great revolutionary festivals. At noon, in Paris, on the Champ de Mars (future site of the Eiffel Tower), delegations of Na- tional Guardsmen from across France swore oaths of loyalty and pledged to join in a great national Federation. Under the ecstatic gaze of the guard commander, Lafayette, and the cooler eye of the presiding bishop, Talley- rand, guardsmen paraded past specially built pavilions, dignitaries deliv- ered speeches, and masses of spectators applauded and broke into patriotic song (including "C? a ira," as yet without its famous refrain about hang-
169
170 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ing aristocrats from lampposts). Everywhere--on flags, banners, uniforms, and cockades--floated the new symbol of the nation, the tricolor. At as close to the same moment as the technology of the age permitted, cities and villages across France marked the occasion with their own parades, songs, oaths, and speeches. In short, the idea of the nation as a political construction built by the conscious action of patriotic citizens--an idea unimaginable to the French just a few decades before--here enjoyed its apotheosis. 1
In one of the localities celebrating the Federation, the hamlet of Saint- Ginest on the outskirts of the southern city of Toulouse, the assembled guardsmen heard a sermon from a distinguished speaker. Hyacinthe Sermet was an ambitious and progressive-minded clergyman who had preached before the king at Versailles and contributed sprightly notices, in the manner of the day, to learned publications. Already firmly identified with the cause of Revolution, he was widely considered the leading can- didate for bishop of Toulouse under the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. 2 For his text on July 14, Sermet adroitly chose Galatians 4:31-5:1, in which Paul warns his readers against falling back into the grip of the old Mosaic law: "So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. " In the sermon itself, Sermet compared Christ's abrogation of the Mosaic law to the Revolution's abrogation of the old regime, and suggested that Paul himself, in heaven, was smiling on the achievements of the Constituent Assembly. 3
Yet even as he participated in this great ceremony of nation-building, the actual words Sermet used testified to what, from our modern perspec- tive, stands as one of the most important signs of French disunity at the time. This is how he started:
Jamay nou debignayots, mous efans, & brabe? s Camarados, a` qui l'Apoustoul Sent-Pol, le plus grand des Predicaire? s qu'ajo parescut sur la terro, desempey la naissenc? o del Christianisme? , adressabo aquel lengatge? . Aco ero, afin qu'au sapiats, a` nostre? s illustre? s Aujols, as mainatge? s d'aquelis Gauloise? s, que quitteguen y a enbiron tres milo ans aqueste? Pays, al nombre? de may de cent cinquanto milo, per ana al dela de las mars, al bout del mounde? counescut alabets, al fin found de l'Asio founda la superbo Bilo d'Anciro, & poupla la Proubinc? o que prenguec lour noum & s'apelec Galatio. 4
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 171
? The sermon was not in French, but rather in the Romance language now called Occitan, which then served as the vernacular for most of southern France and was just one of the many non-French languages then spoken on French territory. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which saw so much bloodshed in the name of self-determination for minority language groups, one would think that France in 1789 stood poised on the brink of dissolution into half a dozen smaller states--or at the very least, that any program of French nation-building had very far to go indeed.
The Politicization of Language
In fact, it was only in the Revolution itself that French multilingualism ac- quired real political significance and became the principal sign of the na- tion's regional diversity (before that, as I argued in Chapter 2, provincial rights and privileges served this purpose). Although France's kings had promoted French as a learned language and tried to associate its glory with their own, they had given very little attention to the speech of their hum- bler subjects. Franc? ois I's 1539 Edict of Villers-Cottere^ts, which ordered that all judicial and administrative documents be written "in maternal French language," originally had more to do with reducing the role of Latin in public life than with propagating Parisian French in the provinces. 5 Occitan verse stayed in print to the end of the old regime, while Alsace sheltered a vibrant German publishing trade until the Revolution. 6 In fact, the idea that language could be altered by legislative fiat remained largely unimaginable before 1789. "There is no Power capable of reforming man- ners of speech consecrated by usage," wrote d'Espiard de la Borde in a typi- cal statement. 7 Other authors made much the same point by recounting an anecdote about a Roman emperor who failed in his bid to legislate new words into Latin. 8 A few isolated works did call for the elimination of local dialects, but they had little resonance. 9 Most authors agreed with the view of sixteenth-century Lord Chancellor Michel de l'Ho^pital: "The division of languages does not cause the separation of kingdoms. "10
True, it did not take legislation to render the position of the local languages increasingly marginal in secular society. As early as 1567, the Gascon poet Pey de Garros had tellingly mourned "the damned cause of our despised language, [which] everyone is leaving and abandoning, and calling barbaric. "11 Local elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries oriented themselves increasingly to the court and the capital, and therefore to the French language, and the process was abetted by the expansion of
172 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the royal administration and the periodical press. By 1789, French reigned unchallenged in nearly all print media, in courtrooms and administra- tions, in the drawing rooms of educated bourgeois and nobles, and throughout most French cities. 12 Men and women who might previously have read and taken pride in local literary productions now bought hand- books with titles like Gasconisms Corrected, which promised to eliminate all embarrassing traces of dialect from their speech. 13
The use of the local languages in print, except in religious contexts, now served principally to mark a piece of writing as carnivalesque, capable of expressing meanings not permitted by the conventions of polite usage, without necessarily crossing into the territory of the obscene and forbid- den. 14 Grammarians tended to define correct speech by the usage of the royal court. They and many others dismissed regional languages and French dialects as "patois," a derogatory term derived from patte (an ani- mal's paw), signifying an earthy, unsophisticated, variable speech part way between animal grunts and true human speech. 15 Although some scholars were starting to devote serious attention to the local languages, glimpsing in them stable remnants of Europe's older, more primitive tongues, most educated people simply ignored them altogether, or treated them as cor- rupt versions of French itself. 16 In a 1790 speech, Mirabeau casually de- scribed France as "a nation of twenty-four million people speaking the same language. "17
Even at the start of the Revolution, concern about linguistic diversity re- mained almost nil among France's secular elites. The grievance petitions drawn up for the Estates General in 1788 and 1789 barely mentioned the subject. 18 When a prominent article in the Mercure national in 1790 demanded a wholesale reform of language, the recommendations boiled down to nothing more than the removal of forms of aristocratic politeness from the language. 19 Consider also an early revolutionary pamphlet which called on the government to abolish all differences of language and accent among the citizenry. "What good will it have done to eliminate the divi- sions of the provinces," the author asked, "as long as one can say, from someone's first phrase, this person is Provenc? al and that one is Picard? "20 The proposal sounds radical--but the pamphlet was actually a satire on the advanced revolutionaries' calls for social equality. It also proposed, inter alia, to nourish all children exclusively with a special "patriotic bouil- lon" so as to render them physically identical.
Starting in 1790, however, the way the French perceived and represented
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 173
? their linguistic situation became a point of angry political contention. Sermet's July 14 sermon itself had political importance, not simply because he delivered it in patois--already an unusual step for a man of his stat- ure--but because it then appeared in print in no fewer than four cities. 21 The very typography, precisely the same used in French-language publica- tions, gave graphic visual evidence that the language of Toulouse could ex- press the same range of meanings and opinions as French itself, and so perhaps deserved something closer to equal status. Sermet's confident, ele- gant Occitan prose, nourished by a deep familiarity with Toulouse's native literary traditions, implicitly made the same point. 22
The sermon in fact signaled the beginning of a remarkable efflorescence of France's regional languages in 1790-92. The Department of Finiste`re organized the translation and printing of numerous laws in Breton. 23 A well-known antiquarian translated the Constitution of 1791 into Provenc? al and had it published by the Imprimerie Nationale. 24 Jacobin clubs in non-French speaking areas, while generally deliberating in French, commonly organized public sessions at which members orally translated new laws and newspapers into the local language. 25 In the south, they also sponsored original speeches and subsidized publications in patois, to which counter-revolutionary authors responded in kind. 26 Over two hun- dred printed Occitan songs, poems, and pamphlets appeared between 1788 and 1800. 27 In Alsace, a strong tradition of German-language publishing continued, with thousands of items published, including a weekly newspa- per aimed at "artisans and peasants. "28 In 1790, after complaints that some citizens could not follow its debates, the National Assembly even voted to translate all new laws and decrees into the various regional tongues. Fol- lowing this moment of enthusiasm, however, it passed on to other busi- ness, and despite the zeal of volunteers hoping for lucrative translating as- signments, the policy functioned only fitfully, and few printed translations appeared. 29
Even as these hundred flowers were blooming, however, other revolu- tionaries were beginning to see linguistic diversity--which they identified above all with the peasantry--as a curse. 30 The key figure was abbe? Henri Gre? goire, a Lorraine priest who first made a national reputation as cham- pion of civil rights for Jews. As early as 1790 he blamed rural resistance to the Revolution on ignorance of French, claiming that disruptive south- western peasants were confusing the de? crets (decrees) of the revolutionary National Assembly with the old regime's de? crets de prise de corps (arrest or-
174 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 15. Antoine-Hyacinthe Sermet, a noted cleric from Toulouse, delivered his speech celebrating the Festival of the Federation in Occitan, and had it printed in the same language. The typeface and layout are exactly the same as in French- language publications of the period. Title page from his Discours prounounc? at le 14 juillet, 1790 (Toulouse, 1790).
