No More Learning

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.
180 The Cult of the Nation in France
? 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. Yet to the extent that the local languages developed a new lexicon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was not the lexicon of Enlightenment or of secular politics, but rather of Tridentine Catholicism. The French-Breton and French-Occitan dictionar- ies proposed translations for such terms as grace and he? re? sie (rendered in Breton as Huguenaudage, that is, Huguenotism), even Janse? nisme (most of- ten listed as a synonym for he? re? sie), and then gave detailed definitions to help parish priests explain the new words. 120 Evidence about actual speech patterns is sparse, but Yves Castan has tantalizingly suggested that liti- gants in Languedoc tended to use Occitan religious vocabulary to translate French legal terms. As already noted, Breton and Occitan specialists have demonstrated the persistence of religious terminology in revolutionary publications. 121
In short, even as the secular status of the local languages was falling pre- cipitously, the clergy, for its own evangelical reasons, was preserving for them a measure of dignity. The words of the Toulouse priest quoted at the start of this chapter make the point movingly. 122 The efforts of teaching, catechizing, and preaching that the priest referred to, and the linguistic knowledge that went into producing the catechism itself, show clearly that the non-French-speaking areas of France had not been lingering in some linguistic state of nature from which the revolutionaries would work to re- move them after 1789. The Catholic Church had already made strong at- tempts to influence linguistic practices.
Catholics and Protestants
Overall, this story offers insight into at least part of the revolutionary en- gagement with the local languages. In 1789-90, adherents of the Revolu- tion in the French provinces found themselves confronted with an awe- some and difficult task: helping the peasant masses become good citizens of a democratic polity. The only previous enterprise that had much rele- vance was the Catholic Reformation's attempt to turn the ancestors of those same peasants into good Catholics. In both cases, the same thing was at stake: the conversion of hearts and minds. So it is hardly surprising that the revolutionaries, and particularly those trained as clergymen them- selves, took the Church's earlier efforts as a sort of template for their own.
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 191
? In the provinces, revolutionary leaders eagerly launched their own cam- paigns of catechizing, sermonizing, hectoring, and instructing, particularly in their weekly "popular sessions" held mostly on Sundays and often led by priests, but also on special occasions such as that of July 14, when Sermet delivered his sermon. 123 From their clerical predecessors they took the no- tion that "no tongue reaches further into the heart" than the maternal, and so they carried out the campaigns in patois, not in French.
The story also suggests one reason why, among all the prominent revo- lutionaries, the one who cared most about language, and saw the unfortu- nate effects of language difference everywhere at work, was Henri Gre? goire. For not only did he grow up in rural Lorraine speaking a distinct dialect of French; as a vicar and parish priest in Lorraine villages from 1776 to 1789, he himself ministered to peasants who spoke the dialect exclusively. Fur- thermore, Gre? goire saw himself as a paradigmatic "bon cure? ," bringing what he later called "enlightened piety" to his flocks. Among other things, he established a library for their use. He therefore directly confronted the problem of how to communicate complex ideas to peasants. 124
Yet Gre? goire, unlike Sermet and many others, did not believe the local languages were suited for this sort of communication. He wished to make the peasants speak standard French, and it was his view which became the official policy of the First Republic and subsequent regimes. Why? Part of the answer lies in a quirk of the priest's biography--but it is a quirk that illuminates the overall course of the revolutionary policies in a surprising manner.
