Free The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow Page B

the career of Michel de Montaigne shows. Montaigne was the son of a fishmonger turned nobleman who lived in Périgord, east of Bordeaux, who wanted to consolidate his new rank through the proper education of baby Michel. Normally the younger Montaigne’s mother tongue would have been Gascon, a langue d’oc spoken in Aquitaine. But when he started to speak, his father hired a German tutor, giving him orders to speak to the child only in Latin—in fact, the whole household used Latin. As a result of his intensive immersion program, the young Michel de Montaigne spoke fluent Latin at age six—a skill that left him bored for the rest of his school years while his schoolmates struggled to catch up with him. While rare, Montaigne’s Latin immersion remained the ideal scenario, and it produced the desired result: social promotion. He grew up to become mayor of Bordeaux and a special agent to King Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV.
    When Montaigne began his literary career, he chose to write neither in Latin nor in Gascon, but in French, creating a whole new genre of literature. Considered one of the leading lights of Renaissance writing, on a par with Machiavelli and Erasmus, Montaigne invented the personal essay. He is the first example of a writer using literary introspection to create a mental portrait of himself. In Les Essais ( Essays ), which he published in 1580 at the age of forty-eight, he describes his feelings, his physical appearance, even his bowel movements, and speculates about the merits of love “in the manner of the Greeks.” His famous phrase explaining his friendship with the scholar La Boétie—“ Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi ” (“Because it was him, because it was me”)—emphasized the new centrality of human experience, and is still frequently quoted. Shakespeare quoted one of his essays (“On Cannibals”) in The Tempest. Montaigne’s approach and writing are so contemporary in style that it is possible to read them in the original without annotations.
    But Latin remained the language of scholarly domains such as theology and philosophy. Students caught speaking French at the University of Paris in the 1620s were flogged. In 1637, nearly a century after Du Bellay’s manifesto and the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, philosopher René Descartes (1596–1659) was the first to publish a philosophical treatise in French, the famous Discours de la méthode ( Discourse on Method ). Descartes sought to unify all knowledge under a single mathematical principle. He invented coordinate geometry, and his contributions to physics methodology and metaphysics were invaluable. The extended preface of his book, which explains his method—based on doubt—is a classic of philosophy; that’s where his famous formula “ Je pense donc je suis ” (“I think, therefore I am”) appears. Yet, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, Descartes felt he needed to justify his choice of French over Latin, since many erudite circles still regarded French as too vulgar for science:
If I write in French, which is the tongue of my country, rather than Latin, which is the tongue of my preceptors, it is because I hope that those who use their natural and pure sense of reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who only believe old books; and to those who join good sense with study, whom I prefer to have as judges, they will not be, I hope, so partial to Latin that they will refuse to hear my reasonings because they are expressed in popular language.
    Although Descartes switched back to Latin for his next two philosophical books, Metaphysical Meditations and The Principles of Philosophy, he had broken the ice by using French. In fact, he and his contemporaries had made a major contribution to the language. They had done the groundwork that prepared for the next stage in the evolution of French: the creation of the Académie française, the French Academy.

Chapter 3 ~
The Dawn of