No More Learning

"89 Robespierre made the same point more darkly: "Considering the depths to which the human race has been degraded by the vices of our for- mer social system, I am convinced of the need to effect a complete regener- ation, and, if I may so express it, to create a new people. "90 From this point, it was only a short step to a rejection of nature itself in favor of the de- mands of the patrie. Thus Danton could famously tell the Convention that children belong to the Republic before belonging to their parents, and the legislator Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau could propose (in a plan en- dorsed by Robespierre) to remove all French children from their families and send them to state-run boarding schools for periods of six years or
National Character and the Republican Imagination 157
? longer. 91 Thus Saint-Just could proclaim to the Convention that "there is something terrible in the sacred love of the patrie. It is so exclusive that it sacrifices everything without pity, without fear, without human respect, to the public interest. "92
The call to reject nature came with particular persistence in the arts. Already in 1789, Jacques-Louis David's neoclassical masterpiece, Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, celebrated the Roman hero who or- dered his own sons killed as a punishment for treason. The painting bril- liantly contrasted the still, unfeeling Brutus, staring straight ahead without visible emotion on one side of the tableau, to his wife and daughters weep- ing hysterically on the other. Under the Terror, revolutionary theater re- peatedly returned to such themes, with a series of plays celebrating the same sort of chillingly stern and unforgiving heroes, drawn mostly from the history of republican Rome. In Joseph Lavalle? e's 1794 Manlius Tor- quatus, ou la discipline romaine, for instance, a Roman father, in the man- ner of Brutus, kills his son for disobedience. The son pleads repeatedly with his father, but the stern Roman responds only with the words "la patrie! " Finally, he adds this explanation:
To save unhappy morals from chains,
Let us break, burst the chains of paternal affection;
And whether they finally call me just or barbaric,
Let me be the father of the people, and not the father of a man. 93
Similarly, in Antoine-Vincent Arnault's Quintus Cincinnatus, also from 1794, a Roman learns that his father-in-law has committed treason, where- upon his wife warns him not to let family sentiment soften his reaction:
Stifle the murmur of protesting blood,
Conquer yourself; enslave nature to the patrie, Feeling to laws, and the man to the citizen;
This is the effort worthy of your heart and mine. 94
From Soanen's reconciling of "man" and "citizen," to Rousseau's injunction to choose between them, to the 1789 pamphleteer's suggestion to forget the first in favor of the second, the French had finally arrived at the ulti- mate stage of the republican critique: demanding the enslavement of man, and nature itself, to the patrie.
From this perspective, of course, any national character shaped by cli- mate, historical evolution, and monarchy was nothing other than an ob-
158 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 13. Jacques-Louis David, Les licteurs rapportent a` Brutus les corps de ses fils (Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons), 1789. David's stern, neoclassical masterpiece depicts a famous incident from the Roman Republic, in which Junius Brutus ordered the execution of his own sons for treason.
stacle to be overcome, which is precisely how the Jacobin and Terrorist Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne described it in his 1793 work, Principes re? ge? ne? rateurs du syste`me social, in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. In Manlius Torquatus, Lavalle? e drew a contrast between the Ro- man and Latin peoples whose conflict lay at the heart of his story, stressing that even though they were neighbors sharing a common history, climate, and language, the thirst for liberty had changed the Roman character unal- terably. Robespierre expressed the same sentiment when he strikingly as- serted, in a report to the Convention on religious ideas and national festi- vals, that the Revolution had put the French two thousand years ahead of the rest of the human race, so that "one is tempted to see them . . . ] as a different species. "95 If France was to have a national character, it should have an entirely new one, reflecting its newly republican constitution. As we have seen, the playwright Che? nier told the National Convention that the state should take as its purpose "to make Frenchmen, to give the nation a physiognomy of its own. "96
The single most sustained exposition of this point of view came a few years after the Terror, in a remarkable short book called De l'influence
National Character and the Republican Imagination 159
? de la Re? volution franc? aise sur le caracte`re national ("On the Influence of the French Revolution on the National Character") by Jacobin magistrate Gilles Boucher-Laricharderie. Composed at a time when the achievements of the republican revolution seemed ever more precarious, Boucher hoped to encourage the left by sounding a tone of revolutionary optimism and confidence, declaring that the national character had changed, positively, completely, and irreversibly, since 1789. Before that date, he argued in a fa- miliar manner, despotism had caused the French to lose whatever national character they might once have possessed. Therefore, to consolidate itself, the Revolution needed to entirely recast that character. "This is what it be- gan to do," he continued, "with a success that even the most penetrating minds could not have predicted. "97 In keeping with earlier diagnoses of na- tional character, Boucher devoted the heart of the book to the role of women. Quoting Rousseau, he argued that before 1789 French women had taken advantage of the deference shown them by men to make themselves the true sources of power "in all conditions and ranks," right up to the royal court. But, he continued sententiously: "This strange domination ex- pired on July 14, 1789. " Since then, women's dominion had been restricted to the "interior of their families" and "the exercise of domestic virtues," with beneficial results for France in general. 98 Boucher did admit that the French possessed a natural gaiety which had suffered under the Terror. But he also insisted that the "frivolity" and le? ge`rete? which had accompanied this gaiety had disappeared, replaced by "decency, gravity, . . . simplicity. "99 The French had acquired a "new character," a martial, conquering disposi- tion that allowed their armies to march through Europe in triumph. And Boucher concluded, in echo of a thousand revolutionary speeches: "Thus the love of liberty has made of the French an entirely new people. "100 Al- though issued in the twilight of the First Republic, it was the perfect re- publican vision of a France transformed.
