It was during this period that French replaced Latin as the language of European diplomacy, although this was never stated anywhere in international law. Until 1678 almost all European treaties were written in Latin, which was considered a neutral language. That began to change after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, when the Austrians, who controlled the defeated Holy Roman Empire, claimed it was their prerogative that treaties be written in Latin. For the first time Latin became associated with a specific nationality. French was a defined language, so its corset of rules and definitions meant that whatever was written in French would not change its meaning a couple of years later. In 1678 the Treaty of Nijmegen was written in both French and Latin. The Treaty of Rastatt and Baden of 1714—one of three that ended the War of the Spanish Succession—was the first to be written completely in French, even though France had lost the war. The French plenipotentiary, the Duc de Villars, knew only French, so his imperial counterpart, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who knew French, accommodated him. According to Professor Agnès Walch, of the University of Artois in France, the negotiators introduced a clause specifying that although the treaty was negotiated in French, that did not constitute a precedent. This clause reappeared in other treaties in 1736 and 1748. But by the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the clause had disappeared, and the entire treaty was negotiated and written in French—even though the French had lost. From then on, all treaties were negotiated in French. In most European countries, with the notable exception of Britain, even diplomatic notes were written in French.
French became the language of diplomacy in Europe less because of the power of France than because of the power of French. A class of career diplomats had begun to appear at the time. Many of them were also career soldiers, and soldiers, who usually joined the military at a young age, rarely knew Latin. These career diplomats started bringing their wives to diplomatic conferences, and women of high society spoke French, so salon culture gradually spilled over into the meeting rooms. (The participants also spoke French among themselves so the servants could not understand them.) No decree ever made French the diplomatic language of Europe; its status was never official. It was all a question of usage. French remained the sole language of high diplomacy in Europe until 1919.
Social conditions also favoured the international preeminence of French. In the political system of Europe, based as it was on marriages among different dynasties, all communication between princes and princesses, people of rank, writers, and their lovers and mistresses—what Marc Fumaroli calls the “politico-diplomatic machine of the century”—was done in French. From Spain, Italy and Portugal to England, Germany, Holland, Russia and Sweden, the crowned heads studied French, corresponded in French and looked to France as an example and a model.
Young Swedish nobles had been travelling to Paris for their education for a good century before Gustav III (who ruled 1771–92) came to power, but he would become the king of francophiles. A great admirer of Voltaire, as well as of Jean Racine, Gustav had been raised in French; he read French books and spoke no other foreign language. During his reign he introduced French theatre to Sweden, where it played to full houses, and he brought in French artists to decorate his castles. He was kept abreast of the news from Versailles through Madame de Staël, the Swiss wife of a Swedish ambassador and the daughter of Louis XVI’s last finance minister, who became famous for her novels and essays. Gustav III paid an incognito visit to King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in Versailles in 1786 (during the French Revolution he would try in vain to arrange exile for them). Shortly after this visit Gustav resuscitated the Swedish Academy (an earlier one had been founded in 1753). The Swedish Academy is still in operation today. Its motto is “Talent and taste” and its mandate is “to further the purity, vigour and majesty of the Swedish language.”
Gustav III was an extreme case, but his taste for French was not uncommon among Europe’s crowned heads. Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762–96) was an avid reader of the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu before she took power. For fifteen years during her reign she exchanged letters with Voltaire in which they discussed European and world events (her French was full of mistakes—it was her third language after German and Russian). Like Gustav III, she founded an academy based on the French model, for Russian writers. Historians still debate whether she was an enlightened despot or simply a tyrant. In either case, she worked hard throughout her reign to increase the grandeur of the Russian Empire and looked towards France for ideas. She imported French intellectuals, scientists, artists and industry leaders, sent teachers of French to Paris to complete their studies, imported French teachers and hosted French theatre evenings in her castles. Most of Russia’s nobility spoke French well into the nineteenth century—the nobles in Tolstoy’s War and Peace make comments in French on almost every page. And the link between France and Russia remained strong until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The case of Prussia’s Frederick II (ruled 1740–86) was more complicated. He was easily as passionate a francophile as Catherine II, and he only ever wanted to learn and write in one language: French. He built a new castle, Sans Souci (“free of care”), modelled on Versailles, and peppered his Court with French speakers. He had French soldiers in his army and French bureaucrats in his civil administration; he wanted to hear only French actors and plays and wrote poetry in French. He was known for including French witticisms in his messages to Voltaire during their long correspondence, like this cryptic dinner invitation:
Translation: Venez sous p (venez below P) à sans sous ci (sans below ci), which in French reads phonetically as Venez souper à Sans Souci (Come to dinner at Sans Souci).