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 175
? ders). The same year he sent out to a wide audience a questionnaire "con- cerning patois and the customs of the people of the countryside. " As his revolutionary career flourished, he made regular calls for the nation's lin- guistic unification and found considerable support for his ideas. Legislative reports, pamphlets, and newspaper articles alike denounced linguistic di- versity as a barrier to social equality, contrasted the success of French abroad to its failure at home, and labeled the translation of laws cumber- some and unreliable. 31
By 1794, the Jacobins had begun an official campaign to eradicate patois entirely and make the French language uniform throughout the Republic (although they recognized the continuing short-term need for transla- tors). 32 Bertrand Bare`re put the matter starkly in a legislative report that demanded the establishment of French-language schools in four periph- eral areas of the Republic: Brittany, Alsace, the Basque Country, and Cor- sica. Directing his ire at their "foreign" idioms, he let loose his usual overboiled rhetoric, notably in the passage quoted at the start of this chap- ter. 33 Four months later, Gre? goire submitted a much more detailed report that targeted not merely peripheral languages, but Occitan and northern French dialects as well. 34 In its pages, what had been material for satire, now became grist for policy. "We no longer have provinces, but we have thirty patois which recall their names," Gre? goire proclaimed. He also re- peated the old anecdote about the Roman emperor who tried to legislate on language but, with aplomb, turned it on its head: "A tyrant of Rome once wished to introduce a new word; he failed, because the legislation of languages was always democratic. "35 The Convention instituted French- language requirements for promotion to officer grades in the armies, and a ban on all non-French languages in judicial documents. 36 In Alsace and in Catalan-speaking Roussillon, something of a limited "linguistic terror" took place, with non-French publications and commercial signs sup- pressed, non-French-speaking personnel dismissed, and plans drawn up for forcible transfers of population. 37 A visiting conventionnel in Stras- bourg proposed a horrific solution for gallicizing Alsace: to guillotine a quarter of the population and expel all others who had not actively partici- pated in the Revolution. 38
Gre? goire and a few others held out as an ultimate goal not merely the diffusion of French through France, but the transformation of French itself into a perfectly pure, clear, and rational tongue, purged of aristocratic cor- ruptions and of all grammatical and lexical irregularities and confusions.
176 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 16. The title page from Henri Gre? goire, Rapport sur la ne? cessite? et les moyens d'ane? antir le patois (Report on the Necessity and Means for Annihilating Patois), Paris, 1794: his proposal for eradicating local languages and making French the sole and uniform language of France.
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 177
? This perfect language could then spread, they suggested, to all the world. They hoped that its development would eliminate misunderstandings and "abuses of words," which they presented as the root causes of all conflict and disharmony in the terrestrial sphere. It was a dream which recalled the ancient religious desire to overcome the legacy of the Tower of Babel; it also testified to the process of "disenchantment" discussed in Chapter 1. For now the perfect language would come from nature, not God, and would belong to the natural world alone. 39
The idea was dazzling. In practice, though, even the radicals devoted most of their effort to the problem of spreading the French language--the one spoken and written by Parisian elites--to the rest of the Republic. Bare`re, the hardheaded and opportunistic Terrorist, even claimed that most language abuses had already disappeared, along with their aristo- cratic authors. 40 Gre? goire himself spent most of his report justifying the destruction of patois, and only in the last few pages turned to the "vast project . . . of revolutionizing language. "41 His program was nationalist first, universalist second.
In any case, even the relatively limited nationalist program of uniformi- zation never had a real chance for success. Long before a single language teacher had arrived in Brittany or Alsace, the Ninth of Thermidor had come, and with it the end of this and many other radical dreams. While subsequent regimes remained cognizant of language differences, until the late nineteenth century they mostly gave up on any attempt to eliminate the problem. It would take the Third Republic, endowed with far greater material resources and a far greater degree of political stability than the First, to start putting Gre? goire's program into action. And even the Third Republic remained tolerant of patois insofar as it constituted part of a re- gion's folklore and did not threaten national unity. 42
The Ear of the Listener
To modern readers, this politicization of language during the French Revo- lution has generally seemed an obvious and inevitable phenomenon, one that arose naturally when the revolutionaries tried to bring democracy to a multilingual country. 43 But was the problem so obvious to contemporar- ies? Consider the enormous differences of opinion on the very extent of the problem. In 1792, the deputy Dentzel estimated that three million people, out of a population of 28 million, could not speak French. Gre? goire him-
178 The Cult of the Nation in France
? self variously put the figure at eight million and six million, and claimed that scarcely three million spoke French itself properly. 44 His report to the Convention enumerated thirty separate patois ripe for eradication. More- over, he treated French dialects and the non-Indo-European Basque as equal barriers to the progress of the Revolution. 45 In contrast, Bare`re ech- oed the common old regime view that northern and southern patois amounted simply to variations on French, and saw a problem only in four relatively small peripheral regions. 46 Other prominent revolutionaries, such as Mirabeau, remained oblivious to the language problem altogether. Seeming to relegate the matter to the past, Saint-Just speculated in the spring of 1794 that if old regime feudalism had continued for longer, "soon the French would no longer have spoken the same language. "47
Consider also Gre? goire's earliest revolutionary remarks on the subject, when he told the Constituent Assembly, in reference to the southwestern riots, that "the municipal authorities in the areas where these troubles are taking place think that they are caused first of all by ignorance of the [French] language. "48 In fact the municipal authorities thought nothing of the sort. Nor did the other deputies charged with investigating the riots, who tended to blame counter-revolutionary agitators, or peasant brigands, rather than any confusion over the meaning of de? cret. Nor have subsequent historians, who have rather highlighted such factors as long-standing peas- ant hostility to seigneurialism and the hopes raised when the Assembly proclaimed the end of the feudal regime on August 4, 1789. At best, lin- guistic confusion has merited a footnote in their works. 49
Two recent studies support the views of those who failed to see major language barriers in France. One shows that French emigrants to Que? - bec--who came primarily from a wide swathe of dialect-speaking western France--adapted to the standard French of the colony quickly and without difficulty. 50 The other concludes that litigants and defendants in old regime Languedoc do not seem to have been seriously inconvenienced by linguis- tic differences. 51 In fact, very few eighteenth-century sources from outside the peripheral regions of Brittany, Flanders, Alsace, Savoy, Corsica, the Basque Country, and Roussillon mention linguistic difference at all, or suggest that speakers of French or Occitan dialects had trouble under- standing the decrees and monitoires read out to them in church. Differ- ences of language may have been obvious, but the extent to which they posed problems of mutual comprehension is much less so. It is no coinci- dence that Gre? goire's revolutionary writings are the most often-cited evi-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 179
? dence for the existence of linguistic barriers in France in the eighteenth century, outside of the periphery. He was one of the very few observers who paid more than passing attention to them. 52
On one level, this confusion as to the very existence of difficulties caused by multilingualism seems somewhat absurd--surely the French knew if they understood each other. Yet as sociolinguists have long recognized, when it comes to the extent that closely related languages (like French and Occitan) differ from one another, perceptions not only vary enormously, but easily get tangled up with politics. The extent to which people succeed in communicating with each other always depends on the subject dis- cussed, and on a host of contingent social and psychological factors. One person's slang or patois is another's oppressed minority language, as in the case of Ebonics, or Black English, whose very existence has been the subject of heated political debate in the United States. 53 The ability to understand a limited range of orders (as in the army) or to complete a transaction in the marketplace is not the same as the ability to engage in a lengthy conversa- tion about religion or politics. So it should not be surprising that while Gre? goire's old regime predecessors--and even his revolutionary colleague Bare`re--perceived only relatively minor differences at the periphery of the country, he himself could see massive and paralyzing heterogeneity. Lan- guage differences are real, but their extent, and the extent to which they matter, lie at least partly in the ear of the listener.
In this connection, it is worth remarking that the representation of early modern France as a nation of vast and overpowering linguistic diversity has been widely promoted, largely because it has nicely served two very dif- ferent ideological agendas. Republicans and educational reformers have promoted it because it suggests that French national unity is fragile, neces- sitating a vigorous program of republican centralization. Modern regional militants have promoted it as well, because it helps them to equate central- ization with imperialism and to distinguish their own culture as sharply as possible from that of Paris. 54 Particularly in the French and Occitan dialect areas, therefore, it is simply not correct to say that the French revolutionar- ies confronted an obvious, inevitable "language problem.
" Rather, a rela- tively small number of them simultaneously invented this problem and kindled a desire to solve it. Furthermore, they proposed solving it in radi- cally different ways. While Sermet and many others advocated translating revolutionary ideas into the languages of the people, Gre? goire and his allies insisted on teaching the people a new language: standard French.
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? The question remains, however, why the revolutionaries invented this problem--why they seized on language as the ultimate sign of national disunity when this issue had previously received such scant political atten- tion. It is an important question, not only for understanding this particu- lar historical moment, but also for making sense of the powerful republi- can vision of the French nation that was born out of the Revolution. Certainly up until World War I, most of those who subscribed to the re- publican vision of the nation interpreted the language question much in the way Gre? goire had done: as a sign of excessive heterogeneity and backwardness requiring civilizing and standardizing instruction from re- publican schoolmasters and officials. The vision lay behind much of the educational policy of the Third Republic, which explicitly attempted to universalize the use of French and to confine regional languages to the do- main of folklore. It has even colored some of the best scholarship on French nation-building--notably Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, which opens with a stark tableau of the isolation, backwardness, and diver- sity of the French countryside before 1870 (Weber entitled his first chapter, with insufficient irony, "A Country of Savages"). 55 Recent scholarship has done much to uncover the ideological roots of this vision, but it has done much less to explore where the vision came from in the first place. 56
Previous interpretations of the revolutionary initiatives with regard to the language, to the extent they have gone beyond the notion that the Rev- olution simply tried to solve an obvious problem, have generally high- lighted either the heritage of the Enlightenment or the experience of the radical revolution itself. For instance, it has been argued that Gre? goire and his correspondents were representatives of a cosmopolitan, urban, and ultimately imperial Enlightenment who sought in essence to colonize and domesticate a peasantry they perceived as alien, primitive, and incapa- ble of abstract reasoning. 57 It has also been suggested that these revolution- aries were driven principally by their theoretical concerns about misunder- standing and "abuse of words," and the utopian idea of creating a perfect language. 58
This complex Enlightenment background certainly has great impor- tance for understanding the language initiatives, but any interpretation of the revolutionary initiatives that refers solely to the Enlightenment runs up against one, simple, frustrating question. Why, if the Enlightenment taught the French to see patois as primitive and unable to handle complex politi- cal discussions, did the years 1790-92 see such important efforts to trans-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 181
? late documents into patois and to use the local languages to educate the people in revolutionary politics? Hyacinthe Sermet was no less a product of the provincial Enlightenment than Gre? goire, yet he saw no trouble with expressing complex political arguments in the Toulouse dialect. The Jaco- bin clubs to which Gre? goire sent his questionnaire were much the same institutions which promoted the flowering of regional tongues during the early Revolution. Indeed, while few of Gre? goire's correspondents ques- tioned the ultimate desirablity of linguistic uniformity, many, as they re- ported back to him, instinctively used patois in their efforts to persuade peasants to support the Revolution. Some contributors to the revolution- ary debate on language even suggested standardizing the regional lan- guages so as to make them more effective tools of political instruction. 59
Interpretations which highlight the experience of the radical revolution, meanwhile, fail to explain either this patois-friendly phase of revolutionary language politics or the wide disagreements among proponents of linguis- tic uniformity. 60 To be sure, the demand for linguistic uniformity fit in well with the general Jacobin struggle against social and cultural heterogeneity, as well as the radical republican efforts to have all male citizens participate in government. 61 Gre? goire, by far the most important figure in the story, described mastery of French as a key element of full republican citizenship and presented linguistic unification as a weapon against the malign forces of feudalism and federalism (the latter a reference to revolts against the Jacobin government). 62 Yet whatever additional impetus the radical revolu- tion provided, there is also the inconvenient fact that Gre? goire himself, at least, had already come to his views on language before the Revolution, in a prize-winning Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews, which called forthrightly for the "annihilation of patois. "63 Talleyrand similarly advocated linguistic uniformity as early as 1790, well before the Jacobins had dreamed of a new calendar, new forms of dress, or a Cult of the Supreme Being. 64 However well it fit in with the agenda of the radical revolution, the politicization of language did not derive from the radical revolution.
