The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  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 still alive and on the throne, how could they be taught the principles of liberty and equality?

  As the replies came in, the republican vision of a united country began to look like the fantasy of a small Parisian elite. Large parts of France were barely French at all. Foreign visitors often claimed to find Latin more useful than French. On the borders, speakers of Spanish and Italian had never bothered to learn French because their own languages were easily understood by their neighbours. Further north, in areas like the Limousin, where two major language groups coincide – French and Occitan – a muddled lingua franca had evolved. ‘French-speaking’ peasants had to be persuaded to revert to patois for the sake of clarity. ‘Such disorder reigns that the prayer recited by fathers when the family is together at evening can be understood only by the Supreme Being.’

  Worse still, it appeared that ‘patois’ was not confined to the countryside and was not spoken only by peasants. The town of Salins (now Salins-les-Bains) was divided into north and south by a language barrier. The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: ‘The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own.’ In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and ‘felt ill at ease’ when speaking French. If certain quartiers of Paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers.

  The information was uneven and incomplete, but there was enough to show – or so it seemed to the Abbé – that the nation was in a fragile state. The land of liberty appeared to be a body composed of ancient, decaying limbs with feeble connections to the brain. The Ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 had made the dialect of Paris and the Île-de-France, now known as French, the language of official documents. Other forms of French that had once been dominant – Normand, Picard and Champenois – were relegated to the status of dialects. Similar decrees were enacted after the annexation of various territories: Flanders, Alsace, Roussillon, Lorraine and Corsica. But no one had ever tried to change the language of the masses. The Abbé’s survey was a revelation. According to his estimate, more than six million French citizens were completely ignorant of the national language. Another six million could barely conduct a conversation in it. While French was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French-speakers (11 percent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly. The official idiom of the French Republic was a minority language. ‘In liberty, we are the advance-guard of nations. In language, we are still at the Tower of Babel.’

  Compared to later linguistic purges (see p. 325), the Abbé Grégoire’s proposals for flattening the Tower of Babel were remarkably gentle: hasten the processes by which people were induced to learn French (build more roads and canals, and disseminate news and agricultural advice); pay particular attention to the Celtic and ‘barbarian’ fringes where counter-revolution was rife (the Basque Country, Brittany and Alsace); above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

  With the Revolution burning its way into the ancient forest of languages, it must have seemed that the whole nation would soon be speaking with one voice. But the biggest surprises were yet to come. The Abbé’s figures are almost certainly an underestimate. Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the communes in fifty-three out of eighty-nine départements were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). In some parts, prefects, doctors, priests and policemen were like colonial officials, baffled by the natives and forced to use interpreters.

  The Abbé Grégoire would have been appalled, but he might have been consoled or at least intrigued by the more complex truth that was beginning to emerge. His attempt to undermine the Tower of Babel had uncovered the first clear signs of a cultural division more profound and lasting than political unity.

  *

  AT THE TIME, it was far from obvious that the muddle of dialects might be one of the keys to the identity of France. The Abbé’s expedition into the linguistic hinterland shows how little was known about these languages. Before – and long after – his report, dialects were treated by the French-speaking elite as deviant forms of French. A few poets and scholars treasured them as historical curios – the ‘troubadour’ languages of Provence and Languedoc, the ‘old French’ of Normandy and proletarian Paris, the ‘prehistoric’ mother-tongues of Basque and Breton – but to most educated people, dialect was just a humorous or irritating inconvenience, a peasant’s ruse to cheat the traveller and to laugh at his expense.

  As the Abbé pointed out, the National Convention itself was a little Babel of regional accents. However, the representatives were educated men who owed their advancement in part to their knowledge of French. Any other dialect was likely to be seen as a corrupt and ancient idiom. Standard French had been tamed and regulated, notably by the French Academy. The size of the Academy’s official dictionary (about fifteen thousand words, compared to forty thousand in Furetière’s dictionary of 1690) showed its determination to eradicate the rabble of synonyms, onomatopoeias and vulgarities. French was supposed to be a product of the rational mind, a beautiful estate carved out of a jungle of strange sounds and obscenities. Dialects were seen as natural excrescences of the landscape. The nineteenth-century Larousse encyclopedia described the Limousin dialect as the audible form of peasant apathy (too many diminutives and words of one syllable). The Poitevin dialect had ‘a rough quality, like the soil’. In Bourg d’Oisans, in the Alpine Écrins massif,

  the language is slow, heavy and unfigurative, due to the inhabitants’ physical and moral ill health and the nature of the country, which is covered with high, barren mountains.

  Words for ‘gibberish’ still reflect this political-linguistic geography: charabia (from charabiat, a migrant worker from the Auvergne), baragouin (from the Breton bara, ‘bread’, and gwin, ‘wine’) or ‘parler comme une vache espagnole’ (the ‘cow’ was originally a ‘Basque’).