At the beginning of Frederick’s rule he reorganized the Berlin-Brandenburg Society of Scientists in Berlin on the model of the French Academy, and it was this academy that hosted the essay contest that Rivarol and Schwab won in 1783.
But his francophilia didn’t prevent Frederick II from going to war with the French and the Russians. His ruthless expansionism, especially the way in which Prussia—along with Russia and Austria—dismantled Poland, made a serious dent in his reputation in Europe. Some historians argue that Frederick II was using the philosophes for the same purpose François I had used the Humanists for: trying to get the endorsement of public-opinion makers in order to boost his nation’s international reputation at a time when it was in an unfavourable light. In the end, Frederick’s aggressive foreign policy spelled the end of his friendship with Voltaire, and an end to the witty invitation cards.
The British were among the most ambiguous regarding their love of things French, not surprisingly, since their national identity had been built on England’s four-century-long competition with France. Yet French retained an undeniable cachet among England’s upper classes. A couple of years before defeating the French outside the walls of Quebec City, the young officer James Wolfe was sent to the City of Light for five months to dance and fence, ride and go to the opera, and improve his French. Most British officers in Quebec spoke French. Horace Walpole and David Hume wrote much of their correspondence in French. British aristocrats and members of the gentry sent their offspring on an extended journey through Europe to Italy, when they were expected to develop their taste and manners and be exposed to civilization. France, a mandatory stage of the trip, often became the sole destination.
During the eighteenth century the grand tour became a target of satirical travel writing in England. In A Sentimental Journey Laurence Sterne (who lived in France in 1762–64 and 1765–66) calls France a “polished nation,” though “a little too serious.” Over the course of a light-hearted romp through France, the novel’s hero turns out to be not so much widening his cultural horizons as chasing after a married woman, but through the process he encounters all the characteristics associated with the French of the period: refinement, debauchery, gallantry, wit, urbanity and self-assurance. Interestingly, the word sentimental entered French under Sterne’s influence; the adjective didn’t yet exist
in the language, so the French translator and publisher just used the English word.
British admiration for France and French had its limits. In his History of the French Language, published in the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Brunot argued that the British accepted French as the language of Europe in the eighteenth century, but never accepted the idea of French cultural superiority, as many other countries did. In Britain, Brunot says, French was considered simply a “universally useful language.” The works of many British thinkers and scientists spread throughout Europe thanks to wide dissemination of their works in French translation. The philosopher John Locke became known in Italy through a French translation of his Essay on Enlightenment, which appeared in 1736, and the writings of Hobbes also spread through Europe in French. French started being taught as a second language at Oxford University in 1741. But according to Brunot, the English really just “wanted to learn a European language, not French per se.”
More than anything, it was this quest for a European language that drove people outside of Europe’s upper classes to learn French. Throughout the century, noble and middle-class families scrambled to find ways to enter the French-speaking world. Many French dictionaries and grammar guides were designed specifically for the provincial bourgeoisie and nobility of France, but readers outside those circles also picked them up. In the German principalities many people thought that German was good only for speaking to their horses. Parents sent children to school in French, and the schools run by Huguenots were especially popular; in a century and a half these would form the backbone of a network of collèges and lycées français. Families also imported French-speaking nannies from either France or Switzerland. In many places in Europe the French language made progress independently of any contact with France or its people. French books or French translations and French theatre were widely available in the European capitals. Francophiles were able to keep abreast of the news in France by reading one of the dozen French-language papers called Gazette de Hollande. According to Clyde Thogmartin of the University of Indiana, the title described any international French paper, whether it was published in London, Berlin, Monaco, Luxembourg or Geneva. (The label was a tribute to the fact that most cities in Holland had a newspaper in Dutch and another in French. The oldest version, the Gazette de Leyde, was founded in 1639.)
But the seeds of francophilia were spreading even beyond Europe. French made remarkable progress during that period in a region of Moldavia and Wallachia that was under Turkish influence, the future Romania. Romanians already spoke a Romance language, making it easier for them to master French. The language gained wide currency through their contacts with francophile Russians and the Greek administrators of the Ottoman Empire, who were also ardent francophiles. In 1859 Napoleon III helped bring about the union of Wallachia and Moldavia to form modern Romania. And in the first decades of the twentieth century, France’s support and the strong francophilia of the Romanian elites were critical in establishing an independent Romania. The Romanians as well as the Moldavians would retain strong emotional links to French even while they were under Soviet rule.