The revolutionary language initiatives might also be put in the context of long-term social and economic developments of the sort discussed by Gellner and Anderson in their influential theories of nationalism. 65 How- ever, even leaving aside the fact that the late-eighteenth-century French countryside had not yet experienced widespread industrialism (a key part of Gellner's theory), and that most patois-speaking peasants were poor
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? and illiterate (Anderson's theory puts great emphasis on the expanding market for books), such long-term explanations offer little help in under- standing why the issue erupted into politics so abruptly in 1789-90, and what precipitated the subsequent variety of attitudes towards multilingual- ism. In short, to understand the problem fully, we need to move into a very different historical territory.
"L'Empire des Pre^tres"
Some time in late 1790 or early 1791, the Society of the Friends of the Con- stitution of Albi, in Languedoc, published a twenty-seven-page speech in the local dialect delivered by a wool merchant named Salivas to the "good people of the countryside. "66 The title gave little clue to the content, and in- deed the first few lines amounted to standard early revolutionary boiler- plate. Soon, however, Salivas's principal purpose became clear. Not only did the Revolution pose no threat to the Catholic religion, he argued; it represented the fulfillment of Catholic prayers. Indeed, it meant something close to the literal coming of the Millennium. As he made this hyperbolic point, his literary style, which had begun as a fairly literal rendering into Occitan of the rhetoric of the National Assembly, quickly strayed into a different, older mode:
It is now that the reign of God will flourish in this Kingdom . . . now, in this age of miracles . . . France will be the first [country] to spread and propagate the law of our Lord . . . and thus the desire for our Redemption will be fulfilled; the name of the Lord, of God Almighty, will spread and be hallowed first throughout Europe, and from here will reach to all parts of the universe . . . God has heard our oath, it is written in the book of life, it is pleasing to Heaven and has brought joy to all the martyrs crushed by the former despotism, the former tyranny. 67
Salivas also contrasted the "purity of the Gospel" to the corruption of the Catholic clergy in France. He insisted that among all the tasks faced by the Revolution, none ranked higher than putting an end to the church's myr- iad "abuses. " Soon, however, the light of reason would prevail, and then "France will not be better compared than to that Zion triumphant, that heavenly Zion of which the Scripture speaks. "68
In publishing this unlikely attempt to drape the mantle of Hebrew prophets over the shoulders of revolutionary Liberty, the club of Albi did
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 183
? not wish to indulge the religious fantasies of an addled merchant, but rather to address a pressing political problem. In 1790, the National As- sembly had unveiled a plan for the greatest reform ever undertaken in the history of French Catholicism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. From now on, it decreed, the people (including non-Catholics) would elect priests and bishops; clerics would become, in effect, civil servants under the control of the state. This action stirred more resistance than any previ- ously taken by the revolutionary authorities, and in response, the Assembly insisted that priests take an oath of loyalty to the new regime (including the Civil Constitution) or face dismissal. The breach widened, and both sides in the dispute resorted massively to the newspaper and pamphlet press to win adherents. 69
In the overall corpus of revolutionary publications, the dispute over the Civil Constitution amounts to only one large body of texts. In the more limited corpus of publications in the local languages, however--both revo- lutionary and counter-revolutionary--it represents by far the single largest issue under discussion. 70 A concern for the religious future of France suf- fused these texts. They alternately spoke of the Revolution as the coming of Christ or the Antichrist. They alternately praised the priests as faithful shepherds of their flocks or damned them as iniquitous monsters (in the words of one Montpellier pamphleteer, the clergy was a "great beast with a red head, purple claws, all the rest a black body, and motley fur. ")71 Fur- thermore, they did not hesitate to confront the ultimate fear raised by the dispute in the minds of uneasy believers: its consequences for their per- sonal salvation. 72 While most opinions came from the Occitan-speaking areas of France, the pattern seems to have held for the other non-French- speaking areas. The most substantial of the rare Flemish texts published in revolutionary France is a pastoral letter sent by a "constitutional" bishop to assure his parishioners of the "complete conformity between Catholic belief and the Civil Constitution. "73 A similar letter from the bishop of Finiste`re makes up one of the two longer pieces of revolutionary rhetoric translated into Breton, and the two known Breton addresses drawn up by Jacobin clubs focused on the issue as well. 74 In Alsace, a German-language newspaper came out that dealt exclusively with the religious issue. 75
Did the non-French texts dwell so heavily on the Civil Constitution sim- ply because it dominated political discussion at the time the Revolution was extending toleration to the regional languages? 76 The chronological and geographical patterns of revolutionary publishing in Occitan suggest a
184 The Cult of the Nation in France
? much more fundamental importance for religious issues in the revolution- ary engagement with linguistic diversity. To begin with, of the 140-odd Occitan works published between 1789 and 1794, over half appeared in 1790-91. The majority of these texts dealt principally with the Civil Con- stitution (including Sermet's July 14 sermon), and nearly all mentioned it in some way. 77 In 1789, by contrast, there had been only 19 publications, mostly "burlesque" verses and addresses typical of the pre-revolutionary role set aside for patois. In 1792 the figure fell to 20, in 1793 to 13, and in 1794 to just 10. 78 For the period of the Terror, the anti-patois policies of Bare`re and Gre? goire can plausibly take the blame for the decline, but throughout 1792, the successive governments in Paris remained commit- ted to a policy of translation. In 1792, however, other conflicts eclipsed the disputes over the Civil Constitution. As for the geography of publication, two French cities in 1789 still had strong traditions of Occitan publishing: Toulouse and Marseilles. 79 In the Revolution, it was Toulouse--where only a minority of priests accepted the Civil Constitution, and a bitter conflict ensued--which by itself produced forty percent of all Occitan texts, in- cluding the only (unsuccessful) attempt to launch a newspaper in the lan- guage. Marseilles, where most priests acceded to the new clerical regime, produced less than half that number. 80
Even after 1790-91, religion remained the most important single theme in the diminishing number of non-French-language publications. The most substantive of the Occitan texts from 1794 were devoted to the Cult of Reason, including one speech published at the behest of a Jacobin club. 81 The second substantial piece of revolutionary rhetoric translated into Breton was Robespierre's report of 18 Flore? al on the Cult of the Supreme Being and national festivals. In Finiste`re, the departmental authorities or- dered the revolutionary Tribunal to publish its sentences in Breton, but in only one case does the court actually seem to have done so: the death sen- tence of a "refractory" priest. 82 In sum, patois was a language of choice for addressing the peasantry on religious issues--even when the purpose was to attack or supplant religion itself.