The Means of Conversion
It was one thing to pontificate about the weaknesses of the French national character. It was quite another to do something about it. And over the course of the Revolution, the task came to seem steadily more daunting, as the bounds of the political nation expanded. In the spring of 1789, with the French still divided into their three traditional estates and with voting rights strictly circumscribed by property requirements, it was still possi-
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? ble--just--to follow Voltaire or Duclos and restrict the problem of the na- tional character to a small, influential, easily describable minority. But by the fall of 1792, when the National Convention had extended the suffrage, in theory, to nearly all adult males, the problems of the larger nation could no longer be overlooked, and the biblical and classical examples of nation- building cited by Rousseau in the Considerations on the Government of Po- land came to seem less and less relevant. For eighteenth-century France was not a small desert tribe knit together by painfully tight bonds of kin- ship and obedience, nor was it a walled classical city-state in which slaves supported the leisure of free citizens. Shaping the character of a population that numbered in the millions, most of whom had little formal education, many of whom could not read or understand any but rudimentary French, and who varied enormously in everything from language and folklore to village organization and forms of agriculture, was a project without any real secular precedent.
How was the task to be accomplished? Mona Ozouf has suggested that the revolutionaries had two, almost diametrically opposed ways of talking about what she calls the problem of the "new man": the miraculous and the laborious. 101 In the first, the change would simply happen, in a single instant, through a simple, immense, and fundamentally miraculous act of political will. In a period of such rapid and extraordinary change that one month's "unimaginable" regularly became the next month's "insufficient," the notion was not quite so naive as it appears with hindsight. Yet given the disappointment that followed upon nearly all the supposedly transforma- tive moments during the Revolution, it is not surprising that, just as often, the revolutionaries saw change in the national character as a long, pains- taking project involving the massive use of state resources and personnel. As one member of the Convention wrote in a report on the new revolu- tionary calendar: "A revolution that involves a total change in political opinions can lead, in very little time, to a similar change in government and the laws . . . but when it comes to destroying religious opinions and the customs of private life, which habit has turned into a sort of necessity, then it takes centuries. "102
It was this notion of slow, laborious change driven by the central state which animated the enormously ambitious cultural policies of 1792-94 in education, religion, the arts, and daily life. These policies, although di- rected at everything from language to the calendar to book publishing, de- rived their fundamental unity precisely from their goal of transforming the
National Character and the Republican Imagination 161
? French people as a whole and giving them new unity and uniformity. The legislators in question cared remarkably little about giving the French the intellectual tools to act as free, independent citizens. They wanted, rather, to purge the population of old attitudes, habits, and knowledge and to reshape it according to a particular, predetermined idea of what a good republican state required.
In undertaking this vastly ambitious project, the Jacobins had only one clear model before them. From the middle of the sixteenth until well into the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church throughout Europe had en- gaged in a massive campaign to instruct the common people in orthodox Catholic doctrine and to purge them of "superstitious" "pagan" beliefs and practices. In Brittany, one of the best-studied cases, a typical mission might involve a score of priests spending a month in small villages, dispensing more than 7,000 hours of Christian education. The Jesuit Julien Maunoir probably oversaw the instruction of hundreds of thousands of Bretons during his career. The missionaries brought with them, along with new catechisms, new songs, new parables and stories, new almanacs, and new instructions for the parish priest, whose activities became subject to regu- lar, stringent inspections by the ecclesiastical authorities. In a word, the campaign aimed at nothing less than a wholesale transformation of popu- lar culture. It cannot be said to have fully succeeded. It varied in intensity over time and from place to place, and everywhere the common people ap- propriated the missionaries' message in their own way and for their own purposes. 103 Nonetheless, under the old regime it represented the only con- certed cultural project of its sort. After 1789, the revolutionaries had every reason to reject a comparison between it and their own project, given the fundamental difference of kind which they believed separated them from the priesthood. Yet many of them could not resist the model. As Rabaut Saint-Etienne had stressed in his 1792 speech to the Convention: "Why should we not do in the name of truth and freedom what [the priests] so often did in the name of error and slavery? " The Jacobin club of Paris, in February, 1792, similarly urged its affiliates in the provinces to emulate the spread of Christianity by sending apostles of liberty and equality into France's villages. The Girondin Armand Kersaint wrote in 1791: "What the imposters did in the name of God and the King, so as to enslave minds and captivate men, you must do in the name of liberty and the patrie. "104
This is certainly not the place for an exhaustive survey of the Jacobin cultural program, a subject which would require a book of its own. Here I
162 The Cult of the Nation in France
? will simply offer a brief survey of the policies that explicitly aimed at the reform of France's national character, and point out the ways in which they took inspiration from the earlier, clerical project. 105 The next chapter will examine in more depth one particular aspect of the program: the attempt to make French a truly national language.
