The Place of Words: The Académie Française and Its Dictionary During an Age of Revolution by Michael P. Fitzsimmons (review)

Dictionaries are products of consensus. That consensus can arise from evidence, as when research about a word’s use is based on many examples, and the wording of definitions is often changed during the editorial process for accuracy, clarity, and length. A different kind of consensus relies instead on the collective opinion of a group for the treatment of each word, which has been the procedure of the Académie Française for nearly 400 years.

Most dictionary users are unlikely to register the difference between an approach based on evidence and one based on expertise. Users don’t want theory, they want practicality: they are seeking the authority of a dictionary, real or perceived, for answers to questions about words. Authority is the subject of The Place of Words: The Académie Française and Its Dictionary During an Age of Revolution by Michael P. Fitzsimmons. A historian of the tumultuous decades before and after 1800 in France, Fitzsimmons delves deeply into the many intersections of politics and language in this absorbing study.

Just as there are different kinds of linguistic consensus, there are different kinds of linguistic authority. The initial authority discussed is that by which the Académie itself was created. Originally something of a literary salon, it was soon granted official status by Cardinal Richelieu and was formally established in 1635. French was in those years by no means the only language spoken in France, and the early goals of the dictionary project were to encourage the use of French both within France and abroad, to establish fixed rules for its spelling and grammar—based expressly on the prestige dialect of the elite—and even to secure its status as a successor to Latin as a universal language for learned writings.

The project began in 1639 with high hopes and royal support. However, progress proved to be disappointingly slow. The inefficiency of the undertaking was underscored by the private project of one Academician, Antoine Furetière, who began working on his own dictionary and was subsequently expelled from the Académie for this challenge to their authority. The resulting scandal, known as the querelle des dictionnaires ‘feud of the dictionaries’, raised questions about who was to control information about language: If the essential promise of the Académie’s dictionary was to be useful to the people of France, was it right to stifle private enterprises with similar goals? In the end, Furetière’s dictionary was published in 1690, after his own death but before the appearance of the Académie’s dictionary. Worse, when the latter was finally published in 1694, Louis XIV let it be known that he preferred Furetière’s work. Perhaps mercifully, none of the original members of the Académie was alive to hear that.

While this first edition of the Académie’s dictionary was arranged mostly alphabetically, etymologically related terms were defined at the base or root word. Thus, for example, désarmer ‘disarm’ and gendarme ‘soldier, policeman’ can both be found at armer ‘to arm’ rather than alphabetically in the letters D and G, respectively.

Detailing the revisions made for the subsequent editions of 1718, 1740, and 1762, Fitzsimmons provides some insight into the Académie’s editorial process. Arguments about proposed changes had the effect of paralyzing progress, and enlightened suggestions for streamlining went unheeded. Some of the efforts made to instill discipline in the body seem comical, such as an early suggestion for issuing tokens redeemable for cash to individual members who would deign to assemble for two whole hours per week. At times, the Académie seems to have behaved like a group of the vainglorious pedants lampooned in the plays of Molière (who was himself pointedly passed over for membership). Other details of these revisions mark...