From Barbarism to Universality: Language and Identity in Early Modern France by Christopher Coski (review)

Christopher Coski’s handsome book charts the evolution of subjective attitudes towards the French language in the early modern period. The author places particular emphasis on the process by which French shed its ‘inferiority complex’ vis-à-vis Latin and became preeminent among European vernaculars as the language of ‘universality’ and the vehicle for universal logic, as asserted most memorably by Antoine de Rivarol in his De l’universalité de la langue française of 1784. Coski’s study is, however, not a work of historical (socio)linguistics, but rather, as he puts it, ‘the study of a fiction’ that focuses on a French ‘myth’ of language and identity. In keeping with this focus, Coski’s preferred method is that of a close reading of extracts from his chosen authors — Du Bellay, Montaigne, Descartes, Vaugelas, Condillac, and Rivarol himself — that enables him to tease out the ideological and philosophical implications of their discussions of questions of language and individual and collective identity, and of the relationship between expression, thought, and reality. Indeed, the novelty of Coski’s approach lies in its conscious juxtaposition of analysis of instrumental metalinguistic comment as practised by Du Bellay, Vaugelas, and Rivarol with the philosophical speculation of Montaigne, Descartes, and Condillac. Such juxtaposition enables Coski to make a valuable contribution to both the history of metalinguistic comment in France and the history of ideas; where the approach seems less helpful, however, is in its apparently uncritical use of terms borrowed from art history to differentiate, for instance, between the ‘baroque’ mind and language of Montaigne and the ‘classical’ mind advocated by Descartes. At other times, Coski seems to want to keep his material at arm’s length, as when he feels the need to pass explicit judgement on the ‘absurd’, ‘ridiculous’, and ‘offensive’ ideas espoused by Rivarol without allowing his readers to reach this (entirely reasonable) judgement themselves. A dimension of the study that would benefit from further development is the intriguing parallel between the status of French as an international language in the age of Rivarol and the hegemony of Global English today, which Coski seems to hint at in his introduction but which is not directly addressed in his short conclusion. Despite this missed opportunity, however, Coski’s book has much to offer both historians of the French language and historians of ideas, not least a series of fresh readings of canonical authors and philosophers situated within a cogent diachronic framework.