In 1794 things calmed down under the bourgeois (but increasingly corrupt) government of the Directoire (Directory), until 1799, when a young general and popular hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power and declared himself first consul, or dictator for life. Napoleon ran things competently for five years and re-established order in France. But in 1804 he decided to crown himself Emperor of France and wage wars of conquest to expand his country’s territory. Napoleon’s regime became increasingly despotic until the British defeated him once and for all at Waterloo in 1815; he was sent into exile on Saint Helena’s Island to finish out his days.
This close succession of revolutionary and imperial governments between 1789 and 1815—more appropriately called Revolution-and-Empire—was a period of almost constant political, economic and military crisis that brought out the worst and the best in people. Maximilien Robespierre thought terror was the only way to deal with political dissent and preserve the Republic. At the same time he was an ardent democrat and defender of human rights, supporting the abolition of slavery no matter what it would cost France. Napoleon was a dictator and imperialist who did his best to reinstate slavery, yet he created such institutions as the Civil Code and a system of public administration, which are still in place in France and went on to become models for nations across the world. Then there were characters such as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who simply kept reinventing himself in order to ride France’s political roller coaster. Talleyrand was Bishop of Autun (in Burgundy) when he joined the Revolution. When things got extreme, he went into exile. In 1797 he returned, became foreign minister under the Directoire and remained there under Napoleon. But in 1807, as Napoleon’s ambitions began to become alarming, Talleyrand turned against the Emperor. In 1814 he represented France during the peace negotiations of the Congress of Vienna, as foreign minister during the brief reign of Louis XVIII. And in 1830, after a long period of retirement, he returned to advise King Louis Philippe during the July Revolution (when the latter seized power from Charles X). He ended his career as France’s ambassador to London.
Abbé Henri Grégoire was perhaps one of the most principled and consistent personalities of the Revolution. He was well-known for writing a progressive essay titled “The Regeneration of the Jews” in 1788. His tremendous intellectual energy led him to support causes ranging from the Bureau des longitudes (Navigation Office) to the emancipation of Jews and slaves. As a clerical representative to the Estates General, he was one of the first to cross over to the commons side when they created the National Assembly. During the Revolution he was an ardent nationalist and republican who insisted on being the first cleric to pledge allegiance to the Republic. When clerics were being dragged to the guillotine during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Grégoire brazenly walked the streets in his priest’s gown. He defended the nationalization of the Catholic Church and later openly opposed Napoleon’s reconciliation with the Vatican. At Grégoire’s funeral, students unharnessed the horses and pulled the carriage themselves, leading a procession of twenty thousand mourners.
Within months of the creation of the National Assembly, its members already understood how important language was to their project. In fact, the issue came up as soon as the revolutionary government tried to impose its authority. To be understood by as many people as possible, the National Assembly initially decided to translate its decrees and laws into the local languages spoken across French territories: German in Alsace, Breton in Brittany, as well as Catalan, Italian and others. But there were many problems with this approach, not least of which was the fact that many regional languages did not have clear rules, grammar or a defined vocabulary. But more important, the National Assembly really had no idea what people spoke or where. The initial reason they asked Grégoire to carry out the language survey was simply for him to assess France’s linguistic situation and make recommendations on how the National Assembly should proceed with respect to the question of language.
But thinking on the issue evolved quickly. For one thing, the National Assembly did not have the means to translate all its decrees and laws. It also realized that, for practical reasons, it needed to establish a common tongue in order to enforce the new values of the Republic and its laws. In 1791, long before Grégoire’s results were in, Talleyrand—then a parliamentarian—declared, “French must become the universal language used in France.”
National Assembly members quickly began to see language as a way to create and solidify a national identity. In the ancien régime, the king had inspired such loyalty that the nation held together even though it was in effect multilingual. Now the legitimacy of the regime was based on popular support (that is, in the ideal scenario—this new democracy would switch modes several times, from monarchy to dictatorship to empire, before it became a reality). To win that support, the National Assembly set out to turn the French language into something with which all French citizens would identify—in other words, to make it into a French institution, on a par with the National Assembly itself.
When we lived in France, we were a little puzzled to hear people refer to the French language as an institution. To us the term applied to public services, buildings, corporate entities or foundations. But of course, in its pure meaning (even in English), institution really refers to anything that has been instituted: established, set up or put in place. And that’s exactly how the French came to see their language—as a fixed and immovable part of the state apparatus. This view goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental cultural differences between English speakers and the French. The British tend to understate their institutions; their constitution is unwritten and their legal system is not codified into a whole. Strangely, their attitude towards language reflects this. The English language has rules (and many exceptions), but English speakers downplay the rules, especially when they are comparing their language to French. The French, meanwhile, proclaim and embrace their institutions with all their officialdom—and their language with all its rules.