Although Antoine de Rivarol wrongly argued that English was the last language that would ever displace French (because, he said, it encouraged “disorderly thinking”), some learned observers of the time were already predicting that English would one day become the world’s universal language. According to Ferdinand Brunot, there was more interest in English ideas than in the language itself, but it was already showing signs that it could rival French. Jean-Christ Schwab believed that even if English lacked in appeal—he said it was not “polite” or “mannered” like French—it was one of the easiest languages to learn (from a German point of view). The main problem with English, Schwab wrote, was that it hadn’t succeeded in spreading itself. But he predicted that that would change when English acquired its “prodigious empire” in America.
Schwab would turn out to be right, but by that time the reputation of French would no longer based be exclusively on refinement, or even on international influence. French was about to take on a new personality—as the language of revolution.
Chapter 6 ~
Revolutionary French
In August 1790, a year after the French Revolution began, France’s new National Assembly commissioned the world’s first language survey. They appointed Abbé (Father) Henri Grégoire, a popular revolutionary priest, to carry it out. Grégoire sent fifty doctors, lawyers and professors to villages all over France to see whether people were speaking French, other languages such as German and Italian, or a patois—a pejorative term for local dialects. If they spoke a patois he wanted to know what it was like, whether it was similar to French, how vulgar or repetitive it was, whether children in the villages were schooled in it and whether priests preached in it; he even wanted to know if people swore in patois.
The project was ambitious, but Grégoire managed to compile his answers and present a report in four years. It was a stunning achievement considering the scale of the survey and the detailed information he had to process, not to mention the fact that the country was in the middle of a revolution and small-scale civil war the whole time he was gathering his data.
Grégoire’s report, submitted to the National Assembly in 1794, paints a picture of France that still surprises foreigners today. France in the 1790s was a potpourri of different cultures and languages. Of a population of twenty-eight million, only three million French citizens spoke French well, and even fewer wrote it. Another six million could carry on a conversation, and at least six million didn’t speak French at all. The thirteen million others probably had a shaky understanding of French at best. Grégoire discovered no fewer than thirty dialects being spoken across France. And more than two centuries after the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was passed, French still had not pushed other languages out of the state apparatus. On the borders with Italy and Germany, Italian and German were used for everyday communications, in courts and in the administration. In other words, the young Republican general Napoleon, who learned French only when he was fifteen and spoke it with a Corsican accent all his life, was typically French.
The impact of the Revolution-and-Empire period on the French language was tremendous. It spawned a vast new vocabulary to describe new political categories and institutions. The function of French in France also changed radically, and practically overnight. During the Revolution, language became a tool that the French government would use to centralize the country. And through this process the French language became, for the first time, the foundation of a French national identity. The Revolution also changed the role of French outside of France, giving it a double personality: It reinforced the status of French as an elite language while giving it the new label of “universal language of liberty.” And all this happened while France was being crippled by civil and foreign wars and Napoleon was draining France’s resources in a vain attempt to carve out a French Empire in Europe.
Although decades—some even argue a century—of political conditions in France explain how France ended up with a revolution, its outbreak was sudden. The Revolution is widely considered to have begun with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789; the political crisis that provoked it began ten weeks earlier, in May. At the time Louis XVI was staring bankruptcy in the face. After three years of bad harvests his subjects were rioting, so raising taxes was no longer an option. He had no choice but to consult the Estates General, a parliament composed of three distinct estates, or chambers, with representatives of the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The Estates had not been summoned since 1614, and their gathering unleashed a wave of recrimination, especially on the part of the commons, who resented not only the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy, but also the arbitrary rule of the King himself.
The commons, which had already declared itself the sole representative of the people, forced the French regime to transform itself overnight. On June 20 the commoners swore an oath that they would not
disband until they had a constitution to define their rights, and they proclaimed themselves to be the National Assembly. Six weeks later, this National Assembly—which had also attracted progressive members of the clergy and the nobility—abolished aristocratic privileges, destroying the feudal regime. A violent chain of events followed that would draw France into civil war, dictatorship and imperial conquest.
Historians still argue about how the French Revolution actually unfolded. Between 1789 and 1815 the country went through roughly five phases. From 1789 to 1792 France was a constitutional monarchy. During that time Louis XVI came to be seen as a despot, and in 1792 he was tried and beheaded. That marked the beginning of the most radical period of the Revolution, called the Terror, when France was run by the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety), headed by Maximilien de Robespierre. Robespierre quelled civil war within the country and waged war on the neighbouring countries hostile to the Revolution. Some seventeen thousand opponents of his regime were beheaded and another thirty-five thousand jailed, but in 1794 Robespierre himself was led to the guillotine in a counter-coup.
The Story of French Page 13