The Story of French (20 page)

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 agree. 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, strangulation 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 revolutionaries were bent on modernizing all aspects of French society. In 1795 the existing currency, the
livre,
became the
franc,
and was subdivided into a hundred
centimes.
God, whose existence had been temporarily denied, became the
être suprême
(supreme being). One of the revolutionaries’ most ambitious undertakings was to overhaul France’s chaotic weights and measures system. The British had succeeded in unifying their system in 1496, but the French had still not gotten around to it, partly because France was so big. Each region had its own system, so a pound of flour and a pound of bread were not the same from one region to another. Talleyrand first proposed unifying the system. In 1791 the Academy of Science (which had not yet been closed down) recommended the
mètre
(metre, from the Greek for “measure”) as the fundamental unit of measurement.

The Academy of Science decreed that a metre would be one ten-millionth of a quarter of a meridian of the Earth. To determine this, they needed an exact measure of the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona in order to extrapolate the distance between the North Pole and the Equator (which they would then divide by ten million to get the metre). It took two teams of surveyors six years to finish the measurement, as their work was somewhat disrupted by civil unrest and war. The length of the metre was crucial because all the other measurements of volume, weight and surface area were derived from it. For example, a
tonne
was the weight of a cubic metre of water, consisting of a thousand litres, which each weighed precisely one kilogram. The system was decimal (that is, based on factors of ten). Prefixes denoting quantities were uniform for measures of mass, length and volume;
kilo,
meaning a thousand, was taken from Greek. The system became official in 1795, although with a temporary estimate of the metre, since they needed three more years to measure the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona (the surveyors ended up with an error of three kilometres). Then it took France another forty-five years to overcome entrenched customs and make the new system mandatory for daily life.

This modernizing spirit was less successful with the Republican calendar. In their desire to blank-slate everything, the revolutionaries decided to get rid of the Gregorian calendar, with its religious undertones that included pagan and Christian names for days, months and celebrations. While they were at it, they decided to make the calendar decimal. The new calendar still had twelve months of thirty days each (plus five or six supplementary days at the end of the year), but the weeks had ten days and the days had ten hours of a hundred minutes each.