The most important means that the revolutionaries envisaged for trans- forming the French national character was primary education. Between 1789 and 1794, the successive assemblies devoted enormous amounts of time to proposals for reforming the educational system. 106 Marat, with his usual savage wit, scornfully compared the proposals to "planting trees so that they may bear fruit for the future nourishment of soldiers who are already dying of starvation. "107 In the midst of war, civil war, economic desperation, and political turmoil, most of them indeed ended up as dead letters. Nonetheless, they illuminate radical revolutionary attitudes excep- tionally well.
Particularly between 1792 and 1794, the would-be fathers of republican education devoted far more attention to the inculcation of correct moral and political attitudes than to the imparting of basic knowledge. 108 In this respect, their authors followed a distinction first made by Rabaut in his 1792 speech between "public instruction" and "national education. " While the first "enlightens and exercises the mind" through schools, books, and instruments, the second "shapes the heart" through festivals, circuses, pub- lic games, and "the spectacle of the fields and nature. "109 Indeed, for Rabaut and most of his successors, "national education" had relatively little to do with schooling. "All the doctrine consists of taking hold of man from the cradle, indeed even before birth, for the unborn child already belongs to the patrie. It takes hold of the man and never leaves him, so that national education is not an institution for childhood, but for all of life. "110
Rabaut's speech inspired most of the subsequent republican educational proposals, and particularly Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau's draconian plan for placing all children in boarding schools, which Robespierre strenuously advocated after Lepeletier's assassination in early 1793. 111 "At age five," Lepeletier wrote, "the patrie receives the child from the hands of nature; at twelve, it returns him to society . . . the totality of the child's existence be- longs to us . . . it never leaves the mold. "112 Lepeletier called for a "surveil- lance of every day, every moment," with children eating the same food, wearing the same clothing, and cut off from most contact with the outside world: "Thus there will take shape a renewed, strong, hard-working, well-
National Character and the Republican Imagination 163
? regulated, disciplined race, which an impenetrable barrier will have sepa- rated from impure contact with the prejudices of our aged species. "113 In its foreshadowing of modern totalitarian practices, the project had no equals.
But even if they pointed towards the twentieth century, the radical edu- cational proposals also followed older models. Most obviously, they re- called ancient Sparta, with its severe regimentation of male youth. But as was so often the case during the Revolution, the invocation of the ancients hid the equal, indeed perhaps greater, importance of the clerical example, which the French of the eighteenth century knew far more intimately. It is an obvious but too-often-ignored point that nearly all of the French revo- lutionary generation's personal experience of education had come at the hands of the Catholic Church, which had maintained a virtual monopoly on education under the old regime. Furthermore, the rigid separation of the young from outside society and the twenty-four-hour-a-day surveil- lance proposed by Lepeletier had a more recent and more exact precedent than Sparta (where a rigid quarantine of youth was not practiced): namely, the monasteries. 114
While the educational projects confronted the problem of France's rural masses, other types of cultural reform focused on a far narrower, predomi- nantly urban population. For instance, the theater, arguably the central cultural institution of the old regime, attracted more than its share of Jaco- bin reforming energy. In March of 1793, the Paris Commune voted to es- tablish a free theater for "the instruction of the people. " That summer, the Convention ordered Parisian theaters to present only certifiably republican plays and provided a list of works, dealing mostly with Roman history, to be performed three times a week over the next month. In March 1794, the government voted to rename the Come? die Franc? aise the Theater of the People, and it instructed every French municipality possessing a stage to put on free "patriotic" productions every ten days. 115 These reforms were aimed at the servants and artisans of the parterre as well as the grandees and bourgeois of the box seats, but not the rural population.
