The Discovery of France (9 page)

The Abbé Grégoire was not a linguistic terrorist. He had campaigned for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty; he called for Jews to be given full citizenship and tried to save national treasures from revolutionary ‘vandalism’ (the word ‘vandalism’ was his invention). He wanted to cover the country with libraries and schools, but none of this would be possible, he believed, without a common tongue. Without a national language, there could be no nation.

Grégoire himself came from a poor family in Lorraine. He knew
that an ignorant, divided population was easily exploited. To his ears, patois was the voice of superstition and subservience. As a fellow revolutionary put it, linguistic diversity was ‘one of the sturdiest flying-buttresses of despotism’. The government had already spent a small fortune having its decrees translated into Catalan, Basque, Breton, Provençal and Alsatian, but the only lasting solution, in Grégoire’s mind, was to silence those ancient tongues for good.

Replies to the questionnaire had straggled in from representatives, mayors, lawyers, clerics and a semi-literate farmer from Brittany. From some regions – Picardy, the centre of France, much of the Auvergne and most of Brittany – there was no response, either because no one had the necessary information or because no one cared about the incomprehensible jabbering of peasants. But there was enough to give the Abbé Grégoire a clearer view of the fragmented nation than anyone before.

The Abbé Grégoire’s report on ‘The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language’ painted an alarming picture of a land that was still festering in medieval ignorance. The fringes of France were already known to be dominated by languages quite different from French: Basque, Breton, Flemish and Alsatian. But the two Romanic languages that covered most of the country – French in the north, Occitan in the south – also turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects. In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French.’ In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky.

The reports confirmed the Abbé’s fears. Peasants in the Armagnac were ‘too ignorant to be patriotic’. News of important events and government decrees left the capital on the broad river of French only to run aground in the muddy creeks of patois. A landowner from Montauban found the same startling ignorance in the Quercy: the
peasants might talk of Revolution and the Constitution, but when they are asked whose cause they support, ‘they answer without hesitation, “the King’s”.’ If there were people who thought that the King was still alive and on the throne, how could they be taught the principles of liberty and equality?

As the replies came in, the republican vision of a united country began to look like the fantasy of a small Parisian elite. Large parts of France were barely French at all. Foreign visitors often claimed to find Latin more useful than French. On the borders, speakers of Spanish and Italian had never bothered to learn French because their own languages were easily understood by their neighbours. Further north, in areas like the Limousin, where two major language groups coincide – French and Occitan – a muddled lingua franca had evolved. ‘French-speaking’ peasants had to be persuaded to revert to patois for the sake of clarity. ‘Such disorder reigns that the prayer recited by fathers when the family is together at evening can be understood only by the Supreme Being.’

Worse still, it appeared that ‘patois’ was not confined to the countryside and was not spoken only by peasants. The town of Salins (now Salins-les-Bains) was divided into north and south by a language barrier. The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: ‘The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own.’ In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and ‘felt ill at ease’ when speaking French. If certain
quartiers
of Paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers.

The information was uneven and incomplete, but there was enough to show – or so it seemed to the Abbé – that the nation was in a fragile state. The land of liberty appeared to be a body composed of ancient, decaying limbs with feeble connections to the brain. The Ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 had made the dialect of Paris and the Île-de-France, now known as French, the language of official documents. Other forms of French that had once been dominant –
Normand, Picard and Champenois – were relegated to the status of dialects. Similar decrees were enacted after the annexation of various territories: Flanders, Alsace, Roussillon, Lorraine and Corsica. But no one had ever tried to change the language of the masses. The Abbé’s survey was a revelation. According to his estimate, more than six million French citizens were completely ignorant of the national language. Another six million could barely conduct a conversation in it. While French was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French-speakers (11 percent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly. The official idiom of the French Republic was a minority language. ‘In liberty, we are the advance-guard of nations. In language, we are still at the Tower of Babel.’

Compared to later linguistic purges (see p. 325), the Abbé Grégoire’s proposals for flattening the Tower of Babel were remarkably gentle: hasten the processes by which people were induced to learn French (build more roads and canals, and disseminate news and agricultural advice); pay particular attention to the Celtic and ‘barbarian’ fringes where counter-revolution was rife (the Basque Country, Brittany and Alsace); above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

With the Revolution burning its way into the ancient forest of languages, it must have seemed that the whole nation would soon be speaking with one voice. But the biggest surprises were yet to come. The Abbé’s figures are almost certainly an underestimate. Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the
communes
in fifty-three out of eighty-nine
départements
were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). In some parts, prefects, doctors, priests and policemen were like colonial officials, baffled by the natives and forced to use interpreters.

