Le Grand Concours: 'Dissertation sur les causes de l'universalité de la langue française et la durée vraisemblable de son empire' (review)

Every undergraduate knows, we hope, about Rivarol's victory in the Berlin Academy's competition of 1784 and his epigram on French clarity. Less well known is that he shared the laurels with Johann Christoph Schwab, a Leibnizian professor from Stuttgart, and Schwab's dissertation is edited here in its French translation by Denis Robelot, an émigré priest working in 1803. By comparison with these two worthies, Rivarol is made to look small, an adventurer of letters whose superficial brilliance covers insecure facts and a failure to answer the Academy's tripartite question. Schwab, by contrast, writes at twice the length because he quotes sources and subjects the question to a thorough examination, seeking explanations for the French linguistic hegemony in a wide range of political, cultural, pedagogical and structural factors. Where Rivarol fails to address the future of this hegemony, Schwab considers the prospects for English, for which he predicts great things, and his native German, which has little hope despite the contemporary flourishing of German culture of which he is part. Although its literary merits are modest, Schwab's text is well worthy of a modern edition for the light it throws on many themes, including, among others, the status of the French language in Germany at the end of Frederick the Great's reign, ways of analysing language in the period preceding the birth of modern linguistics, notions of literary taste, the interaction of the political and the cultural and the self-image of Germany in the generation preceding Goethe and Kant, whom Schwab did not like. Robelot's scrupulous translation adds an extra dimension, with its discreet critical apparatus questioning some of Schwab's judgements and its tendentious addendum on French in the Middle Ages which fails to match Schwab's scholarship. There is also the question of its date. By 1803 Schwab's francophilia had been tempered by the Revolution, and he and Robelot, cautious moderates both, share a concern with the subsequent re-establishment of order in the French world; both writers therefore view the text in a different light from the way Schwab viewed it in 1784. Freeman G. Henry's edition ably sets all this in context and offers a substantial and instructive introduction, explaining the institutional background of the Berlin Academy and Frederick's role in it and comparing the approaches of writer, rival and translator. There are rather too many misprints, and the introduction is not supplemented by editorial footnotes, which is perhaps a pity, as this text will be read as a testimony of its age rather than as an intrinsic masterpiece, and an even more ambitious critical apparatus offering further pointers into contemporary debates would have been of great value. However, it would have led to an unwieldy volume, and it would be churlish to complain; Henry has done enough to demonstrate his command of the field and the interest and importance of his subject. His work will deservedly stand as a starting point for much future study.