The use of the theater for civic education had been widely discussed during much of the century. This discussion itself reflected the progress of what Marcel Gauchet calls "disenchantment," for as early as in the decades around 1700, quarrels over the theater started focusing less on Christian morality and more on the institution's possible contributions to civic har- mony. 116 In the 1760s, the crown touted patriotic plays such as Le sie`ge de Calais. Meanwhile Mercier, who sympathized with the patriotic opposition
164 The Cult of the Nation in France
? to Lord Chancellor Maupeou, argued that the theater, which he compared to the pulpit, had a unique ability to shape moeurs and to bind the French together into one nation. 117 Mercier and other critics of the Come? die Fran- c? aise's rigid monopoly on theatrical performance in Paris suggested that one benefit of ending the monopoly would be to encourage the perfor- mance of plays with more patriotic content. The notorious journalist Restif de la Bretonne made particularly vast claims for patriotic theater: "The strength of national or patriotic tragedy is that it is the only one ca- pable of reviving . . . ancient virtues, and giving descendants of great men the possibility of representing on the stage the model that the descendant must then copy in life. "118 By 1790 the Paris Commune was being pressured to dictate which plays should be performed, and from there it was not too far a step to the rigid politicization of the theater under the Terror, when only didactic republican plays like Manlius Torquatus were allowed on the French stage. 119
It was this strict control of the theaters, as much as the content of the plays, which most strongly marked off revolutionary drama from its pre- decessors (crudely pedagogical and patriotic plays were hardly an eigh- teenth-century invention, after all). Even at the height of the campaign of royal patriotism, works like the Le sie`ge de Calais shared the boards with apolitical comedies and tragedies. Only with the Revolution did the notion take shape that the political authorities should pass on all the plays that ap- peared and use them to pursue a particular didactic agenda--as opposed simply to censoring plays they deemed offensive. Yet if these practices had no real secular precedent, they did have something of a religious one, in the dramas performed until the 1760s in French colle`ges (high schools), particularly under the aegis of the Jesuit order. According to L. W. B. Brockliss, colle`ge instructors did not just choose the plays; they generally wrote the scripts. "Through a careful control of plot and theme," he em- phasizes, "they intentionally imparted moral and political lessons. " More- over, "the themes explored by these plays . . . scarcely deserved the name of tragedy. They examined neither the problems of inner conflict nor the ef- fect of an obsessive passion, but through the portrayal of stereotyped saints and sinners indoctrinated the audience in the need to be obedient to the commands of their father, prince and God. "120 Few of the texts have sur- vived, but the titles and programs indicate that the plays most frequently celebrated the monarchy and the great men of French history. 121
In their campaign for national regeneration the radical republicans also
National Character and the Republican Imagination 165
? made heavy use of the periodical press, using its columns to report news, make political arguments, and also to enlighten their readers and to impart proper political attitudes. One newspaper in particular, the inexpensive weekly La Feuille villageoise, aimed explicitly at educating the peasantry about politics and the events of the Revolution and achieved a fair de- gree of popularity (although admittedly, peasants accounted for well under half of the 15,000 subscribers). 122 At first glance, this particular means of conversion seems to differ from the other two in lacking important reli- gious precedents. Certainly, newspaper publishing was not a practice of the Counter-Reformation clergy. Yet revolutionary journalists, too, borrowed from the priesthood in surprising ways. The principal editors of the Feuille villageoise were clerics: none other than the former Jesuit Cerutti, and Rabaut Saint-Etienne. The newspaper often covered the efforts of priests to educate the peasants, and more than half the letters to the editor printed in the Feuille allegedly came from priests and pastors. 123 More generally, Jeremy Popkin has noted that radical revolutionary journalists made large- scale use of "language and imagery drawn from religious sources," which would make their message "easily comprehensible for a wide audience. " None did so more insistently than Marat: "Addressing the ordinary people of France in language they had previously heard on the most solemn occa- sions, he conveyed to his audience the sense that they were called upon to play a leading part in a great drama of redemption. "124
One final arena for the project of reshaping the French national charac- ter, and the one with the most obvious religious precedents, was the festi- val. Between 1789 and 1799, in cities and hamlets alike, revolutionaries or- ganized hundreds of large, carefully choreographed festivals to celebrate their accomplishments, render homage to their heroes and themselves, and to instruct and transform the common people through images, words, mu- sic, and pageantry. On June 8th, 1794 (the date of the traditional holiday of Pentecost), the Jacobin government organized in Paris the most remark- able such affair, the Festival of the Supreme Being. In the morning, 2,400 Parisians dressed in white robes sang hymns. In the afternoon a parade took to the streets, featuring a triumphal chariot drawn by eight oxen, their horns painted gold, and bearing a printing press and a plow, symbols of la- bor. Ahead, in a cart, a group of blind children sang a Hymn to Divinity; they were followed by columns of mothers bearing roses, and fathers lead- ing sons carrying swords. In the center of the field was an enormous plas- ter-and-cardboard mountain, on top of which stood a huge tree beside
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 14. The great Festival of the Supreme Being, staged in Paris during the Terror under the direction of Maximilien Robespierre and Jacques-Louis David. Naudet, La fe^te de l'e^tre supre^me, 1794.
