L'imaginaire d’une langue nationale : l'État, les langues et l'invention du mythe de l'ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts à l'époque moderne en France

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The traditional narrative of the history of French holds up the 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts as the moment when the French state first imposed French as the national language of France. As recent scholarship has shown, however, not only did the edict contribute little to the dissemination of French — a process which was already well underway in 1539 —, its authors did not conceive of their project as an attempt to unify linguistically France. The view that Villers-Cotterêts constituted a Renaissance form of state-managed language planning is therefore a myth which came into being within a generation of François I’s death. To qualify the ordinance as a fiction is by no means to reject its utility as an object of historical analysis. Like many myths, this particular fiction is intimately bound up in the history of the object it misrepresents. The ways people have interpreted Villers-Cotterêts reflect the evolution of political ideology and of definitions of the proper relationship between the prince and language. I propose in this paper to excavate the history of the myth of Villers-Cotterêts in the early modern period. I argue that Villers-Cotterêts is an invented memory, fashioned in the sixteenth century, from humanist tropes and commonplace references to classical history, and raised up as the central explanatory framework for the history of French in the seventeenth century in order to inscribe the French language within absolutist political theory.