Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism

Abstract

thought). Proposals for linguistic reform might therefore have arisen in any case in a revolution committed to universal male suffrage, particularly a revolution that exposed so many other peaks and crags of the cultural landscape to the blast of political change. Furthermore, in the Year II, the Jacobin will to cultural conformity extended to many different domains (including clothing, where Gregoire again stood out in the debates); the idea of linguistic conformity fits into the pattern.'54 Still, if the engagement did not derive from religious precedents alone, in practical terms it was soon mapped onto a template inherited from centuries of religious controversy. This mapping occurred because during the revolution, the question of linguistic diversity was essentially a rural question, and the world of the peasant was still the world of the priest. The work of de Certeau, Julia, and Revel has strangely downplayed the reformers' recognition of this fact. These historians argue that Gregoire's urban, cosmopolitan correspondents, informed by the work of enlightened scholars, saw the peasants as wild and natural, almost untouched by civilization.'55 Yet it is not certain that the reformers really thought in this manner. Some of the revolutionary writings on language discussed here (including the responses to Gregoire) did indeed treat rural as a fascinating survival from a more primitive, natural past, but many others adopted the older Catholic Reformation habit of peremptorily dismissing it, not in terms of primitiveness versus civilization but of truth versus error.'56 Moreover, most of these texts prominently mention the single most important institution linking eighteenth-century peasant villages and the outside world: the church. Peasants might not have had salons and, reading societies and academies structuring their cultural lives, the way educated city-dwellers did, but, as Gregoire's correspondents readily attested, they had a curate who relayed news, told them what (if anything) to read, and possibly even made notes on their grammar and vocabulary. In a sense, he was their salon and reading society and Academie Patoise. He gave a structure to their cultural lives, and the linguistic reformers knew they could not pursue their own program without either winning 154 On revolutionary policies on dress, see Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 74-81. 155 See de Certeau, Julia, and Revel, Unepolitique de la langue, esp. de Certeau's conclusion, 155-69. 156Jacques Revel, in Forms of Expertise, traces what he sees as a shift in the interpretation of popular culture over time, from a Tridentine attempt to equate the and the erroneous in the mid-seventeenth century to a more secular, sympathetic, and curious approach to the subject by the scholars of the late eighteenth century. Yet he may have overestimated the extent of this shift. Certainly, many of the revolutionary sources discussed above-most notably, Barere's report to the Convention-display little sympathy to or curiosity about patois but instead dismiss them forthrightly as instruments of error. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1995 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.243 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:48:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms