La Langue partagée : écrits et paroles d'oc 1700–1789 de Jean-François Courouau (review)

In this book Jean-François Courouau manages a successful collaboration between six scholars, based mainly in Toulouse, evaluating the use of Occitan as a vehicle for literary expression in the eighteenth century. The research is grounded in a thorough trawl through the archives and libraries of southern France, which produced a rich harvest of Occitan texts in manuscript and printed-book form. This period of Occitan literary history, falling as it does between the literary renaissances inspired by Pierre Godolin (1580–1649) and by Frédérique Mistral (1830–1914), is usually seen as one of decadence and decline. The authors accept that, apart from Jean-Baptiste Fabre's Historia de Jean-l'anprès (first performed 1754, translated A. Troubat (Paris: Liseaux, 1877)) and Cassanéa de Mondonville's opera libretto Daphnis et Alcimadure (first performed 1754 (Paris: Veuve Delormel et fils, 1756)), literary output at this time rarely transcended the immediate and local. The approach they adopt, therefore, is that of the cultural and social historian, generating a wealth of interesting details about contemporary vernacular culture. Courouau considers the century's output in poetry and prose; Philippe Gardy looks at the theatre; Xavier Bach and Pierre-Joan Bernard sacred and secular song; and Jean-Christophe Maillard cantata and opera. In his concluding chapter Courouau assesses the extent to which there existed an Occitan literary community at this time and decides that the different genres and sub-genres each appealed to different sub-sets of Occitan society. In the absence of a single literary capital, loose networks of 'consumers' and 'producers' of literature coalesced around the various urban centres of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony. In this regard, it would have been helpful for the index to have contained place-names as well as personal names. David Fabié's survey of dictionaries and grammars of Occitan seems out of place in this literary programme, but it nevertheless informs the fundamental sociolinguistic problem with which the authors are wrestling throughout the book: the status of the Occitan language. The fate of Occitan in the face of the rising standard language in France is not without parallel in the history of Lalland Scots and standard English. However, whereas the relationship between Lalland Scots and English is normally portrayed as being that of a 'standard with dialects', Courouau sees that between Occitan and French as one of diglossia. From the Occitaniste perspective, this is a conflictual relationship between a langue dominante and a langue dominée, with Occitan struggling to retain the residual features of an H language. Since French and Occitan are regarded as discrete systems, the authors play down the proximity of the two languages and the extent to which mutual intelligibility was routinely possible on the basis of ad hoc accommodation. While the phenomenon of francitan is occasionally mentioned, no space is allocated to the widespread phenomenon of dialect- or language-mixing. This oversight barely diminishes the value of what is an important contribution to the history of the literatures and languages of France.