  By the time of the Revolution, most dialects had no written form. For those that did, spelling was largely a matter of individual choice. Dictionaries of regional languages were rarely taken seriously, even by their authors. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they were presented as manuals for provincials who wanted to speak correctly and not sound ridiculous when they went to Paris. A bilingual French–Comtois dictionary (the language of Besançon and the Franche-Comté) was written in 1753 by Marie-Marguerite Brun ‘to help my compatriots to reform their language’. A popular work on the language of Lyon (fourth edition, 1810) was titled Bad Language and addressed to those ‘who are not fortunate enough to live in a select society’. Even the great French–Languedocian dictionary compiled by Boissier de Sauvages (1785) advertised itself as ‘A Collection of the Principal Errors Made in Diction and in French Pronunciation by the Inhabitants of the Southern Provinces’.

  Though the words themselves proved the wealth and vitality of ‘patois’ and the impoverishment of official, academic French, they were treated as a natural resourc
e to be plundered by the dominant language. Dialect terms such as ‘affender’ (to share a meal with an unexpected visitor), ‘aranteler’ (to sweep away spiders’ webs), ‘carioler’ (to cry out while giving birth), ‘carquet’ (a secret place between breast and corset), ‘river’ (to strip off leaves by running one’s hand along a branch) and a thousand other useful gems were like trophies brought back from foreign parts and cleansed of their original context. None of them were admitted to the dictionary of the French Academy. When linguistically omnivorous writers like Balzac used dialect words in their published works, they were accused of sullying the language of civilization.

  The world to which these words belonged would not be fully charted until the twentieth century. In most people’s minds – if they gave the matter any thought – the map of languages had more spaces than contemporary maps of Africa. Educated travellers were constantly amazed to find that their French was quite useless.

  I was never able to make myself understood by the peasants I met along the way. I spoke to them in French; I used the patois of my region; I tried speaking to them in Latin, but all in vain. Finally, when I was tired of talking without being understood, they spoke to me in turn using a language which I found completely incomprehensible.

  This was written by a priest from the Provençal Alps travelling in the Limagne region of the Auvergne in the late 1770s. Similar accounts can be found from the Ancien Régime to the First World War. The disorientation of Jean Racine, when he found himself linguistically stranded in Provence in 1661, was a common experience in some parts of France even two centuries later. Racine wrote to his friend La Fontaine about a trip to his uncle’s home in Uzès, fifteen miles north of Nîmes. (This was several years before he wrote the plays that would be hailed as the purest expression of classical French.)

  By the time I reached Lyon, the local language was already becoming incomprehensible, and so was I. This misfortune increased at Valence, and God so willed it that when I asked a maid for a chamber-pot, she put a warming-pan in my bed. But it’s even worse in this pays. I swear to you that I need an interpreter as much as a Muscovite would need one in Paris.

  A few days later, he told another correspondent, ‘I cannot understand the French of this region and no one can understand mine.’

  If an educated man with relatives in Provence was unable to order a chamber-pot in Valence, was effectively illiterate further south and failed even to identify the language he was hearing, it is no wonder that ‘France’ sometimes seemed a rather abstract concept.

  *

  WITH A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY satellite image of the languages of France, it is easy to see that the language Racine heard at his uncle’s home was not a form of French at all. Long before reaching Uzès, he had crossed the great divide between the northern oïl or French languages and the southern oc or Occitan languages (so named in the Middle Ages after the words for ‘yes’). It was not until 1873 that a heroic two-man expedition began to trace the frontier of Oïl and Oc by interviewing hundreds of people in tiny villages. It covered one-third of the distance from the Atlantic to the Alps before one of the explorers died and the other lost an eye. Until then, the line was commonly supposed to follow the river Loire. In fact, it runs much further south, from the tip of the Gironde estuary, along the northern edge of the Massif Central, through a narrow mixed zone known as the ‘Croissant’ (crescent), which includes Limoges, Guéret and Vichy. About forty-five miles before the Rhône valley, Oc and Oïl are separated by a third Romanic group of dialects known, confusingly, as Francoprovençal. (Provençal itself belongs to the Occitan group.) The languages of Oïl, Oc and Francoprovençal together account for about 94 percent of the territory.10

  At his uncle’s home in Uzès, Racine found himself four branches away from French. He was in the realm of Occitan, in the area dominated by Provençal – specifically, Rhodanian (Rhône) Provençal, comprising five main dialects, one of which was the dialect spoken in Uzès.

  This much was known, at least to scholars, by the end of the nineteenth century. About fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects had been identified, belonging to four distinct language groups: Romanic (French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Catalan and the Italic languages spoken in Corsica and along the Italian border); Germanic (Flemish, Frankish and Alsatian); Celtic (Breton); and an isolated group, Euskaric (Basque). Many more were unknown or unrecognized. Shuadit or Judeo-Provençal was a separate language spoken by Jews in the Papal enclave of Vaucluse. It became extinct in 1977 and survives only in liturgical texts. Zarphatic or Judeo-French was spoken in the Moselle and the Rhineland until the Second World War. The last speakers died in concentration camps. The Iberian gypsy language Caló had two main forms in France – Basque and Catalonian – but little was known about the people, let alone their language.