The regional-language texts that dealt with religion followed its literary models as well. On the laws and decrees translated into Breton during the Revolution, one specialist has commented: "The translation is not, as I was going to say, into kitchen Breton--that would be as false as it is unfair, for unfortunately kitchen Breton is better--but rather into Church Breton. It seems to me on the level of the more successful [Breton] catechisms. "83 The
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 185
? most thorough expert in Provenc? al writings from the period also points to the prevalence of "the form of the sermon, but secularized. "84 Among the titles of the Occitan texts, words like Epistle, Hymn, Homily, Exaudiat, Credo, and Profession of Faith were considerably more prevalent than in the French-language equivalents. 85 Blatant biblical language found its way into many texts unconcerned with religious conflict, such as a set of plaintive 1790 verses which urged the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost to aid the representatives of the nation, and a "Christmas Carol of the Sans-Culottes" sung in Marseilles in 1792. 86
Religion thus permeated publications in the local languages. But what of the other ways in which the Revolution engaged with linguistic issues? Consider the background and concerns of those revolutionaries most ac- tive in this area, starting with the most important one, Henri Gre? goire. Not only was Gre? goire a priest; unlike many other revolutionary priests, he never wore the cassock lightly and never abjured his calling. He had been known before 1789 as the very model of the enlightened cure? , and during the Terror he insisted on attending the Convention in clerical garb, at real risk to his life. 87 Moreover, Gre? goire consistently defended his linguistic initiatives in religious as well as political terms. His first systematic discus- sion of patois, in his 1789 essay on the Jews, mentioned a "purified knowl- edge of religion" as one reason to impose linguistic uniformity. 88 The ques- tionnaire on patois that he sent out in 1790 actually gave precedence to religion over politics in its crucial leading question ("What would be the religious and political importance of entirely destroying this patois? ")89 This document itself, with its attention not only to the language but to the morals of the peasantry, had an obvious clerical model: the questionnaires used in the so-called pastoral visits carried out by Tridentine bishops to monitor the health of the church in their dioceses. 90
Most of Gre? goire's colleagues in the legislature who helped formulate language policies admittedly lacked this sort of clerical pedigree (although Talleyrand, the least pious of priests, did write one important report). But the same is not true of the more numerous revolutionaries engaged with the issue in the provinces. Here the model is Sermet, who throughout the Revolution defended a liberal, enlightened Catholicism and, like Gre? goire, never abjured his calling (indeed the two men became fast friends). 91 Sermet pioneered the idea of preaching in patois to propagate the gospel of Revolution, and many other priests followed his example. In the Breton village of Ploue? nour-Trez, the local cure? preached in Breton and translated
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? the Constitution of 1791 into this language. 92 In Flanders, priests took the lead in translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and also pub- lished a short-lived Flemish-language newspaper. 93 In Perpignan in 1791, the bishop prevented the revolutionary abbe? Cambon from preaching, so Cambon instead founded a "patriotic school" and spent every evening and holiday lecturing in Catalan on the decrees of the Assembly, and more broadly on "the double duty of Christian and citizen. "94 Other priests enthusiastic about the Revolution set themselves up as their parishioners' instructors in French. The idea of priests as language instructors runs through the writings of Gre? goire's correspondents, and fully a third of them came from the clergy. 95
Yet despite all the efforts of these patriotic clerics, in the canons of revo- lutionary demonology the figure of the patois-speaking priest most often signified something very different: hideous reaction. Despite the wide- spread use of patois by Jacobin clubs and priests favorable to the Revolu- tion, the fear that counter-revolutionaries might somehow make occult use of patois to turn ignorant peasants against the Revolution gnawed power- fully at revolutionary officials. A certain Brassard, for example, offering his services to the Justice Ministry as a translator in 1792, warned that while the local priests had done much to translate the decrees of the Assembly, they had done so for the worst of reasons: "They had mutilated or enven- omed the terms, and had thus managed to make our Constitution seem odious not only to the people in our countryside, but also to our neigh- bors, the Belgians and Flemings. "96 Many of Gre? goire's correspondents similarly raised the specter of patois-speaking priests misleading their flocks. 97 The ex-Capuchin (and future Terrorist) Franc? ois Chabot, who himself tried to conduct patois classes for the peasantry, warned that "the members of the parish tremble at the sight of a pastor, who appears in their eyes like the Sultan of Constantinople. "98
It was Bare`re who managed best (as in his speeches on England) to dis- till a general fear of conspiracy into an elixir of concentrated hyperbole. In his report to the Convention on language, the deputy from the Pyrenees excoriated German and Italian dialects because these were the languages of the foreign enemy. He cast Breton and Basque beyond the pale, however, largely because of the use priests made of them. "It is with this barbaric in- strument of their superstitious thoughts [Breton] that the priests and the intriguers hold [the people] under their sway, direct their consciences and prevent citizens from knowing the laws and loving the Republic. "99 Only
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 187 with the teaching of French, he insisted, would the "empire des pre^tres"
(dominion of the priests) come to an end. 100
The Clerical Precedents
To get an inkling as to why the "dominion of the priests" weighed so heavily in the Revolution's linguistic initiatives, one can do no better than to read a response to Gre? goire's questionnaire sent by the Jacobin club of Auch, in Gascony. The anonymous author reported that nearly everyone in the area spoke Gascon in preference to French. However, he continued, "no one writes in patois, unless it is some cure? or some missionary monk. " He mentioned that the peasants did not know of the seventeenth-century Gascon poet Jean-Ge? raud d'Astros, nor, curiously, could the literate ones even manage to decipher his verses. They could, however, make out the Gascon hymns with which Capuchin missionaries had "flooded" the coun- tryside. "Our peasants," he concluded, "have less trouble reading in their patois everything which maintains their rusticity and their false ideas on religion. "101
Behind these brief and dismissive remarks lie two centuries of history which explain a great deal about the linguistic policies of the French Revo- lution. It is true that patois stirred relatively little concern in secular circles in France before the Revolution. The same was not true, however, of reli- gious circles. In this period, as part of the great enterprise of evangelization undertaken under the auspices of the Catholic Reformation, French priests devoted enormous time and energy to learning the many languages of France, speaking them, cataloguing them, and above all using them to spread the word of God. Far more than the still-hesitant efforts of a hand- ful of late eighteenth-century savants, it was this long-standing clerical en- gagement with the languages of the common people which, for the first time in France, seriously raised the questions of whether linguistic unifor- mity could be achieved in a modern state, what it would take to achieve it, and whether or not this achievement was desirable.
The involvement of the clergy stemmed from an obvious dilemma, took inspiration from a prominent model, and followed well-established exam- ples. The dilemma lay in the fact that whereas approximate, rough-and- ready translations between French and the local languages might suffice for many ordinary transactions (including most forms of interaction with the state), they were woefully inadequate when it came to convincing peo-
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? ple of sacred truths and of the need to reform their most intimate behav- ior. 102 The model was that of the Apostles, in Acts, chapter II: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . When this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. " As for the examples, at least since late antiquity, the demands of Christian evangelization had provided the most important spur for the study and systematization of non-written tongues. 103 From the age of European exploration to the present day, Chris- tian missionaries have done the most to study and systematize such lan- guages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and to compose their first written texts: translations of the Scriptures. 104 The same Jesuit Order which took the lead in studying supposedly primitive dialects in France was, at the same time, doing much the same work in relation to the Amerindian lan- guages of New France. 105
In France itself, the work began in earnest in the late sixteenth century, with Jesuits like Julien Maunoir in Brittany. He and his colleagues had little or no interest in language for its own sake: they wanted to save souls. Un- like their contemporaries at court, however, they could not afford to ignore linguistic differences. Maunoir himself spoke Breton fluently and insisted on the same skills from his missionaries. 106 Similar attitudes prevailed in the south. A bishop of Grasse wrote of his crusading predecessor, Antoine Godeau, that "if God had given him the choice of the gift of miracles or the Provenc? al language, he would have chosen to speak this language well, so as to instruct his people more faithfully. "107 In the Vivarais, another bishop asked his clergy, "If you don't know patois, what have you come here for, fools that you are? "108
The missionaries and crusading bishops not only spoke the local lan- guages, they also influenced them in important ways. To begin with, they wrote in them and worked to replace many traditional peasant composi- tions with their own. Maunoir composed scores of hymns in Breton, which he urged the peasantry to sing in place of their old profane songs, and the southern clergy did likewise. 109 Passion plays, largely composed by Jesuits, also proliferated in several dialects, as did religious poetry and funeral ora- tions. 110 Most important, a profusion of dialectal catechisms appeared in the seventeenth century. 111 The efforts of the reforming clergy in this do- main did, however, have one important limit: the local priests rather than the peasants themselves were to read these works and then, as spiritual in-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 189
? tercessors and cultural intermediaries, transmit the words orally to their flocks. 112
Nonetheless, thanks to these efforts, most written texts in the local lan- guages between 1600 and 1789, both manuscript and printed, were reli- gious in nature. 113 Indeed, if religious observance began to decline in French culture as a whole in the eighteenth century, the same cannot be said of the remnants of those local cultures tied to non-French lan- guages. 114 If anything, these non-French cultures grew more exclusively re- ligious in character as the educated classes abandoned the local tongues, leaving great Occitan baroque poets such as Pe`ire Godolin and Guillaume Ader without audiences or secular successors. When Gre? goire asked his correspondents in 1790 to list the principal uses of patois and any exam- ples they knew of patois publications, again and again the same responses came back to him: carols and hymns, books of devotions, reports on preaching and catechizing, and references to the clerical compilers of dic- tionaries and grammars. 115
The reforming clergy also influenced the development of the local dia- lects in another way. Even priests from humble backgrounds undertook their formal education in French and Latin and lost almost all contact with local dialects once they entered clerical milieus. 116 Maunoir tellingly la- mented that even his native-Breton missionaries had "forgotten part of the vocabulary of the Breton idiom, with the result that in their Catechisms and sermons they use many French words with Breton endings, and most of their listeners do not understand. "117 Priests who came from French- speaking areas often had not the slightest inkling of their parishioners' tongues. To carry out the program of evangelization, they needed instruc- tion in the local languages based on a formal knowledge of their grammar and vocabulary. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus saw the large-scale publication, for the first time, of French-Languedocien, French- Provenc? al, and French-Breton dictionaries and grammars, ranging from small, loosely bound affairs of a hundred pages to imposing, multivolume folio sets. 118 Given the great variation in dialects, the project entailed effec- tively devising standard versions of the local languages, the first ever at- tempted. Not surprisingly, later generations have looked back to these works as early examples of regionalism, but it was the demands of the clergy that usually generated them. Fully six of the seven Breton works were written explicitly for the use of the clergy, including one by Maunoir, a native French-speaker sometimes called the father of modern Breton. 119
190 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Did these various clerical projects have any effect on actual speech pat- terns? Certainly the priests had no ambition to impose a new "standard" Breton or Gascon on their flocks.
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? and habits--and also, crucially, the same attitudes, opinions, and habits, to ensure that they acted as a single body. Education, the theater, the press, and the festivals were all mobilized to this end.
But as France's revolutionary assemblies recognized on many different occasions between 1789 and 1794, even a successful transformation of the French national character might not suffice to arrive at the desired state of harmony. For within France there existed, so they believed, another deadly source of division, misunderstanding, and conflict, a deeper one that de- stroyed any chance of achieving true republican homogeneity and might lead even the best of republican citizens inadvertently to threaten the safety of the republic. Overcoming it would require an effort as arduous as any proposed by the radical educational reformers, perhaps more so. This source of division was language itself.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
CHAPTER 6
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
The poor of this country should be able to say, like the poor of other nations such as the French, Spanish, Italian, &c. : "we dare to speak in our own language of the grandeurs of God and of the articles of our Faith. " . . . What flaw might the language of Toulouse have, not to be worthy of expressing the word of God, just like all others? What could the poor people of this country have done, not to deserve the consolation and honor of hearing of a matter as great as eternal sal- vation in their own language? To speak truly, experience . . . teaches us that there is no tongue which reaches further into the heart, and that touches more to the quick, than the maternal.
