Free The Discovery of France by Graham Robb Page B

For the next seven weeks, France would be governed by the guillotine. But the Abbé Henri Grégoire had more serious matters on his mind. Four years before, he had sent a questionnaire to town halls all over France on the subject of patois. (‘Patois’ was the derogatory term for dialects other than the official state idiom in its standard form. According to the Encyclopédie , it meant ‘Corrupt language as spoken in almost all the provinces. . . . “Language” proper is spoken only in the capital.’) The key questions were these: Did the people of the region have their own patois? Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths? Were the country people patriotic? and, most importantly of all, How could their patois be destroyed?
    The Abbé Grégoire was not a linguistic terrorist. He had campaigned for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty; he called for Jews to be given full citizenship and tried to save national treasures from revolutionary ‘vandalism’ (the word ‘vandalism’ was his invention). He wanted to cover the country with libraries and schools, but none of this would be possible, he believed, without a common tongue. Without a national language, there could be no nation.
    Grégoire himself came from a poor family in Lorraine. He knewthat an ignorant, divided population was easily exploited. To his ears, patois was the voice of superstition and subservience. As a fellow revolutionary put it, linguistic diversity was ‘one of the sturdiest flying-buttresses of despotism’. The government had already spent a small fortune having its decrees translated into Catalan, Basque, Breton, Provençal and Alsatian, but the only lasting solution, in Grégoire’s mind, was to silence those ancient tongues for good.
    Replies to the questionnaire had straggled in from representatives, mayors, lawyers, clerics and a semi-literate farmer from Brittany. From some regions – Picardy, the centre of France, much of the Auvergne and most of Brittany – there was no response, either because no one had the necessary information or because no one cared about the incomprehensible jabbering of peasants. But there was enough to give the Abbé Grégoire a clearer view of the fragmented nation than anyone before.
    The Abbé Grégoire’s report on ‘The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language’ painted an alarming picture of a land that was still festering in medieval ignorance. The fringes of France were already known to be dominated by languages quite different from French: Basque, Breton, Flemish and Alsatian. But the two Romanic languages that covered most of the country – French in the north, Occitan in the south – also turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects. In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French.’ In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky.
    The reports confirmed the Abbé’s fears. Peasants in the Armagnac were ‘too ignorant to be patriotic’. News of important events and government decrees left the capital on the broad river of French only to run aground in the muddy creeks of patois. A landowner from Montauban found the same startling ignorance in the Quercy: thepeasants might talk of Revolution and the Constitution, but when they are asked whose cause they support, ‘they answer without hesitation, “the King’s”.’ If there were people who thought that the King was