French revolutionaries soon understood that to make French an institution, they had to get people to speak it. They quickly homed in on education as the means to this end. Article 1 of the first constitution, written in 1791, defined the “principal social goal” of the Republic as public education, available to all citizens for free. The National Assembly then created a Committee for Public Instruction. The main objective was to teach children to read and write in French. Through education, French would become institué (made into an institution), so teachers were known as instituteurs—a word used for primary schoolteachers in France to this day.
The plan had the added benefit of taking teaching out of the hands of the clergy and reducing their power—outside Paris, the clergy were predominantly monarchist and anti-revolutionary. Revolutionaries also hoped that by “instituting” French, they would get rid of the galaxy of patois and idiomes (foreign languages) spoken across French territory. Local languages had been labelled as patois long before the Revolution. A century earlier, in his Dictionnaire universel, Antoine de Furetière had defined a patois as “corrupt and vulgar language, such as used by peasants and children who don’t know how to speak properly.” In fact, patois were not seen as languages in themselves but, falsely, as corruptions of French. Although most regional languages were not just mispronounced French but languages in their own right, the term patois threw them all into the same bag and labelled them a sign of ignorance. Until the 1980s the idea remained ingrained in the French psyche that regional languages were corruptions of French, not its source languages, as they in fact are.
During the Revolution, patois took on a new significance. They were prevalent in the countryside, where support for the monarchy and the counter-revolutionaries was strong. Talleyrand claimed—and many believed—that if the revolutionaries could get rid of the patois spoken in the countryside, they would get rid of the prejudices of the people who lived there as well, and quickly convert them to the values of the new republic. Abbé Grégoire would later agre
e. In his report he wrote that imposing French would “smelt citizens into a national mass” and “replace their prejudice with universal truths and virtue.”
Many plans were made during the revolutionary period to establish a system of free primary schools throughout France. But the results were meagre; it was partly a problem of manpower and partly the result of general political chaos. In many French towns there were no teachers who spoke French, and few towns had the resources to train new ones. The National Assembly came up with a vast plan to produce and distribute teaching books in French, but amid the political and social upheaval of the Revolution, the books never got printed. In 1794, seeing the poor results of the Committee for Public Instruction, the revolutionary government decided to create a teacher-training school in Paris, the École normale (teachers’ college, a term still in use). Each of the Départements (administrative territories created during the Revolution) had orders to send four individuals “with a disposition for teaching” to Paris, where they would be provided with accommodation and paid during their training. But even that wasn’t enough to get universal education off the ground. France would have to wait until the middle of the nineteenth century for a universal primary education system to be established (more on this in chapter 8).
French spread rapidly during the Revolution, but by other means. Administrators were sent all over France by the central government, with the result that men from different regions were mixed together and had to use French as a common language. Mass conscription, which began under Robespierre, also mixed soldiers from different regions in France, forcing them to adopt French as a common language.
Of course, there was plenty of resistance to the Revolution, both inside and outside France. As early as 1791, rebellions had reached the scale of civil war. In the Vendée, southwest of Paris, fighting was so brutal that one representative of the revolutionary government, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, went so far as to execute opponents by drowning them en masse from barges in the Loire. Meanwhile, Europe’s other monarchs had awakened to the threat (and the opportunity) posed by the French example. Austria and Prussia attacked France, and Britain joined in when it realized that France might win. The French people, who feared losing their newly acquired rights, mobilized quickly. The war song of the Army of the Rhine, popularized by soldiers from Marseilles, became known as the “Marseillaise,” and was adopted as the national anthem in 1795.
When the nation was being threatened, language became a means of defining the enemy. Revolutionaries came to regard the languages spoken in regions such as Basque country or Brittany and foreign languages in the border areas of France, including German, Italian and Catalan, as seditious by definition. They viewed people in the east who spoke German, and the Basques on the border with Spain, as natural conspirators against the republic. In a 1794 report to the Committee of Public Safety on idioms, Bertrand Barère (1755–1841) declared, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German, the counter-Revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque.”
As early as 1793 the revolutionary government introduced laws banning the use of languages other than French. Members of the French administration who used a local language to carry out their functions could be imprisoned for six months and lose their jobs. The decree finally gave teeth to the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, some 250 years after it was passed. The Committee for Public Instruction ordered a ban on Latin in secondary teaching. They tried to force priests to stop using Latin for Mass, but the clergy refused to obey. During the nine months of Robespierre’s dictatorship, functionaries who spoke a language other than French risked being deported. But these repressive measures never really worked, and the so-called patois remained strongly entrenched until the Second World War.
Starting in November 1792, the National Assembly forbade the appointment of new academicians. By the summer of 1793 the guillotine, exile, jail and death by natural causes had reduced the number of Academy members from forty to seventeen. That same year, the Academy was shut down on the basis that it was a monarchist institution. The argument was questionable at best. On one hand, Academy members included a number of nobles, clerics and aristocrats, and the King had been the Academy’s protector. But it was still dominated by the philosophes, who strongly believed in the ideals of the Enlightenment that had fuelled the Revolution in the first place. Academy member Abbé André Morellet was such an ardent supporter of the rebellious philosophes that Voltaire nicknamed him Mords-les (Bite-Them).