The Abbé Grégoire would have been appalled, but he might have
been consoled or at least intrigued by the more complex truth that was beginning to emerge. His attempt to undermine the Tower of Babel had uncovered the first clear signs of a cultural division more profound and lasting than political unity.

*

A
T THE TIME,
it was far from obvious that the muddle of dialects might be one of the keys to the identity of France. The Abbé’s expedition into the linguistic hinterland shows how little was known about these languages. Before – and long after – his report, dialects were treated by the French-speaking elite as deviant forms of French. A few poets and scholars treasured them as historical curios – the ‘troubadour’ languages of Provence and Languedoc, the ‘old French’ of Normandy and proletarian Paris, the ‘prehistoric’ mother-tongues of Basque and Breton – but to most educated people, dialect was just a humorous or irritating inconvenience, a peasant’s ruse to cheat the traveller and to laugh at his expense.

As the Abbé pointed out, the National Convention itself was a little Babel of regional accents. However, the representatives were educated men who owed their advancement in part to their knowledge of French. Any other dialect was likely to be seen as a corrupt and ancient idiom. Standard French had been tamed and regulated, notably by the French Academy. The size of the Academy’s official dictionary (about fifteen thousand words, compared to forty thousand in Furetière’s dictionary of 1690) showed its determination to eradicate the rabble of synonyms, onomatopoeias and vulgarities. French was supposed to be a product of the rational mind, a beautiful estate carved out of a jungle of strange sounds and obscenities. Dialects were seen as natural excrescences of the landscape. The nineteenth-century Larousse encyclopedia described the Limousin dialect as the audible form of peasant apathy (too many diminutives and words of one syllable). The Poitevin dialect had ‘a rough quality, like the soil’. In Bourg d’Oisans, in the Alpine Écrins massif,

Words for ‘gibberish’ still reflect this political-linguistic geography:
charabia
(from
charabiat
, a migrant worker from the Auvergne),
baragouin
(from the Breton
bara
, ‘bread’, and
gwin
, ‘wine’) or ‘
parler comme une vache espagnole
’ (the ‘cow’ was originally a ‘Basque’).

By the time of the Revolution, most dialects had no written form. For those that did, spelling was largely a matter of individual choice. Dictionaries of regional languages were rarely taken seriously, even by their authors. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they were presented as manuals for provincials who wanted to speak correctly and not sound ridiculous when they went to Paris. A bilingual French–Comtois dictionary (the language of Besançon and the Franche-Comté) was written in 1753 by Marie-Marguerite Brun ‘to help my compatriots to reform their language’. A popular work on the language of Lyon (fourth edition, 1810) was titled
Bad Language
and addressed to those ‘who are not fortunate enough to live in a select society’. Even the great French–Languedocian dictionary compiled by Boissier de Sauvages (1785) advertised itself as ‘A Collection of the Principal Errors Made in Diction and in French Pronunciation by the Inhabitants of the Southern Provinces’.

Though the words themselves proved the wealth and vitality of ‘patois’ and the impoverishment of official, academic French, they were treated as a natural resource to be plundered by the dominant language. Dialect terms such as ‘
affender
’ (to share a meal with an unexpected visitor), ‘
aranteler
’ (to sweep away spiders’ webs), ‘
carioler
’ (to cry out while giving birth), ‘
carquet
’ (a secret place between breast and corset), ‘
river
’ (to strip off leaves by running one’s hand along a branch) and a thousand other useful gems were like trophies brought back from foreign parts and cleansed of their original context. None of them were admitted to the dictionary of the French Academy. When linguistically omnivorous writers like Balzac used dialect words in their published works, they were accused of sullying the language of civilization.

The world to which these words belonged would not be fully charted until the twentieth century. In most people’s minds – if they gave the matter any thought – the map of languages had more spaces than contemporary maps of Africa. Educated travellers were constantly amazed to find that their French was quite useless.

This was written by a priest from the Provençal Alps travelling in the Limagne region of the Auvergne in the late 1770s. Similar accounts can be found from the Ancien Régime to the First World War. The disorientation of Jean Racine, when he found himself linguistically stranded in Provence in 1661, was a common experience in some parts of France even two centuries later. Racine wrote to his friend La Fontaine about a trip to his uncle’s home in Uzès, fifteen miles north of Nîmes. (This was several years before he wrote the plays that would be hailed as the purest expression of classical French.)