Gre? goire lived in Lorraine, in eastern France, and in the 1780s this re- gion had two intellectual poles: Paris, and also, perhaps even more impor- tant, Strasbourg, the capital of neighboring Alsace. A vibrant, bilingual city, still retaining something of the glow generated by its glorious role in the German Renaissance and Reformation, Strasbourg had an active circle of bilingual men of letters, drawn particularly from the venerable univer- sity and the clergy. They gathered in such settings as the informal "table society" of Johann Daniel Saltzmann (where Goethe first met Herder), the more ambitious French-language Socie? te? des Philanthropes, and the Ger- man-speaking Gesellschaft zur Ausbildung der Deutschen Sprache (Soci- ety for the Promotion of the German Language), which helped nurture early German Romanticism. 125 The Socie? te? des Philanthropes played what one biographer calls "an essential role in Gre? goire's intellectual develop- ment. "126 The young priest also developed a close friendship with two sons
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? of a professor at Strasbourg's German Gymnasium: Jeremias-Jakob and Johann-Friedrich Oberlin. Jeremias-Jakob, a polymathic philosopher, phi- lologist, and classicist, was one of the first scholars to give serious study to regional languages, notably in a 1775 study entitled Essai sur le patois lorrain. 127 Gre? goire wrote Jeremias in 1798 of his own inquiry into patois: "It was you who once gave me the idea by your writings. "128
Just as important was Gre? goire's relation with Johann-Friedrich, the fa- mous "enlightened pastor" for whom Oberlin College is named. In his ru- ral Lorraine parish of Waldersbach, this Oberlin worked with maniacal en- ergy to advance education, improve roads, modernize farming techniques, and develop commerce. Significantly, he also struggled to eradicate the lo- cal patois, which he barely understood. According to one historian, he "succeeded, if not in eradicating it, at least in relegating it to the interior of the family and substituting French as the public and official language. "129 Gre? goire, ten years Oberlin's junior, fell entirely under the charismatic pastor's spell and called his conduct "a lesson and a reproach to many Catholic priests. " In 1794, he would persuade the Convention to commend Oberlin for his "contributions to the universalization of the French lan- guage. "130 In sum, Gre? goire's attitude towards patois, so different from that of most Catholic clergy, derived in large part from these two men. 131
The Oberlins' attitude towards common speech, in turn, stemmed above all from their Protestant heritage. During the Reformation, Protestant cler- ics, like their Catholic counterparts, had embarked on ambitious programs of evangelizing the peasantry. Yet they quickly took a different approach to language differences, because of their insistence that the faithful read the Scriptures for themselves. While Catholic priests could render the message of the Gospel orally into the hundreds of distinct dialects that existed at the time, producing printed texts in each dialect was clearly impossible, in the first place because of the limitations of the technology, and also because faulty translations could conceivably produce theological error. The Protestants therefore strove for amalgamation and uniformization: the production of a single, standard translation that could appeal to as broad a population as possible, followed by education to bring groups initially in- capable of comprehending it into the charmed circle. Protestants also pre- ferred to standardize only the speech of the princes who stood at the head of the new churches. For instance, the High German of Luther's Saxony be- came the basis for the standard form of the language. 132 When practical difficulties proved too great, however, they could also opt for producing
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 193
? printed, standardized versions of widely spoken minority languages such as Welsh. Significantly, the two known revolutionary-era proposals for raising at least some regional languages to the level of standard languages, equal to French, came from Protestants: Jeremias-Jakob Oberlin, and the Montauban agriculturist Antoine Gautier-Sauzin. 133
The case of Protestant Great Britain, with its large non-English-speaking populations in Wales, Ireland, and Highland Scotland, provides a particu- larly useful comparison with France. Draconian legislation on language in these areas dates from long before the late eighteenth century--from the early years of the Reformation, when Henry VIII's ministers feared that the Celtic lands would provide a refuge for Catholicism. 134 Thus the 1536 Act of Union between England and Wales commanded Welsh justices and sheriffs to use only English in their proceedings. A year later, a law for Ire- land stated in its preamble that "There is nothing which doth more conteyne and keep many of [the King's] Subjects of the said Land in a cer- tain savage and wilde kind and manner of living, than the diversitie that is betwixt them in Tongue, Language, Order and Habit. "135 The first Welsh re- ligious primer appeared in 1547, but in Ireland and Scotland it was only af- ter attempts to impose English had failed miserably that efforts were made to establish standard versions of Irish and Scots Gaelic, with their own ap- proved translations of the Scriptures. 136
Had Protestantism succeeded in France, it is virtually certain that the French language would have spread far more rapidly than it did. The Protestant churches that mushroomed in the mid-sixteenth century used the French of the court and the high nobility almost exclusively, even in the south of the country. 137 The Calvinist preachers who swarmed through the Occitan-speaking regions in those years came bearing small, cheap printed books which taught literacy, the French language, and the new faith all at once. 138 The only exception occurred in the tiny remnant of the Kingdom of Navarre north of the Pyrenees, the only place where an Occitan dialect remained the official language. 139
In short, when Gre? goire proposed to abolish patois and universalize the use of French in France, he was effectively introducing a Protestant solu- tion to the problem of linguistic diversity. It was not the only possible Protestant solution. Conceivably, Gre? goire might have heeded Jeremias- Jakob Oberlin's advice and called for raising at least some local speech to the level of standard, official languages. Instead, he ended up following Johann-Friedrich and historical precedent and opted for a single standard:
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? the language of power. Interestingly, in later years Gre? goire's ideas on lan- guage earned him abuse as a crypto-Protestant, for after the Terror one of his principal causes was the translation of the Catholic liturgy itself into French. 140
The Jacobins and the Law
The question remains, of course, why Gre? goire's "Protestant" solution should have had such great appeal in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Most obviously, one answer is the French Revolution's violent turn against Catholicism, which began in the debates over the Civil Constitution and reached a climax in the violent campaign of de-Christianization launched by the Jacobins in 1793, and later Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. Bare`re's report on language, infused as it was by violent anticlericalism, certainly reflected this rejection of the Christian God.
