The politics of language: Republican values and Breton identity

Abstract

Among other things, the revolutionary period in France is notorious for two practices: the development of a civil religion and a project of linguistic standardization. The substitution of republican for religious symbols, the creation of public space for republican worship, the hostility towards intermediary bodies, all of this sought to ground a more direct relationship between the citizen and the republic. At the same time, the new order sought to consolidate its control of the church. An oath of loyalty to the republic was required from priests, as part of a plan to make priests functionaries of the state. The protest evoked, and its association with counterrevolution, however, produced equivocation on the part of regimes until the Concordat, which acknowledged the place of Catholicism in French society, without providing official recognition as the state religion, and which sought to monitor the activity of the clergy.