  Even if a place was known to outsiders, its language might remain a secret. The Pyrenean village of Aas, at the foot of the Col d’Aubisque, above the spa town of Eax-Bonnes, had its own whistling language which was unknown even in the neighbouring valleys until it was mentioned on a television programme in 1959. Shepherds who spent the summer months in lonely cabins had evolved an ear-splitting, hundred-decibel language that could be understood at a distance of up to two miles. It was also used by the women who worked in the surrounding fields and was apparently versatile enough in the early twentieth century to convey the contents of the local newspaper. Its last known use was during the Nazi Occupation, when shepherds helped Jewish refugees, Résistants and stranded pilots to cross the border into Spain. A few people in Aas today remember hearing the language, but no one can reproduce the sounds and no recordings were ever made. If such a remarkable language escaped detection, many other quieter dialects must have died out before they could be identified.

  *

  THE KNOWN DIALECTS of France can all be placed precisely on the tree of languages – even the whistling language of Aas, which was based on the local Bearnese dialect. Naturally, to a cross-country traveller who leapt from one branch to the next, the effect was obscurity and chaos. The title of this chapter lists some of the major forms of ‘yes’ in clockwise order, starting with Provence and ending with Savoy. But even this is a simplification. In mid-nineteenth-century Brittany, a person who walked the five miles from Carnac to Erdeven could hear three distinct pronunciations of the word ya (‘yes’): iè, ia and io. Along the Côte d’Azur, from Menton to Mons (west of Grasse), fathers ten miles apart were called païre, père, pa, pèro and papo. As the sun travelled over the Franche-Comté, it changed its name to souleil, soulet, soulot, s’lot, soulu, sélu, slu, séleu, soureil, soureuil, sereil, s’reil and seroille.

  Writers of travel accounts and official reports revelled in the blur of local words and the incomprehensibility of peasants. Just as Romantic engravers surrounded their steeples with bats and birds of prey, they darkened the Dark Continent with tales of ignorance and isolation. Later, the impressions of the monolingual elite would be confirmed by professional linguists who identified variant forms of sub-dialects in tiny areas, sometimes in a single village and, in one case, in a single family. But these erudite descriptions gave only the faintest impression of what was after all a means of communication.

  The language landscape as it appeared to the speakers themselves was harder to describe, though some of its contours and vistas can be seen even in the earliest surveys. The Abbé Grégoire’s questionnaire was just the first of many reports from the linguistic frontier. In 1807, Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior ordered the prefects of every département to supply him with translations of the parable of the Prodigal Son into the local patois. (The story of a swineherd who returns to civilization must have seemed appropriate.) The results, in ninety different patois, predictably showed huge differences, even within the same group of dialects. The sample sequence below follows the arc of the Mediterranean, staying within forty miles of the coast, from the eastern Pyrenees to Marseille. The average distance between each phrase
is forty-six miles.

  Un home tingue dos fills. Y digue lo mes jove de ells al pare: Pare, daii me la part de be que me pertoca. (Catalonian Pyrenees)11

  Un hommé abio dous mainachés. Et lé pus joubé diguec à soun païré: Moùn païré, dounatz-mé la partido dal bé qué mé rébén. (Carcassonne)

  Un home abio dous éfans. Lous pus jouine diguet à soun péra: Moun péra, douna me la part de bostre bianda que me coumpeta. (Lodève)

  Un ome avié dous efans. Lou mendre li diguet: Paire, bailo-mi ce que deu mi reveni de toun be. (Lasalle)

  Un homé avié dous garçouns. Et lou cadè dighé à soun péro: Moun péro, beïla-mé la par que deou me révéni de vastè ben. (Nîmes)

  Un homo avié dous eufans. Lou plus jouîné diguet à soun péro: Moun péro, douna mi ce que deou mé revenir de vouestre ben. (Marseille)

  The fact that would have been obvious to the speakers of these dialects is that the similarities outnumber the differences. Mutual comprehensibility rather than isolation was the norm. The effective range of some dialects was astonishing. The ‘Friends of the Constitution’ who wrote to the Abbé Grégoire from Carcassonne noted the ‘infinite number’ of dialects in villages and towns, but they also pointed out that a person could travel twenty or thirty leagues (fifty-six or eighty-three miles) ‘and understand this multiplicity of dialects despite knowing only one of them’. In the Landes, though forms of Landais or ‘Gascon noir’ still differ from town to town, a writer from Mont-de-Marsan assured the Abbé that ‘all Gascons understand one another without interpreters, from Bayonne to deepest Languedoc’, which suggests a range of about two hundred and fifty miles.