Another reason may have to do with the attitude taken towards language by those Catholic cousins of Calvin, the Jansenists, who had had enormous influence in eighteenth-century French political culture, and nowhere more than in the religious debates that led up to the Civil Constitution. 141 From the mid-seventeenth century, these advocates of rigorous Augustin- ianism helped produce a new French translation of the Bible and defended the legitimacy both of translation and of Bible study for all, just as Luther and Calvin had done. 142 Intriguingly, Jansenism had particular purchase in Lorraine, and after the Revolution Henri Gre? goire became an ardent de- fender of the Jansenist legacy. The extent to which he followed this reli- gious current himself as a young man remains a matter of debate, however, and there is no direct evidence to tie Jansenism to the revolutionary lan- guage projects. 143
Perhaps of greater importance to the drive for imposing French as the national language was a fundamental shift in the status of the written word in French culture during the revolutionary period. Marie-He? le`ne Huet and Sarah Maza have suggested that during the Revolution, "the traditional symbolism of power, which centered on the visible, theatricalized body of the father-king, was displaced by a competing semiotic system, which vested social authority in such linguistic abstractions as 'public opinion' or 'the Law. '"144 Carla Hesse has similarly pointed to a growing conviction on the part of revolutionary criminal authorities that written words, particu- larly in the form of private correspondence, provided the most authentic
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 195
? portrait of defendants' most intimate feelings. 145 In a society where such a shift was taking place, it follows that the full exercise of citizenship de- manded a full understanding, not simply of the principles of the Revolu- tion in general, but of the specific written laws that incarnated most au- thentically the convictions and decisions taken by the sovereign people.
Indeed, it was precisely the problem of how to teach the common people the new written law that centrally preoccupied the radicals who argued for the elimination of patois. The problems that linguistic diversity might have posed for the peasants' active participation in politics--for acting as elec- tors or elected officials, for instance--received far less attention. "The peo- ple must understand the laws to sanction and obey them," Gre? goire wrote in his report to the Convention. 146 His correspondents echoed this idea, and again and again voiced the fear that translating the written law would expose it to the danger of mistranslation, whether innocent or malevolent. Chabot cautioned that "an insidiously translated word can totally change the meaning of a law. " Fonvielhe, a cure? of Bergerac, wrote: "However well the law is explained to the people, they will interpret it badly, they will sus- pect the fidelity of the translation . . . they will stick to their own ideas, in- terpret it themselves according to their own personal interests. "147 At Aix, in 1790, certain members of the Jacobin club opposed the public explana- tion of laws in Provenc? al on the grounds that "only the legislator has the right to interpret the law . . . it can happen that the instructor without meaning to can make a mistake, or even that a well-explained decree will be poorly understood by an almost entirely illiterate audience. "148
These warnings suggest that the radical revolutionaries found them- selves in much the same situation vis-a`-vis linguistic difference as Protestant reformers who insisted that individual believers read holy Scrip- ture for themselves. If what mattered was access to a text endowed with quasi-sacred qualities, then all citizens needed to know the language in which the text was written. (The revolutionaries assumed that a perfectly clear, rational legislation would need no particular legal expertise to be un- derstood. ) This need would have seemed particularly great at the height of the Terror. When deception and treason seemed to lurk almost behind ev- ery visage, representatives of the people like Gre? goire and Chabot could no more imagine entrusting the political salvation of the citizenry to poten- tially deceitful translators than pious Protestants could imagine entrusting the care of their souls to Catholic priests. In these circumstances, regardless of the practical difficulties facing Gre? goire's plan to eliminate patois, the
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? Convention could hardly refuse its support or refrain from acting to dis- courage translation wherever possible.
To conclude, then, although the French revolutionary engagement with the language issue did not derive from religious precedents alone, in a real sense these precedents structured the debates and lurked behind them at every stage. The initial efforts to use patois to spread the revolutionary message followed from the evangelizing enterprises of the Counter-Refor- mation clergy (and indeed were partly carried out by a portion of that same clergy, who tried for a time to mix the old and new gospels). Later attempts to impose linguistic uniformity arose in part from suspicion that ill-intentioned priests were using patois as a sort of occult, mysterious tool to control a superstitious and ignorant peasantry. These efforts also stemmed, however, from much the same concerns about the relationship of the common people to the law as those that were first articulated by Protestants, concerns which did not lose their relevance when linguistic di- versity became a secular, rather than religious issue. The revolutionaries were seeking to seize the linguistic power of the priest for themselves, and this meant either destroying or seizing control of his occult language: pa- tois. In the Year II, they opted decisively for the former, just as Luther had done before them.