National Character and the Republican Imagination 167
? a fifty-foot column bearing a statue of Hercules. After more hymns had been sung, a man dressed in a sky-blue coat descended from the moun- tain in the manner of Moses, bearing a torch, applauded by ranks of patri- ots dressed in red, white, and blue and singing the Marseillaise. It was Maximilien Robespierre. If Condorcet had earlier warned against treat- ing revolutionary doctrine as "tablets brought down from heaven, to be worshipped and believed in," Robespierre here gave his unambiguous re- sponse. 125
Such episodes reveal just how profoundly the republicans of 1792-94 obeyed, if often unconsciously, Rabaut Saint-Etienne's words about follow- ing the example of the priests "with their catechisms, their processions . . . their ceremonies, sermons, hymns, missions, pilgrimages, patron saints, paintings, and all that nature placed at their disposal. "126 Mona Ozouf, in her analysis of the festivals, has exhaustively catalogued the "vertigo of imi- tation" of Christian practices evident in them: hymns, processions, ser- mons, altars, the Declaration of Rights taking the place of the Bible, the obsessive use of words such as "holy," "temple," "catechism," and "gos- pel. "127 From this perspective, the festival seems to have amounted to little more than a laughable pastiche of Christianity, centered upon a kitschy cardboard Sinai.
Yet Ozouf cautions that the festivals were not a simple imitation of Christianity, for through them the revolutionaries also hoped to purge the world of superstition, of the metaphysical, of ideas of sin and redemption. The formal content of the festivals overwhelmingly referred not to Chris- tianity, but to pagan antiquity--although an antiquity curiously shorn of nearly all specific references to Rome or Greece. Ozouf concludes that the festivals amounted to an attempt to "transfer sacrality" to the human world, to the Revolution itself, and to the patrie. 128
In this sense, the festivals perfectly illustrate the relationship between nationalism and religion. The architects of the festivals, who were also the principal architects of nationalism in France, were not acting on behalf of any God, not even a God dressed up in the clothes of the Nation--a super- natural idol in secular guise. They were following the example of the priests so as to establish harmony and order in a wholly human world that existed on its own terms, according to its own laws. In particular, they sought to do this within a particular, limited space, which they called the nation. And they sought to do it by transforming the very character of the people who lived within this space by giving them new attitudes, opinions,
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? and habits--and also, crucially, the same attitudes, opinions, and habits, to ensure that they acted as a single body. Education, the theater, the press, and the festivals were all mobilized to this end.
But as France's revolutionary assemblies recognized on many different occasions between 1789 and 1794, even a successful transformation of the French national character might not suffice to arrive at the desired state of harmony. For within France there existed, so they believed, another deadly source of division, misunderstanding, and conflict, a deeper one that de- stroyed any chance of achieving true republican homogeneity and might lead even the best of republican citizens inadvertently to threaten the safety of the republic. Overcoming it would require an effort as arduous as any proposed by the radical educational reformers, perhaps more so. This source of division was language itself.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
CHAPTER 6
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible
The poor of this country should be able to say, like the poor of other nations such as the French, Spanish, Italian, &c. : "we dare to speak in our own language of the grandeurs of God and of the articles of our Faith. " . . . What flaw might the language of Toulouse have, not to be worthy of expressing the word of God, just like all others? What could the poor people of this country have done, not to deserve the consolation and honor of hearing of a matter as great as eternal sal- vation in their own language? To speak truly, experience . . . teaches us that there is no tongue which reaches further into the heart, and that touches more to the quick, than the maternal.
--la douctrino crestiano meso en rimos
[christian doctrine set to rhymes] (toulouse, 1641)
Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us break these instruments of injury and error.
--bertrand bare`re (1794)
? On July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the French staged one of the most impressive displays of national unity ever seen in Europe, in the first of the great revolutionary festivals. At noon, in Paris, on the Champ de Mars (future site of the Eiffel Tower), delegations of Na- tional Guardsmen from across France swore oaths of loyalty and pledged to join in a great national Federation. Under the ecstatic gaze of the guard commander, Lafayette, and the cooler eye of the presiding bishop, Talley- rand, guardsmen paraded past specially built pavilions, dignitaries deliv- ered speeches, and masses of spectators applauded and broke into patriotic song (including "C? a ira," as yet without its famous refrain about hang-
169
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? ing aristocrats from lampposts). Everywhere--on flags, banners, uniforms, and cockades--floated the new symbol of the nation, the tricolor. At as close to the same moment as the technology of the age permitted, cities and villages across France marked the occasion with their own parades, songs, oaths, and speeches. In short, the idea of the nation as a political construction built by the conscious action of patriotic citizens--an idea unimaginable to the French just a few decades before--here enjoyed its apotheosis. 1
In one of the localities celebrating the Federation, the hamlet of Saint- Ginest on the outskirts of the southern city of Toulouse, the assembled guardsmen heard a sermon from a distinguished speaker. Hyacinthe Sermet was an ambitious and progressive-minded clergyman who had preached before the king at Versailles and contributed sprightly notices, in the manner of the day, to learned publications. Already firmly identified with the cause of Revolution, he was widely considered the leading can- didate for bishop of Toulouse under the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. 2 For his text on July 14, Sermet adroitly chose Galatians 4:31-5:1, in which Paul warns his readers against falling back into the grip of the old Mosaic law: "So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. " In the sermon itself, Sermet compared Christ's abrogation of the Mosaic law to the Revolution's abrogation of the old regime, and suggested that Paul himself, in heaven, was smiling on the achievements of the Constituent Assembly. 3