The National Assembly also closed the four other royal academies. Morellet, who was interim permanent secretary of the French Academy before it was closed, managed to save the Academy’s archives and some eighty oil paintings by hiding them in his home (sacking and looting of monarchist institutions was common during the Revolution). But the French evidently missed their academies. Two years after they had been closed, the government created the Institut de France, with four branches dedicated to science, fine arts, history and humanities, and although there was no specific section for language, the Institut published the fifth edition of the French Academy’s dictionary in 1798. In 1803 the French Academy was resurrected in all but name, when Napoleon created a fifth section of the Institut dedicated to language and literature. In 1816 it reopened as the French Academy.
French phonetics and grammar were not much affected by the Revolution, mostly because it unfolded over such a short period of time. Some aristocratic pronunciations disappeared, along with the aristocrats who had used them, but such changes were quite minor compared to the tremendous impact the Revolution had on French vocabulary. New words had to be created to describe the new political reality, new institutions and the radical experiments of different revolutionary governments.
Some existing terms took on new meanings. In the Middle Ages, the word révolution had applied to astronomy, and had meant a cycle. The French borrowed the sense of “toppling a government” from England, which had been through its own revolutions a century earlier. They then created a flood of derivatives such as révolutionner (revolutionize), révolutionnaire (revolutionary), anti-révolutionnaire (anti-revolutionary), contrerévolutionnaire (counter-revolutionary) and even révolutionnairement (revolutionarily). Ultra-revolutionaries were dubbed enragés, an old term that had meant “rabid” but during the Revolution took on the sense (now common) of fanatic, crazy or furious. Nation, which had previously referred to a linguistic group, came to designate a collectivity that lived in a territory (both meanings were soon merged). The Revolution also created nationalisation and nationalité. The centralizers were called Jacobins, while Girondins described those who were fédéraliste (federalist). The latter term took on a pejorative meaning in France (which it still has), as did bourgeois, which had previously referred to the urban middle class—now perceived as reactionary by definition. The most radical lower-class revolutionaries were called sans-culottes (“without knee breeches”). Sans-culottes produced la sans-culotterie (their behaviour), le sans-culottisme (their principles), the adjective sans-culottique and even les sansculottides (an untranslatable term applied to leap days in the revolutionary calendar—a curious honour).
Some of these creations didn’t survive the excesses of the revolutionary period, but some had longer careers and were picked up by other languages. Vandalisme (vandalism), anarchisme (anarchism) and terrorisme (terrorism) all took their present meaning in English from French terms coined during the Revolution. Some terms disappeared, at least temporarily. Parlement (parliament) was abolished as a royalist institution in 1790 (it referred to the high tribunal in the ancien regime); after several generations it reappeared in France with the English meaning of the term.
Commoners also influenced the language. In the early days of the Revolution, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis XVI’s doctor, actively promoted reform of capital punishment. Before the Revolution only criminals of high rank and nobles were executed by decapitation, which was more humane than hanging, stra
ngulation or quartering. Guillotin’s machine for beheading was almost named the louisette or louison, after the surgeon Antoine Louis, who perfected it with the help of a German mechanic (Louis XVI himself suggested making the blade angular so it would cut better). In 1790 it was named the guillotine, though it was also known simply as la veuve (the widow). Guillotin was jailed during the Terror along with many high-profile reformers (on the basis that they were not revolutionary enough), but he escaped his invention and died a natural death in 1814.
Although Napoleon was notoriously uninterested in the French language itself, he had a huge impact on it. Under his reigns both as consul and later as emperor, a mass of official terminology was created to describe the new apparatus of the State and the institutions he created, from Conseil d’état (State Council) to préfet (prefect) and lycée (college), all of which are still used today. His Code Civil (the Napoleonic Code) and his centralized administration called for hundreds of new words such as département (department), arrondissement (city district) and commune (town), as did other creations such as the Bank of France and chambres de commerce—a French invention.
The period also resulted in an almost total reinvention of the French military, creating new vocabulary such as levée en masse (mass recruitment) and tirailleurs (skirmishers). A French engineer, Claude Chappe, proposed translating the old military system of visual signals into a visual code using flags, which he called sémaphore. He convinced authorities to invest in a network of towers equipped with signalling systems and state-of-the-art optics. His télégraphe (he coined the term) system was so successful that the French army could relay messages from Paris to Toulon, on the south coast, in twenty minutes. It played a crucial role in Napoleon’s ability to lead campaigns and coordinate efforts hundreds of kilometres away.
The Story of French Page 14