Rousseau and the Democratization of Language in the French Revolution

Rousseau and the DemocratizationzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ of Language in the French Revolution C A R O L B L U M Two separate b utultimately complementary manifestations of Rous­ seau’s “democratization” of language appeared during the French Revo­ lution: one forcing the admission of popular language into the preserves of “upper French,” the other redefining fundamental political vocabulary in order to discredit the monarchy and to serve a new, wider-based polity.1 The French which the Academie franchise was founded to purify and protect was the language of an ascendant class; its nature hierarchical, its fortunes bound to those of an absolute monarchy. Behind this manda­ rin tongue stood another, still more rarified and difficult of access: Latin. A command of Latin and upper French bore witness to the essential su­ periority of the aristocrat and the existential achievements of the success­ ful bourgeois. Upper French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries eschewed words that evoked “the village,” the “old-fashioned,” and the “lowly”; le village, le vieux, et le bas. Not only was the purity of language policed, its very utterance required royal permission. The Comedie franQaise alone was privileged to present actors who spoke the French lan­ guage on stage; the abundant popular theatrical performances of the Fairs, especially the Foire St. Germain, were officially denied the word although their mutism was infringed by ingenious subterfuges.2 Upper French for the upper classes, lowly French for the rabble: one language expressed the mind, the other gave voice to the body. Yet this neat distinction clearly reflected not reality but ideology. The French aristocrat or educated bourgeois was not ignorant of the plebs’ pungent 309 310 / BLUM monosyllabic vocabulary; he was, in fact, the possessor of two French languages, the upper, reserved for him and his peers in texts and discourse consonant with the official world, and the lower, which served him as amusement, as vehicle for the unseemly, as a play tongue in which he could momentarily suspend an onerous dignity. At the great fair spectacles demos and elite were joyfully confounded. Nothing was better tone than a parodic mastery of lowly French by an exemplary upper Frenchman. Thus not long after her husband’s solemn coronation as King of France and of Navarre by the Grace of God, MarieAntoinette invited the market-women from Les Halles to come to Ver­ sailles so that she could imitate their accent for a part she was playing in a dialect comedy, fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA une piece poissarde? As in white America’s long affection for black minstrel and “coon” songs, the lowly was delectable provided it remained below; the head called upon the body but reciprocal visits were discouraged. The great literary genres were insulated against the rising stink of the nether parts by a fine fabric of rules, conventions, and usages. Edmund Burke held that the germinal events of France’s Revolution were as much linguistic as political and social. The great “words” of Western civilization, as Burke described them, were being systematically emptied of their ancient, traditional meanings, and refilled with false and arbitrary ones. In what Steven Blakemore called “regicide and logocide,” Burke linked the demise of the old sign with the physical death of the thing signified.4 Burke’s point is well illustrated by the word “souverain” as it was understood before Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political works, by the Encyclopedists, and after, by Revolutionaries. The Encyclopedists, cognizant of and exploiting the phenomenon Burke signaled, had defined “souverain” in its traditional way, that is, as the per­ son invested with power by the nation. Sovereigns were those individuals “a qui la volonte des peuples a confere le pouvoir necessaire pour gouverner la societe. L’homme, dans la nature, ne connait point de souver­ ain; chaque individu est egal a un autre ... il n’est pas dans cet etat d’autre subordination que celle des enfans a leur pere. Un souverain, quelque absolu qu’il soit, n’est point en droit de toucher aux loix constitutives.” The Encyclopedic definition of a constitutional patriarchal sovereign was underscored by an anecdote: “Le chevalier Temple disait a Charles II, qu’un roi d’Angleterre qui est l’homme de son peuple...