Yet even as he participated in this great ceremony of nation-building, the actual words Sermet used testified to what, from our modern perspec- tive, stands as one of the most important signs of French disunity at the time. This is how he started:
Jamay nou debignayots, mous efans, & brabe? s Camarados, a` qui l'Apoustoul Sent-Pol, le plus grand des Predicaire? s qu'ajo parescut sur la terro, desempey la naissenc? o del Christianisme? , adressabo aquel lengatge? . Aco ero, afin qu'au sapiats, a` nostre? s illustre? s Aujols, as mainatge? s d'aquelis Gauloise? s, que quitteguen y a enbiron tres milo ans aqueste? Pays, al nombre? de may de cent cinquanto milo, per ana al dela de las mars, al bout del mounde? counescut alabets, al fin found de l'Asio founda la superbo Bilo d'Anciro, & poupla la Proubinc? o que prenguec lour noum & s'apelec Galatio. 4
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 171
? The sermon was not in French, but rather in the Romance language now called Occitan, which then served as the vernacular for most of southern France and was just one of the many non-French languages then spoken on French territory. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which saw so much bloodshed in the name of self-determination for minority language groups, one would think that France in 1789 stood poised on the brink of dissolution into half a dozen smaller states--or at the very least, that any program of French nation-building had very far to go indeed.
The Politicization of Language
In fact, it was only in the Revolution itself that French multilingualism ac- quired real political significance and became the principal sign of the na- tion's regional diversity (before that, as I argued in Chapter 2, provincial rights and privileges served this purpose). Although France's kings had promoted French as a learned language and tried to associate its glory with their own, they had given very little attention to the speech of their hum- bler subjects. Franc? ois I's 1539 Edict of Villers-Cottere^ts, which ordered that all judicial and administrative documents be written "in maternal French language," originally had more to do with reducing the role of Latin in public life than with propagating Parisian French in the provinces. 5 Occitan verse stayed in print to the end of the old regime, while Alsace sheltered a vibrant German publishing trade until the Revolution. 6 In fact, the idea that language could be altered by legislative fiat remained largely unimaginable before 1789. "There is no Power capable of reforming man- ners of speech consecrated by usage," wrote d'Espiard de la Borde in a typi- cal statement. 7 Other authors made much the same point by recounting an anecdote about a Roman emperor who failed in his bid to legislate new words into Latin. 8 A few isolated works did call for the elimination of local dialects, but they had little resonance. 9 Most authors agreed with the view of sixteenth-century Lord Chancellor Michel de l'Ho^pital: "The division of languages does not cause the separation of kingdoms. "10
True, it did not take legislation to render the position of the local languages increasingly marginal in secular society. As early as 1567, the Gascon poet Pey de Garros had tellingly mourned "the damned cause of our despised language, [which] everyone is leaving and abandoning, and calling barbaric. "11 Local elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries oriented themselves increasingly to the court and the capital, and therefore to the French language, and the process was abetted by the expansion of
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? the royal administration and the periodical press. By 1789, French reigned unchallenged in nearly all print media, in courtrooms and administra- tions, in the drawing rooms of educated bourgeois and nobles, and throughout most French cities. 12 Men and women who might previously have read and taken pride in local literary productions now bought hand- books with titles like Gasconisms Corrected, which promised to eliminate all embarrassing traces of dialect from their speech. 13
The use of the local languages in print, except in religious contexts, now served principally to mark a piece of writing as carnivalesque, capable of expressing meanings not permitted by the conventions of polite usage, without necessarily crossing into the territory of the obscene and forbid- den. 14 Grammarians tended to define correct speech by the usage of the royal court. They and many others dismissed regional languages and French dialects as "patois," a derogatory term derived from patte (an ani- mal's paw), signifying an earthy, unsophisticated, variable speech part way between animal grunts and true human speech. 15 Although some scholars were starting to devote serious attention to the local languages, glimpsing in them stable remnants of Europe's older, more primitive tongues, most educated people simply ignored them altogether, or treated them as cor- rupt versions of French itself. 16 In a 1790 speech, Mirabeau casually de- scribed France as "a nation of twenty-four million people speaking the same language. "17
Even at the start of the Revolution, concern about linguistic diversity re- mained almost nil among France's secular elites. The grievance petitions drawn up for the Estates General in 1788 and 1789 barely mentioned the subject. 18 When a prominent article in the Mercure national in 1790 demanded a wholesale reform of language, the recommendations boiled down to nothing more than the removal of forms of aristocratic politeness from the language. 19 Consider also an early revolutionary pamphlet which called on the government to abolish all differences of language and accent among the citizenry. "What good will it have done to eliminate the divi- sions of the provinces," the author asked, "as long as one can say, from someone's first phrase, this person is Provenc? al and that one is Picard? "20 The proposal sounds radical--but the pamphlet was actually a satire on the advanced revolutionaries' calls for social equality. It also proposed, inter alia, to nourish all children exclusively with a special "patriotic bouil- lon" so as to render them physically identical.