--la douctrino crestiano meso en rimos
[christian doctrine set to rhymes] (toulouse, 1641)
Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us break these instruments of injury and error.
--bertrand bare`re (1794)
? On July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the French staged one of the most impressive displays of national unity ever seen in Europe, in the first of the great revolutionary festivals. At noon, in Paris, on the Champ de Mars (future site of the Eiffel Tower), delegations of Na- tional Guardsmen from across France swore oaths of loyalty and pledged to join in a great national Federation. Under the ecstatic gaze of the guard commander, Lafayette, and the cooler eye of the presiding bishop, Talley- rand, guardsmen paraded past specially built pavilions, dignitaries deliv- ered speeches, and masses of spectators applauded and broke into patriotic song (including "C? a ira," as yet without its famous refrain about hang-
169
170 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ing aristocrats from lampposts). Everywhere--on flags, banners, uniforms, and cockades--floated the new symbol of the nation, the tricolor. At as close to the same moment as the technology of the age permitted, cities and villages across France marked the occasion with their own parades, songs, oaths, and speeches. In short, the idea of the nation as a political construction built by the conscious action of patriotic citizens--an idea unimaginable to the French just a few decades before--here enjoyed its apotheosis. 1
In one of the localities celebrating the Federation, the hamlet of Saint- Ginest on the outskirts of the southern city of Toulouse, the assembled guardsmen heard a sermon from a distinguished speaker. Hyacinthe Sermet was an ambitious and progressive-minded clergyman who had preached before the king at Versailles and contributed sprightly notices, in the manner of the day, to learned publications. Already firmly identified with the cause of Revolution, he was widely considered the leading can- didate for bishop of Toulouse under the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. 2 For his text on July 14, Sermet adroitly chose Galatians 4:31-5:1, in which Paul warns his readers against falling back into the grip of the old Mosaic law: "So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. " In the sermon itself, Sermet compared Christ's abrogation of the Mosaic law to the Revolution's abrogation of the old regime, and suggested that Paul himself, in heaven, was smiling on the achievements of the Constituent Assembly. 3
Yet even as he participated in this great ceremony of nation-building, the actual words Sermet used testified to what, from our modern perspec- tive, stands as one of the most important signs of French disunity at the time. This is how he started:
Jamay nou debignayots, mous efans, & brabe? s Camarados, a` qui l'Apoustoul Sent-Pol, le plus grand des Predicaire? s qu'ajo parescut sur la terro, desempey la naissenc? o del Christianisme? , adressabo aquel lengatge? . Aco ero, afin qu'au sapiats, a` nostre? s illustre? s Aujols, as mainatge? s d'aquelis Gauloise? s, que quitteguen y a enbiron tres milo ans aqueste? Pays, al nombre? de may de cent cinquanto milo, per ana al dela de las mars, al bout del mounde? counescut alabets, al fin found de l'Asio founda la superbo Bilo d'Anciro, & poupla la Proubinc? o que prenguec lour noum & s'apelec Galatio. 4
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 171
? The sermon was not in French, but rather in the Romance language now called Occitan, which then served as the vernacular for most of southern France and was just one of the many non-French languages then spoken on French territory. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which saw so much bloodshed in the name of self-determination for minority language groups, one would think that France in 1789 stood poised on the brink of dissolution into half a dozen smaller states--or at the very least, that any program of French nation-building had very far to go indeed.
The Politicization of Language
In fact, it was only in the Revolution itself that French multilingualism ac- quired real political significance and became the principal sign of the na- tion's regional diversity (before that, as I argued in Chapter 2, provincial rights and privileges served this purpose). Although France's kings had promoted French as a learned language and tried to associate its glory with their own, they had given very little attention to the speech of their hum- bler subjects. Franc? ois I's 1539 Edict of Villers-Cottere^ts, which ordered that all judicial and administrative documents be written "in maternal French language," originally had more to do with reducing the role of Latin in public life than with propagating Parisian French in the provinces. 5 Occitan verse stayed in print to the end of the old regime, while Alsace sheltered a vibrant German publishing trade until the Revolution. 6 In fact, the idea that language could be altered by legislative fiat remained largely unimaginable before 1789. "There is no Power capable of reforming man- ners of speech consecrated by usage," wrote d'Espiard de la Borde in a typi- cal statement. 7 Other authors made much the same point by recounting an anecdote about a Roman emperor who failed in his bid to legislate new words into Latin. 8 A few isolated works did call for the elimination of local dialects, but they had little resonance. 9 Most authors agreed with the view of sixteenth-century Lord Chancellor Michel de l'Ho^pital: "The division of languages does not cause the separation of kingdoms. "10
True, it did not take legislation to render the position of the local languages increasingly marginal in secular society. As early as 1567, the Gascon poet Pey de Garros had tellingly mourned "the damned cause of our despised language, [which] everyone is leaving and abandoning, and calling barbaric. "11 Local elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries oriented themselves increasingly to the court and the capital, and therefore to the French language, and the process was abetted by the expansion of
172 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the royal administration and the periodical press. By 1789, French reigned unchallenged in nearly all print media, in courtrooms and administra- tions, in the drawing rooms of educated bourgeois and nobles, and throughout most French cities. 12 Men and women who might previously have read and taken pride in local literary productions now bought hand- books with titles like Gasconisms Corrected, which promised to eliminate all embarrassing traces of dialect from their speech. 13
The use of the local languages in print, except in religious contexts, now served principally to mark a piece of writing as carnivalesque, capable of expressing meanings not permitted by the conventions of polite usage, without necessarily crossing into the territory of the obscene and forbid- den. 14 Grammarians tended to define correct speech by the usage of the royal court. They and many others dismissed regional languages and French dialects as "patois," a derogatory term derived from patte (an ani- mal's paw), signifying an earthy, unsophisticated, variable speech part way between animal grunts and true human speech. 15 Although some scholars were starting to devote serious attention to the local languages, glimpsing in them stable remnants of Europe's older, more primitive tongues, most educated people simply ignored them altogether, or treated them as cor- rupt versions of French itself. 16 In a 1790 speech, Mirabeau casually de- scribed France as "a nation of twenty-four million people speaking the same language. "17
Even at the start of the Revolution, concern about linguistic diversity re- mained almost nil among France's secular elites. The grievance petitions drawn up for the Estates General in 1788 and 1789 barely mentioned the subject. 18 When a prominent article in the Mercure national in 1790 demanded a wholesale reform of language, the recommendations boiled down to nothing more than the removal of forms of aristocratic politeness from the language. 19 Consider also an early revolutionary pamphlet which called on the government to abolish all differences of language and accent among the citizenry. "What good will it have done to eliminate the divi- sions of the provinces," the author asked, "as long as one can say, from someone's first phrase, this person is Provenc? al and that one is Picard? "20 The proposal sounds radical--but the pamphlet was actually a satire on the advanced revolutionaries' calls for social equality. It also proposed, inter alia, to nourish all children exclusively with a special "patriotic bouil- lon" so as to render them physically identical.
Starting in 1790, however, the way the French perceived and represented
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 173
? their linguistic situation became a point of angry political contention. Sermet's July 14 sermon itself had political importance, not simply because he delivered it in patois--already an unusual step for a man of his stat- ure--but because it then appeared in print in no fewer than four cities. 21 The very typography, precisely the same used in French-language publica- tions, gave graphic visual evidence that the language of Toulouse could ex- press the same range of meanings and opinions as French itself, and so perhaps deserved something closer to equal status. Sermet's confident, ele- gant Occitan prose, nourished by a deep familiarity with Toulouse's native literary traditions, implicitly made the same point. 22
The sermon in fact signaled the beginning of a remarkable efflorescence of France's regional languages in 1790-92. The Department of Finiste`re organized the translation and printing of numerous laws in Breton. 23 A well-known antiquarian translated the Constitution of 1791 into Provenc? al and had it published by the Imprimerie Nationale. 24 Jacobin clubs in non-French speaking areas, while generally deliberating in French, commonly organized public sessions at which members orally translated new laws and newspapers into the local language. 25 In the south, they also sponsored original speeches and subsidized publications in patois, to which counter-revolutionary authors responded in kind. 26 Over two hun- dred printed Occitan songs, poems, and pamphlets appeared between 1788 and 1800. 27 In Alsace, a strong tradition of German-language publishing continued, with thousands of items published, including a weekly newspa- per aimed at "artisans and peasants. "28 In 1790, after complaints that some citizens could not follow its debates, the National Assembly even voted to translate all new laws and decrees into the various regional tongues. Fol- lowing this moment of enthusiasm, however, it passed on to other busi- ness, and despite the zeal of volunteers hoping for lucrative translating as- signments, the policy functioned only fitfully, and few printed translations appeared. 29
Even as these hundred flowers were blooming, however, other revolu- tionaries were beginning to see linguistic diversity--which they identified above all with the peasantry--as a curse. 30 The key figure was abbe? Henri Gre? goire, a Lorraine priest who first made a national reputation as cham- pion of civil rights for Jews. As early as 1790 he blamed rural resistance to the Revolution on ignorance of French, claiming that disruptive south- western peasants were confusing the de? crets (decrees) of the revolutionary National Assembly with the old regime's de? crets de prise de corps (arrest or-
174 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 15. Antoine-Hyacinthe Sermet, a noted cleric from Toulouse, delivered his speech celebrating the Festival of the Federation in Occitan, and had it printed in the same language. The typeface and layout are exactly the same as in French- language publications of the period. Title page from his Discours prounounc? at le 14 juillet, 1790 (Toulouse, 1790).
