Aspects de la didactique du Latin au XIXe siècle en France et échos de sa réception par les élèves

Abstract

We have chosen in this article on the teaching of Latin in France in the nineteenth century to tackle the Latin essays in verse, which students then had to write from the age of fourteen, a practice which was only suppressed in 1880. To help them in this task, the young versifiers could make use of two types of books: poetical dictionaries, the so-calledGradus ad Parnassum, and Latin prosodies. The Gradus provided for each word the words they occur with (their collocations), their synonyms, as well as circumlocutions and, in each case, indications of syllable length. The prosodies offered, in addition to the rules of versification, a great variety of graded exercises meant to teach students how to write all sorts of poems. We have focused on three prosodies that were in common use for several decades and had numerous re-editions and reprints. The artificiality and the drudgery of such writing tasks in the form of hexameters or distichs, for example, could but put students off, even those who were most successful at it. We have found echoes in the writings of Stendhal and of Jules Valles, among others, of the hours spent laboriously writing Latin poems on subjects as anecdotical as “the drowning of a fly in a bowl of milk” or “the death of a parrot”.