Starting in 1790, however, the way the French perceived and represented
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 173
? their linguistic situation became a point of angry political contention. Sermet's July 14 sermon itself had political importance, not simply because he delivered it in patois--already an unusual step for a man of his stat- ure--but because it then appeared in print in no fewer than four cities. 21 The very typography, precisely the same used in French-language publica- tions, gave graphic visual evidence that the language of Toulouse could ex- press the same range of meanings and opinions as French itself, and so perhaps deserved something closer to equal status. Sermet's confident, ele- gant Occitan prose, nourished by a deep familiarity with Toulouse's native literary traditions, implicitly made the same point. 22
The sermon in fact signaled the beginning of a remarkable efflorescence of France's regional languages in 1790-92. The Department of Finiste`re organized the translation and printing of numerous laws in Breton. 23 A well-known antiquarian translated the Constitution of 1791 into Provenc? al and had it published by the Imprimerie Nationale. 24 Jacobin clubs in non-French speaking areas, while generally deliberating in French, commonly organized public sessions at which members orally translated new laws and newspapers into the local language. 25 In the south, they also sponsored original speeches and subsidized publications in patois, to which counter-revolutionary authors responded in kind. 26 Over two hun- dred printed Occitan songs, poems, and pamphlets appeared between 1788 and 1800. 27 In Alsace, a strong tradition of German-language publishing continued, with thousands of items published, including a weekly newspa- per aimed at "artisans and peasants. "28 In 1790, after complaints that some citizens could not follow its debates, the National Assembly even voted to translate all new laws and decrees into the various regional tongues. Fol- lowing this moment of enthusiasm, however, it passed on to other busi- ness, and despite the zeal of volunteers hoping for lucrative translating as- signments, the policy functioned only fitfully, and few printed translations appeared. 29
Even as these hundred flowers were blooming, however, other revolu- tionaries were beginning to see linguistic diversity--which they identified above all with the peasantry--as a curse. 30 The key figure was abbe? Henri Gre? goire, a Lorraine priest who first made a national reputation as cham- pion of civil rights for Jews. As early as 1790 he blamed rural resistance to the Revolution on ignorance of French, claiming that disruptive south- western peasants were confusing the de? crets (decrees) of the revolutionary National Assembly with the old regime's de? crets de prise de corps (arrest or-
174 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 15. Antoine-Hyacinthe Sermet, a noted cleric from Toulouse, delivered his speech celebrating the Festival of the Federation in Occitan, and had it printed in the same language. The typeface and layout are exactly the same as in French- language publications of the period. Title page from his Discours prounounc? at le 14 juillet, 1790 (Toulouse, 1790).
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 175
? ders). The same year he sent out to a wide audience a questionnaire "con- cerning patois and the customs of the people of the countryside. " As his revolutionary career flourished, he made regular calls for the nation's lin- guistic unification and found considerable support for his ideas. Legislative reports, pamphlets, and newspaper articles alike denounced linguistic di- versity as a barrier to social equality, contrasted the success of French abroad to its failure at home, and labeled the translation of laws cumber- some and unreliable. 31
By 1794, the Jacobins had begun an official campaign to eradicate patois entirely and make the French language uniform throughout the Republic (although they recognized the continuing short-term need for transla- tors). 32 Bertrand Bare`re put the matter starkly in a legislative report that demanded the establishment of French-language schools in four periph- eral areas of the Republic: Brittany, Alsace, the Basque Country, and Cor- sica. Directing his ire at their "foreign" idioms, he let loose his usual overboiled rhetoric, notably in the passage quoted at the start of this chap- ter. 33 Four months later, Gre? goire submitted a much more detailed report that targeted not merely peripheral languages, but Occitan and northern French dialects as well. 34 In its pages, what had been material for satire, now became grist for policy. "We no longer have provinces, but we have thirty patois which recall their names," Gre? goire proclaimed. He also re- peated the old anecdote about the Roman emperor who tried to legislate on language but, with aplomb, turned it on its head: "A tyrant of Rome once wished to introduce a new word; he failed, because the legislation of languages was always democratic. "35 The Convention instituted French- language requirements for promotion to officer grades in the armies, and a ban on all non-French languages in judicial documents. 36 In Alsace and in Catalan-speaking Roussillon, something of a limited "linguistic terror" took place, with non-French publications and commercial signs sup- pressed, non-French-speaking personnel dismissed, and plans drawn up for forcible transfers of population. 37 A visiting conventionnel in Stras- bourg proposed a horrific solution for gallicizing Alsace: to guillotine a quarter of the population and expel all others who had not actively partici- pated in the Revolution. 38
Gre? goire and a few others held out as an ultimate goal not merely the diffusion of French through France, but the transformation of French itself into a perfectly pure, clear, and rational tongue, purged of aristocratic cor- ruptions and of all grammatical and lexical irregularities and confusions.