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 175
? ders). The same year he sent out to a wide audience a questionnaire "con- cerning patois and the customs of the people of the countryside. " As his revolutionary career flourished, he made regular calls for the nation's lin- guistic unification and found considerable support for his ideas. Legislative reports, pamphlets, and newspaper articles alike denounced linguistic di- versity as a barrier to social equality, contrasted the success of French abroad to its failure at home, and labeled the translation of laws cumber- some and unreliable. 31
By 1794, the Jacobins had begun an official campaign to eradicate patois entirely and make the French language uniform throughout the Republic (although they recognized the continuing short-term need for transla- tors). 32 Bertrand Bare`re put the matter starkly in a legislative report that demanded the establishment of French-language schools in four periph- eral areas of the Republic: Brittany, Alsace, the Basque Country, and Cor- sica. Directing his ire at their "foreign" idioms, he let loose his usual overboiled rhetoric, notably in the passage quoted at the start of this chap- ter. 33 Four months later, Gre? goire submitted a much more detailed report that targeted not merely peripheral languages, but Occitan and northern French dialects as well. 34 In its pages, what had been material for satire, now became grist for policy. "We no longer have provinces, but we have thirty patois which recall their names," Gre? goire proclaimed. He also re- peated the old anecdote about the Roman emperor who tried to legislate on language but, with aplomb, turned it on its head: "A tyrant of Rome once wished to introduce a new word; he failed, because the legislation of languages was always democratic. "35 The Convention instituted French- language requirements for promotion to officer grades in the armies, and a ban on all non-French languages in judicial documents. 36 In Alsace and in Catalan-speaking Roussillon, something of a limited "linguistic terror" took place, with non-French publications and commercial signs sup- pressed, non-French-speaking personnel dismissed, and plans drawn up for forcible transfers of population. 37 A visiting conventionnel in Stras- bourg proposed a horrific solution for gallicizing Alsace: to guillotine a quarter of the population and expel all others who had not actively partici- pated in the Revolution. 38
Gre? goire and a few others held out as an ultimate goal not merely the diffusion of French through France, but the transformation of French itself into a perfectly pure, clear, and rational tongue, purged of aristocratic cor- ruptions and of all grammatical and lexical irregularities and confusions.
176 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 16. The title page from Henri Gre? goire, Rapport sur la ne? cessite? et les moyens d'ane? antir le patois (Report on the Necessity and Means for Annihilating Patois), Paris, 1794: his proposal for eradicating local languages and making French the sole and uniform language of France.
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 177
? This perfect language could then spread, they suggested, to all the world. They hoped that its development would eliminate misunderstandings and "abuses of words," which they presented as the root causes of all conflict and disharmony in the terrestrial sphere. It was a dream which recalled the ancient religious desire to overcome the legacy of the Tower of Babel; it also testified to the process of "disenchantment" discussed in Chapter 1. For now the perfect language would come from nature, not God, and would belong to the natural world alone. 39
The idea was dazzling. In practice, though, even the radicals devoted most of their effort to the problem of spreading the French language--the one spoken and written by Parisian elites--to the rest of the Republic. Bare`re, the hardheaded and opportunistic Terrorist, even claimed that most language abuses had already disappeared, along with their aristo- cratic authors. 40 Gre? goire himself spent most of his report justifying the destruction of patois, and only in the last few pages turned to the "vast project . . . of revolutionizing language. "41 His program was nationalist first, universalist second.
In any case, even the relatively limited nationalist program of uniformi- zation never had a real chance for success. Long before a single language teacher had arrived in Brittany or Alsace, the Ninth of Thermidor had come, and with it the end of this and many other radical dreams. While subsequent regimes remained cognizant of language differences, until the late nineteenth century they mostly gave up on any attempt to eliminate the problem. It would take the Third Republic, endowed with far greater material resources and a far greater degree of political stability than the First, to start putting Gre? goire's program into action. And even the Third Republic remained tolerant of patois insofar as it constituted part of a re- gion's folklore and did not threaten national unity. 42
The Ear of the Listener
To modern readers, this politicization of language during the French Revo- lution has generally seemed an obvious and inevitable phenomenon, one that arose naturally when the revolutionaries tried to bring democracy to a multilingual country. 43 But was the problem so obvious to contemporar- ies? Consider the enormous differences of opinion on the very extent of the problem. In 1792, the deputy Dentzel estimated that three million people, out of a population of 28 million, could not speak French. Gre? goire him-
178 The Cult of the Nation in France
? self variously put the figure at eight million and six million, and claimed that scarcely three million spoke French itself properly. 44 His report to the Convention enumerated thirty separate patois ripe for eradication. More- over, he treated French dialects and the non-Indo-European Basque as equal barriers to the progress of the Revolution. 45 In contrast, Bare`re ech- oed the common old regime view that northern and southern patois amounted simply to variations on French, and saw a problem only in four relatively small peripheral regions. 46 Other prominent revolutionaries, such as Mirabeau, remained oblivious to the language problem altogether. Seeming to relegate the matter to the past, Saint-Just speculated in the spring of 1794 that if old regime feudalism had continued for longer, "soon the French would no longer have spoken the same language. "47
Consider also Gre? goire's earliest revolutionary remarks on the subject, when he told the Constituent Assembly, in reference to the southwestern riots, that "the municipal authorities in the areas where these troubles are taking place think that they are caused first of all by ignorance of the [French] language. "48 In fact the municipal authorities thought nothing of the sort. Nor did the other deputies charged with investigating the riots, who tended to blame counter-revolutionary agitators, or peasant brigands, rather than any confusion over the meaning of de? cret. Nor have subsequent historians, who have rather highlighted such factors as long-standing peas- ant hostility to seigneurialism and the hopes raised when the Assembly proclaimed the end of the feudal regime on August 4, 1789. At best, lin- guistic confusion has merited a footnote in their works. 49
Two recent studies support the views of those who failed to see major language barriers in France. One shows that French emigrants to Que? - bec--who came primarily from a wide swathe of dialect-speaking western France--adapted to the standard French of the colony quickly and without difficulty. 50 The other concludes that litigants and defendants in old regime Languedoc do not seem to have been seriously inconvenienced by linguis- tic differences. 51 In fact, very few eighteenth-century sources from outside the peripheral regions of Brittany, Flanders, Alsace, Savoy, Corsica, the Basque Country, and Roussillon mention linguistic difference at all, or suggest that speakers of French or Occitan dialects had trouble under- standing the decrees and monitoires read out to them in church. Differ- ences of language may have been obvious, but the extent to which they posed problems of mutual comprehension is much less so. It is no coinci- dence that Gre? goire's revolutionary writings are the most often-cited evi-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 179
? dence for the existence of linguistic barriers in France in the eighteenth century, outside of the periphery. He was one of the very few observers who paid more than passing attention to them. 52
On one level, this confusion as to the very existence of difficulties caused by multilingualism seems somewhat absurd--surely the French knew if they understood each other. Yet as sociolinguists have long recognized, when it comes to the extent that closely related languages (like French and Occitan) differ from one another, perceptions not only vary enormously, but easily get tangled up with politics. The extent to which people succeed in communicating with each other always depends on the subject dis- cussed, and on a host of contingent social and psychological factors. One person's slang or patois is another's oppressed minority language, as in the case of Ebonics, or Black English, whose very existence has been the subject of heated political debate in the United States. 53 The ability to understand a limited range of orders (as in the army) or to complete a transaction in the marketplace is not the same as the ability to engage in a lengthy conversa- tion about religion or politics. So it should not be surprising that while Gre? goire's old regime predecessors--and even his revolutionary colleague Bare`re--perceived only relatively minor differences at the periphery of the country, he himself could see massive and paralyzing heterogeneity. Lan- guage differences are real, but their extent, and the extent to which they matter, lie at least partly in the ear of the listener.
In this connection, it is worth remarking that the representation of early modern France as a nation of vast and overpowering linguistic diversity has been widely promoted, largely because it has nicely served two very dif- ferent ideological agendas. Republicans and educational reformers have promoted it because it suggests that French national unity is fragile, neces- sitating a vigorous program of republican centralization. Modern regional militants have promoted it as well, because it helps them to equate central- ization with imperialism and to distinguish their own culture as sharply as possible from that of Paris. 54 Particularly in the French and Occitan dialect areas, therefore, it is simply not correct to say that the French revolutionar- ies confronted an obvious, inevitable "language problem.
" Rather, a rela- tively small number of them simultaneously invented this problem and kindled a desire to solve it. Furthermore, they proposed solving it in radi- cally different ways. While Sermet and many others advocated translating revolutionary ideas into the languages of the people, Gre? goire and his allies insisted on teaching the people a new language: standard French.