If the religious precedents dominated in this manner, they did so above all because, during the Revolution, the question of linguistic diversity was essentially a rural question, and the world of the peasant was still the world of the priest. For revolutionaries seeking to reach into the hearts and minds of the peasant masses and to effect what amounted to a mass con- version, the priests offered the only available model. At the same time, the priest himself remained the dominant cultural influence in the country- side, and had to be overcome if the Revolution were to triumph. Peasants might not have had salons and cabinets de lecture and academies struc- turing their cultural lives, the way educated city dwellers did, but, as Gre? goire's correspondents themselves readily attested, they had a curate who relayed news, told them what (if anything) to read, and possibly even made notes on their grammar and vocabulary. In a real sense, he was their salon and cabinet de lecture and "Acade? mie de Patois. " He gave a structure to their cultural lives, and the linguistic reformers knew they could not pursue their own program without either winning him over or in some way replacing him.
Until 1789, the priests carrying out their projects of evangelization in lo-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 197
? cal languages operated in virtually a separate sphere from elite discussions of the nation and the patrie, but the coming of the Revolution marked the eventual doom of their work on behalf of France's many "maternal lan- guages. " Thereafter, a state newly committed to molding the diverse popu- lations of France into a single nation ran unavoidably, and at full speed, into the previous efforts of the Catholic clergy to mold them all into a sin- gle church. It was at this moment that the French state came to share the clergy's perception of France as radically multilingual, and also to interpret multilingualism as a potent barrier to the construction of a properly revo- lutionary nation. And it was at this moment, therefore, that the idea of French as a uniform national language, rather than just the language of an educated elite, acquired the powerful ideological charge which it has re- tained ever since. As a result, the regional languages have now become vir- tually extinct (with--again--the exception of Alsace, which spent much of the Third Republic under German rule). Recent reforms by the Fifth Re- public allowing them to be taught in public schools only underline how small a threat they now pose. Indeed, if Hyacinthe Sermet were to return today to Toulouse and deliver once again his July 14 sermon, he would find virtually no one capable of understanding him.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
Toward the Present Day and the End of Nationalism
We do not have to renounce the nation. France cannot live without its own identity. The French people cannot live as a people whose destiny is to melt away among others.
--lionel jospin, interviewed in le monde, january 7, 1999
? "We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians. " Historians of nation- alism delight in quoting this famous saying of the Risorgimento leader Massimo d'Azeglio, but usually only to echo his own point, namely that the formal creation of the Italian nation had little meaning to most of its new citizens. 1 Whatever their formal nationality, they remained first and foremost, in language, customs, historical traditions, and political alle- giances, inhabitants of their villages and regions: Sicilians, Piedmontese, Tuscans, Calabrians, Romans, Umbrians, Venetians; not "Italians. "
Yet the saying is important for another reason. It perfectly and concisely expresses what I have argued in this book lies at the heart of modern na- tionalism: the idea of the nation as a political artifact whose construction takes precedence over all other political tasks. This idea is today utterly fa- miliar. In the catalogue of the Library of Congress, the phrase "nation- building" itself appears in the titles of no fewer 334 books, going back as far as 1902 and dealing with subjects ranging from Estonian architecture to the Singapore police. 2 Yet this familiarity has bred a forgetfulness of ori- gins. The idea of taking a population, en masse, and transforming every- thing about it--from political allegiances to dress, manners, and daily lan- guage--so as to "build a nation" is not an eternal feature of human history, but a specifically modern phenomenon. Before 1750 or so, the idea of im- posing the same language and "the same, uniform ideas" (Rabaut's phrase) on Basque shepherds and Breton fishermen, Picard farm laborers and
198
Conclusion 199
? Lyonnais servants, Parisian lawyers and Marseilles merchants, to say noth- ing of Versailles courtiers, would have struck observers as self-evidently absurd. It was only in the later eighteenth century that it became thinkable, as Marie-Joseph Che? nier put it, "to form Frenchmen, to endow the na- tion with its own, unique physiognomy. " It was this shift which made nationalism itself possible: the shift from treating nations as organic bod- ies that grow and wither according to biological rhythms, to treating them as man-made entities that humans freely create through the exercise of political will.
I have argued that nationalism took shape in France in the eighteenth century in response to a dynamic that was primarily, although by no means exclusively, religious. Building on the work of several philosophers and social theorists, I suggested that in the decades around the year 1700, a series of religious, philosophical, political and material changes combined to produce a fundamental shift in the way educated French men and women saw the world around them. They came to perceive God as absent from the sphere of human affairs.