176 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 16. The title page from Henri Gre? goire, Rapport sur la ne? cessite? et les moyens d'ane? antir le patois (Report on the Necessity and Means for Annihilating Patois), Paris, 1794: his proposal for eradicating local languages and making French the sole and uniform language of France.
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 177
? This perfect language could then spread, they suggested, to all the world. They hoped that its development would eliminate misunderstandings and "abuses of words," which they presented as the root causes of all conflict and disharmony in the terrestrial sphere. It was a dream which recalled the ancient religious desire to overcome the legacy of the Tower of Babel; it also testified to the process of "disenchantment" discussed in Chapter 1. For now the perfect language would come from nature, not God, and would belong to the natural world alone. 39
The idea was dazzling. In practice, though, even the radicals devoted most of their effort to the problem of spreading the French language--the one spoken and written by Parisian elites--to the rest of the Republic. Bare`re, the hardheaded and opportunistic Terrorist, even claimed that most language abuses had already disappeared, along with their aristo- cratic authors. 40 Gre? goire himself spent most of his report justifying the destruction of patois, and only in the last few pages turned to the "vast project . . . of revolutionizing language. "41 His program was nationalist first, universalist second.
In any case, even the relatively limited nationalist program of uniformi- zation never had a real chance for success. Long before a single language teacher had arrived in Brittany or Alsace, the Ninth of Thermidor had come, and with it the end of this and many other radical dreams. While subsequent regimes remained cognizant of language differences, until the late nineteenth century they mostly gave up on any attempt to eliminate the problem. It would take the Third Republic, endowed with far greater material resources and a far greater degree of political stability than the First, to start putting Gre? goire's program into action. And even the Third Republic remained tolerant of patois insofar as it constituted part of a re- gion's folklore and did not threaten national unity. 42
The Ear of the Listener
To modern readers, this politicization of language during the French Revo- lution has generally seemed an obvious and inevitable phenomenon, one that arose naturally when the revolutionaries tried to bring democracy to a multilingual country. 43 But was the problem so obvious to contemporar- ies? Consider the enormous differences of opinion on the very extent of the problem. In 1792, the deputy Dentzel estimated that three million people, out of a population of 28 million, could not speak French. Gre? goire him-
178 The Cult of the Nation in France
? self variously put the figure at eight million and six million, and claimed that scarcely three million spoke French itself properly. 44 His report to the Convention enumerated thirty separate patois ripe for eradication. More- over, he treated French dialects and the non-Indo-European Basque as equal barriers to the progress of the Revolution. 45 In contrast, Bare`re ech- oed the common old regime view that northern and southern patois amounted simply to variations on French, and saw a problem only in four relatively small peripheral regions. 46 Other prominent revolutionaries, such as Mirabeau, remained oblivious to the language problem altogether. Seeming to relegate the matter to the past, Saint-Just speculated in the spring of 1794 that if old regime feudalism had continued for longer, "soon the French would no longer have spoken the same language. "47
Consider also Gre? goire's earliest revolutionary remarks on the subject, when he told the Constituent Assembly, in reference to the southwestern riots, that "the municipal authorities in the areas where these troubles are taking place think that they are caused first of all by ignorance of the [French] language. "48 In fact the municipal authorities thought nothing of the sort. Nor did the other deputies charged with investigating the riots, who tended to blame counter-revolutionary agitators, or peasant brigands, rather than any confusion over the meaning of de? cret. Nor have subsequent historians, who have rather highlighted such factors as long-standing peas- ant hostility to seigneurialism and the hopes raised when the Assembly proclaimed the end of the feudal regime on August 4, 1789. At best, lin- guistic confusion has merited a footnote in their works. 49
Two recent studies support the views of those who failed to see major language barriers in France. One shows that French emigrants to Que? - bec--who came primarily from a wide swathe of dialect-speaking western France--adapted to the standard French of the colony quickly and without difficulty. 50 The other concludes that litigants and defendants in old regime Languedoc do not seem to have been seriously inconvenienced by linguis- tic differences. 51 In fact, very few eighteenth-century sources from outside the peripheral regions of Brittany, Flanders, Alsace, Savoy, Corsica, the Basque Country, and Roussillon mention linguistic difference at all, or suggest that speakers of French or Occitan dialects had trouble under- standing the decrees and monitoires read out to them in church. Differ- ences of language may have been obvious, but the extent to which they posed problems of mutual comprehension is much less so. It is no coinci- dence that Gre? goire's revolutionary writings are the most often-cited evi-
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? 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.