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? The question remains, however, why the revolutionaries invented this problem--why they seized on language as the ultimate sign of national disunity when this issue had previously received such scant political atten- tion. It is an important question, not only for understanding this particu- lar historical moment, but also for making sense of the powerful republi- can vision of the French nation that was born out of the Revolution. Certainly up until World War I, most of those who subscribed to the re- publican vision of the nation interpreted the language question much in the way Gre? goire had done: as a sign of excessive heterogeneity and backwardness requiring civilizing and standardizing instruction from re- publican schoolmasters and officials. The vision lay behind much of the educational policy of the Third Republic, which explicitly attempted to universalize the use of French and to confine regional languages to the do- main of folklore. It has even colored some of the best scholarship on French nation-building--notably Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, which opens with a stark tableau of the isolation, backwardness, and diver- sity of the French countryside before 1870 (Weber entitled his first chapter, with insufficient irony, "A Country of Savages"). 55 Recent scholarship has done much to uncover the ideological roots of this vision, but it has done much less to explore where the vision came from in the first place. 56
Previous interpretations of the revolutionary initiatives with regard to the language, to the extent they have gone beyond the notion that the Rev- olution simply tried to solve an obvious problem, have generally high- lighted either the heritage of the Enlightenment or the experience of the radical revolution itself. For instance, it has been argued that Gre? goire and his correspondents were representatives of a cosmopolitan, urban, and ultimately imperial Enlightenment who sought in essence to colonize and domesticate a peasantry they perceived as alien, primitive, and incapa- ble of abstract reasoning. 57 It has also been suggested that these revolution- aries were driven principally by their theoretical concerns about misunder- standing and "abuse of words," and the utopian idea of creating a perfect language. 58
This complex Enlightenment background certainly has great impor- tance for understanding the language initiatives, but any interpretation of the revolutionary initiatives that refers solely to the Enlightenment runs up against one, simple, frustrating question. Why, if the Enlightenment taught the French to see patois as primitive and unable to handle complex politi- cal discussions, did the years 1790-92 see such important efforts to trans-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 181
? late documents into patois and to use the local languages to educate the people in revolutionary politics? Hyacinthe Sermet was no less a product of the provincial Enlightenment than Gre? goire, yet he saw no trouble with expressing complex political arguments in the Toulouse dialect. The Jaco- bin clubs to which Gre? goire sent his questionnaire were much the same institutions which promoted the flowering of regional tongues during the early Revolution. Indeed, while few of Gre? goire's correspondents ques- tioned the ultimate desirablity of linguistic uniformity, many, as they re- ported back to him, instinctively used patois in their efforts to persuade peasants to support the Revolution. Some contributors to the revolution- ary debate on language even suggested standardizing the regional lan- guages so as to make them more effective tools of political instruction. 59
Interpretations which highlight the experience of the radical revolution, meanwhile, fail to explain either this patois-friendly phase of revolutionary language politics or the wide disagreements among proponents of linguis- tic uniformity. 60 To be sure, the demand for linguistic uniformity fit in well with the general Jacobin struggle against social and cultural heterogeneity, as well as the radical republican efforts to have all male citizens participate in government. 61 Gre? goire, by far the most important figure in the story, described mastery of French as a key element of full republican citizenship and presented linguistic unification as a weapon against the malign forces of feudalism and federalism (the latter a reference to revolts against the Jacobin government). 62 Yet whatever additional impetus the radical revolu- tion provided, there is also the inconvenient fact that Gre? goire himself, at least, had already come to his views on language before the Revolution, in a prize-winning Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews, which called forthrightly for the "annihilation of patois. "63 Talleyrand similarly advocated linguistic uniformity as early as 1790, well before the Jacobins had dreamed of a new calendar, new forms of dress, or a Cult of the Supreme Being. 64 However well it fit in with the agenda of the radical revolution, the politicization of language did not derive from the radical revolution.
The revolutionary language initiatives might also be put in the context of long-term social and economic developments of the sort discussed by Gellner and Anderson in their influential theories of nationalism. 65 How- ever, even leaving aside the fact that the late-eighteenth-century French countryside had not yet experienced widespread industrialism (a key part of Gellner's theory), and that most patois-speaking peasants were poor
182 The Cult of the Nation in France
? and illiterate (Anderson's theory puts great emphasis on the expanding market for books), such long-term explanations offer little help in under- standing why the issue erupted into politics so abruptly in 1789-90, and what precipitated the subsequent variety of attitudes towards multilingual- ism. In short, to understand the problem fully, we need to move into a very different historical territory.
"L'Empire des Pre^tres"
Some time in late 1790 or early 1791, the Society of the Friends of the Con- stitution of Albi, in Languedoc, published a twenty-seven-page speech in the local dialect delivered by a wool merchant named Salivas to the "good people of the countryside. "66 The title gave little clue to the content, and in- deed the first few lines amounted to standard early revolutionary boiler- plate. Soon, however, Salivas's principal purpose became clear. Not only did the Revolution pose no threat to the Catholic religion, he argued; it represented the fulfillment of Catholic prayers. Indeed, it meant something close to the literal coming of the Millennium. As he made this hyperbolic point, his literary style, which had begun as a fairly literal rendering into Occitan of the rhetoric of the National Assembly, quickly strayed into a different, older mode:
It is now that the reign of God will flourish in this Kingdom . . . now, in this age of miracles . . . France will be the first [country] to spread and propagate the law of our Lord . . . and thus the desire for our Redemption will be fulfilled; the name of the Lord, of God Almighty, will spread and be hallowed first throughout Europe, and from here will reach to all parts of the universe . . . God has heard our oath, it is written in the book of life, it is pleasing to Heaven and has brought joy to all the martyrs crushed by the former despotism, the former tyranny. 67
Salivas also contrasted the "purity of the Gospel" to the corruption of the Catholic clergy in France. He insisted that among all the tasks faced by the Revolution, none ranked higher than putting an end to the church's myr- iad "abuses. " Soon, however, the light of reason would prevail, and then "France will not be better compared than to that Zion triumphant, that heavenly Zion of which the Scripture speaks. "68
In publishing this unlikely attempt to drape the mantle of Hebrew prophets over the shoulders of revolutionary Liberty, the club of Albi did
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 183
? not wish to indulge the religious fantasies of an addled merchant, but rather to address a pressing political problem. In 1790, the National As- sembly had unveiled a plan for the greatest reform ever undertaken in the history of French Catholicism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. From now on, it decreed, the people (including non-Catholics) would elect priests and bishops; clerics would become, in effect, civil servants under the control of the state. This action stirred more resistance than any previ- ously taken by the revolutionary authorities, and in response, the Assembly insisted that priests take an oath of loyalty to the new regime (including the Civil Constitution) or face dismissal. The breach widened, and both sides in the dispute resorted massively to the newspaper and pamphlet press to win adherents. 69
In the overall corpus of revolutionary publications, the dispute over the Civil Constitution amounts to only one large body of texts. In the more limited corpus of publications in the local languages, however--both revo- lutionary and counter-revolutionary--it represents by far the single largest issue under discussion. 70 A concern for the religious future of France suf- fused these texts. They alternately spoke of the Revolution as the coming of Christ or the Antichrist. They alternately praised the priests as faithful shepherds of their flocks or damned them as iniquitous monsters (in the words of one Montpellier pamphleteer, the clergy was a "great beast with a red head, purple claws, all the rest a black body, and motley fur. ")71 Fur- thermore, they did not hesitate to confront the ultimate fear raised by the dispute in the minds of uneasy believers: its consequences for their per- sonal salvation. 72 While most opinions came from the Occitan-speaking areas of France, the pattern seems to have held for the other non-French- speaking areas. The most substantial of the rare Flemish texts published in revolutionary France is a pastoral letter sent by a "constitutional" bishop to assure his parishioners of the "complete conformity between Catholic belief and the Civil Constitution. "73 A similar letter from the bishop of Finiste`re makes up one of the two longer pieces of revolutionary rhetoric translated into Breton, and the two known Breton addresses drawn up by Jacobin clubs focused on the issue as well. 74 In Alsace, a German-language newspaper came out that dealt exclusively with the religious issue. 75
Did the non-French texts dwell so heavily on the Civil Constitution sim- ply because it dominated political discussion at the time the Revolution was extending toleration to the regional languages? 76 The chronological and geographical patterns of revolutionary publishing in Occitan suggest a
184 The Cult of the Nation in France
? much more fundamental importance for religious issues in the revolution- ary engagement with linguistic diversity. To begin with, of the 140-odd Occitan works published between 1789 and 1794, over half appeared in 1790-91. The majority of these texts dealt principally with the Civil Con- stitution (including Sermet's July 14 sermon), and nearly all mentioned it in some way. 77 In 1789, by contrast, there had been only 19 publications, mostly "burlesque" verses and addresses typical of the pre-revolutionary role set aside for patois. In 1792 the figure fell to 20, in 1793 to 13, and in 1794 to just 10. 78 For the period of the Terror, the anti-patois policies of Bare`re and Gre? goire can plausibly take the blame for the decline, but throughout 1792, the successive governments in Paris remained commit- ted to a policy of translation. In 1792, however, other conflicts eclipsed the disputes over the Civil Constitution. As for the geography of publication, two French cities in 1789 still had strong traditions of Occitan publishing: Toulouse and Marseilles. 79 In the Revolution, it was Toulouse--where only a minority of priests accepted the Civil Constitution, and a bitter conflict ensued--which by itself produced forty percent of all Occitan texts, in- cluding the only (unsuccessful) attempt to launch a newspaper in the lan- guage. Marseilles, where most priests acceded to the new clerical regime, produced less than half that number. 80
Even after 1790-91, religion remained the most important single theme in the diminishing number of non-French-language publications. The most substantive of the Occitan texts from 1794 were devoted to the Cult of Reason, including one speech published at the behest of a Jacobin club. 81 The second substantial piece of revolutionary rhetoric translated into Breton was Robespierre's report of 18 Flore? al on the Cult of the Supreme Being and national festivals. In Finiste`re, the departmental authorities or- dered the revolutionary Tribunal to publish its sentences in Breton, but in only one case does the court actually seem to have done so: the death sen- tence of a "refractory" priest. 82 In sum, patois was a language of choice for addressing the peasantry on religious issues--even when the purpose was to attack or supplant religion itself.
The regional-language texts that dealt with religion followed its literary models as well. On the laws and decrees translated into Breton during the Revolution, one specialist has commented: "The translation is not, as I was going to say, into kitchen Breton--that would be as false as it is unfair, for unfortunately kitchen Breton is better--but rather into Church Breton. It seems to me on the level of the more successful [Breton] catechisms. "83 The
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 185
? most thorough expert in Provenc? al writings from the period also points to the prevalence of "the form of the sermon, but secularized. "84 Among the titles of the Occitan texts, words like Epistle, Hymn, Homily, Exaudiat, Credo, and Profession of Faith were considerably more prevalent than in the French-language equivalents. 85 Blatant biblical language found its way into many texts unconcerned with religious conflict, such as a set of plaintive 1790 verses which urged the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost to aid the representatives of the nation, and a "Christmas Carol of the Sans-Culottes" sung in Marseilles in 1792. 86
Religion thus permeated publications in the local languages. But what of the other ways in which the Revolution engaged with linguistic issues? Consider the background and concerns of those revolutionaries most ac- tive in this area, starting with the most important one, Henri Gre? goire. Not only was Gre? goire a priest; unlike many other revolutionary priests, he never wore the cassock lightly and never abjured his calling. He had been known before 1789 as the very model of the enlightened cure? , and during the Terror he insisted on attending the Convention in clerical garb, at real risk to his life. 87 Moreover, Gre? goire consistently defended his linguistic initiatives in religious as well as political terms. His first systematic discus- sion of patois, in his 1789 essay on the Jews, mentioned a "purified knowl- edge of religion" as one reason to impose linguistic uniformity. 88 The ques- tionnaire on patois that he sent out in 1790 actually gave precedence to religion over politics in its crucial leading question ("What would be the religious and political importance of entirely destroying this patois? ")89 This document itself, with its attention not only to the language but to the morals of the peasantry, had an obvious clerical model: the questionnaires used in the so-called pastoral visits carried out by Tridentine bishops to monitor the health of the church in their dioceses. 90
Most of Gre? goire's colleagues in the legislature who helped formulate language policies admittedly lacked this sort of clerical pedigree (although Talleyrand, the least pious of priests, did write one important report). But the same is not true of the more numerous revolutionaries engaged with the issue in the provinces. Here the model is Sermet, who throughout the Revolution defended a liberal, enlightened Catholicism and, like Gre? goire, never abjured his calling (indeed the two men became fast friends). 91 Sermet pioneered the idea of preaching in patois to propagate the gospel of Revolution, and many other priests followed his example. In the Breton village of Ploue? nour-Trez, the local cure? preached in Breton and translated
186 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the Constitution of 1791 into this language. 92 In Flanders, priests took the lead in translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and also pub- lished a short-lived Flemish-language newspaper. 93 In Perpignan in 1791, the bishop prevented the revolutionary abbe? Cambon from preaching, so Cambon instead founded a "patriotic school" and spent every evening and holiday lecturing in Catalan on the decrees of the Assembly, and more broadly on "the double duty of Christian and citizen. "94 Other priests enthusiastic about the Revolution set themselves up as their parishioners' instructors in French. The idea of priests as language instructors runs through the writings of Gre? goire's correspondents, and fully a third of them came from the clergy. 95
Yet despite all the efforts of these patriotic clerics, in the canons of revo- lutionary demonology the figure of the patois-speaking priest most often signified something very different: hideous reaction. Despite the wide- spread use of patois by Jacobin clubs and priests favorable to the Revolu- tion, the fear that counter-revolutionaries might somehow make occult use of patois to turn ignorant peasants against the Revolution gnawed power- fully at revolutionary officials. A certain Brassard, for example, offering his services to the Justice Ministry as a translator in 1792, warned that while the local priests had done much to translate the decrees of the Assembly, they had done so for the worst of reasons: "They had mutilated or enven- omed the terms, and had thus managed to make our Constitution seem odious not only to the people in our countryside, but also to our neigh- bors, the Belgians and Flemings. "96 Many of Gre? goire's correspondents similarly raised the specter of patois-speaking priests misleading their flocks. 97 The ex-Capuchin (and future Terrorist) Franc? ois Chabot, who himself tried to conduct patois classes for the peasantry, warned that "the members of the parish tremble at the sight of a pastor, who appears in their eyes like the Sultan of Constantinople. "98
It was Bare`re who managed best (as in his speeches on England) to dis- till a general fear of conspiracy into an elixir of concentrated hyperbole. In his report to the Convention on language, the deputy from the Pyrenees excoriated German and Italian dialects because these were the languages of the foreign enemy. He cast Breton and Basque beyond the pale, however, largely because of the use priests made of them. "It is with this barbaric in- strument of their superstitious thoughts [Breton] that the priests and the intriguers hold [the people] under their sway, direct their consciences and prevent citizens from knowing the laws and loving the Republic. "99 Only
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 187 with the teaching of French, he insisted, would the "empire des pre^tres"
(dominion of the priests) come to an end. 100
The Clerical Precedents
To get an inkling as to why the "dominion of the priests" weighed so heavily in the Revolution's linguistic initiatives, one can do no better than to read a response to Gre? goire's questionnaire sent by the Jacobin club of Auch, in Gascony. The anonymous author reported that nearly everyone in the area spoke Gascon in preference to French. However, he continued, "no one writes in patois, unless it is some cure? or some missionary monk. " He mentioned that the peasants did not know of the seventeenth-century Gascon poet Jean-Ge? raud d'Astros, nor, curiously, could the literate ones even manage to decipher his verses. They could, however, make out the Gascon hymns with which Capuchin missionaries had "flooded" the coun- tryside. "Our peasants," he concluded, "have less trouble reading in their patois everything which maintains their rusticity and their false ideas on religion. "101
Behind these brief and dismissive remarks lie two centuries of history which explain a great deal about the linguistic policies of the French Revo- lution. It is true that patois stirred relatively little concern in secular circles in France before the Revolution. The same was not true, however, of reli- gious circles. In this period, as part of the great enterprise of evangelization undertaken under the auspices of the Catholic Reformation, French priests devoted enormous time and energy to learning the many languages of France, speaking them, cataloguing them, and above all using them to spread the word of God. Far more than the still-hesitant efforts of a hand- ful of late eighteenth-century savants, it was this long-standing clerical en- gagement with the languages of the common people which, for the first time in France, seriously raised the questions of whether linguistic unifor- mity could be achieved in a modern state, what it would take to achieve it, and whether or not this achievement was desirable.
The involvement of the clergy stemmed from an obvious dilemma, took inspiration from a prominent model, and followed well-established exam- ples. The dilemma lay in the fact that whereas approximate, rough-and- ready translations between French and the local languages might suffice for many ordinary transactions (including most forms of interaction with the state), they were woefully inadequate when it came to convincing peo-
? 188 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ple of sacred truths and of the need to reform their most intimate behav- ior. 102 The model was that of the Apostles, in Acts, chapter II: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . When this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. " As for the examples, at least since late antiquity, the demands of Christian evangelization had provided the most important spur for the study and systematization of non-written tongues. 103 From the age of European exploration to the present day, Chris- tian missionaries have done the most to study and systematize such lan- guages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and to compose their first written texts: translations of the Scriptures. 104 The same Jesuit Order which took the lead in studying supposedly primitive dialects in France was, at the same time, doing much the same work in relation to the Amerindian lan- guages of New France. 105
In France itself, the work began in earnest in the late sixteenth century, with Jesuits like Julien Maunoir in Brittany. He and his colleagues had little or no interest in language for its own sake: they wanted to save souls. Un- like their contemporaries at court, however, they could not afford to ignore linguistic differences. Maunoir himself spoke Breton fluently and insisted on the same skills from his missionaries. 106 Similar attitudes prevailed in the south. A bishop of Grasse wrote of his crusading predecessor, Antoine Godeau, that "if God had given him the choice of the gift of miracles or the Provenc? al language, he would have chosen to speak this language well, so as to instruct his people more faithfully. "107 In the Vivarais, another bishop asked his clergy, "If you don't know patois, what have you come here for, fools that you are? "108
The missionaries and crusading bishops not only spoke the local lan- guages, they also influenced them in important ways. To begin with, they wrote in them and worked to replace many traditional peasant composi- tions with their own. Maunoir composed scores of hymns in Breton, which he urged the peasantry to sing in place of their old profane songs, and the southern clergy did likewise. 109 Passion plays, largely composed by Jesuits, also proliferated in several dialects, as did religious poetry and funeral ora- tions. 110 Most important, a profusion of dialectal catechisms appeared in the seventeenth century. 111 The efforts of the reforming clergy in this do- main did, however, have one important limit: the local priests rather than the peasants themselves were to read these works and then, as spiritual in-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 189
? tercessors and cultural intermediaries, transmit the words orally to their flocks. 112
Nonetheless, thanks to these efforts, most written texts in the local lan- guages between 1600 and 1789, both manuscript and printed, were reli- gious in nature. 113 Indeed, if religious observance began to decline in French culture as a whole in the eighteenth century, the same cannot be said of the remnants of those local cultures tied to non-French lan- guages. 114 If anything, these non-French cultures grew more exclusively re- ligious in character as the educated classes abandoned the local tongues, leaving great Occitan baroque poets such as Pe`ire Godolin and Guillaume Ader without audiences or secular successors. When Gre? goire asked his correspondents in 1790 to list the principal uses of patois and any exam- ples they knew of patois publications, again and again the same responses came back to him: carols and hymns, books of devotions, reports on preaching and catechizing, and references to the clerical compilers of dic- tionaries and grammars. 115
The reforming clergy also influenced the development of the local dia- lects in another way. Even priests from humble backgrounds undertook their formal education in French and Latin and lost almost all contact with local dialects once they entered clerical milieus. 116 Maunoir tellingly la- mented that even his native-Breton missionaries had "forgotten part of the vocabulary of the Breton idiom, with the result that in their Catechisms and sermons they use many French words with Breton endings, and most of their listeners do not understand. "117 Priests who came from French- speaking areas often had not the slightest inkling of their parishioners' tongues. To carry out the program of evangelization, they needed instruc- tion in the local languages based on a formal knowledge of their grammar and vocabulary. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus saw the large-scale publication, for the first time, of French-Languedocien, French- Provenc? al, and French-Breton dictionaries and grammars, ranging from small, loosely bound affairs of a hundred pages to imposing, multivolume folio sets. 118 Given the great variation in dialects, the project entailed effec- tively devising standard versions of the local languages, the first ever at- tempted. Not surprisingly, later generations have looked back to these works as early examples of regionalism, but it was the demands of the clergy that usually generated them. Fully six of the seven Breton works were written explicitly for the use of the clergy, including one by Maunoir, a native French-speaker sometimes called the father of modern Breton. 119
190 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Did these various clerical projects have any effect on actual speech pat- terns? Certainly the priests had no ambition to impose a new "standard" Breton or Gascon on their flocks.
