Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Why did French gain such an association with high culture in Europe, especially spreading eastward? The fundamental reason was the growth of France’s population and agricultural wealth; the rich of France could afford the best, and their taste was influential. [138]France was the most densely populated country in medieval and early modern Europe, and so tended to set the standard for the rest. French became the business language of European merchants. And the same principle of geographical centrality that had made Paris the crossroads of France made France itself the crossroads of west European Christendom. In 1164 John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas à Becket: ‘I took a detour by Paris. When I saw the abundance of foods, the happiness of the people, the consideration accorded to the clergy, the majesty and glory of the whole Church, the diverse activities of the philosophers, I thought I was seeing, filled with admiration, Jacob’s ladder, its top touching the sky and angels passing up and down upon it.’ [608]

This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. France remained the richest and most populous country in Europe; its geographical advantages simply could not be challenged until the power base of European politics spread beyond western Europe. Certainly, the cultural predominance of French was shaken by the rise of the Italian city-states in the fifteenth-century Renaissance, and by the sixteenth-century Reformation, since the French king chose to associate France resolutely with the Catholic Church. France itself ceased to be the centre of the action for a time, yet the Reformation prompted many influential French speakers to flee eastward: Huguenots, the French Protestants, took up residence in the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, and there was an explosion of French-language publishing, especially just over the border in the Netherlands. The Reformation added to the French language’s eastward momentum as a language of culture.

In the seventeenth century, French power and influence in Europe reached their height, during the long reigns of Louis XIII, 1610-43, and of Louis XIV, the famed Roi Soleil , ‘Sun King’, 1643-1715. Increasingly complacent, France began to reflect on its own cultural attributes. As all nations do when they enjoy pre-eminence, the French began to look for some particular virtues that could explain their success. Increasingly, they saw evidence of excellence in their language itself. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, founded the Académie Franαaise in 1635, with a concern that transcended the practical: by its statutes its principal function was ‘to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.

This was a new step in language consciousness, the world’s first academy dedicated to the care of a language. [139]The particular concern of the French for accuracy and concision was crystallised at the time. In fact, the article of the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539 which enjoined the use of French had been immediately preceded by one that required clarity of expression in court judgments: they were to be ‘done and written so clearly that there would not be, nor could be, any ambiguity or uncertainty, nor place to ask for interpretation’. Now in 1637 the already famous philosopher René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode. One notable feature of this work was that it was written in French, rather than Latin, acting perhaps in the radical spirit of the academy’s statutes. Descartes was not willingly a revolutionary; indeed, one of his maxims in the Discours was to ‘follow the most moderate opinions and those most remote from excess as were commonly received in practice by the most sensible of those he lived with’, and ‘change his desires rather than the order of the world’. [609]But here, at the heart of the European intellectual debate, he proposed that knowledge must be founded exclusively on clear and distinct ideas. [610]Abolishing the need for divine revelation, this approach was new and radical, and came to be seen as quintessentially French. [140]It is often held to mark the beginning of modern philosophy and modern science, even if for Descartes, playing it safe as ever, it left all practical matters of faith and morals unchanged.

And the French belief in their linguistic advantages soon came to be shared by others not so fortunate. Descartes’ great successor Leibniz (1646-1716), though a German from Leipzig, wrote all his major works in French. The intellectual superiority of French culture had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be read widely by the elite, one simply had in these days to write in French.

In the late seventeenth century, French culture, especially its classic dramatists Corneille, Racine and Molière, enjoyed a vogue throughout Europe, and Versailles set the standard everywhere for court style and etiquette. Novels in French were everywhere a favourite amusement for rich young ladies. It was especially in the areas of Europe with least cultural self-confidence that the elite set a high value on fluency in French: Sweden, Poland and above all Russia, where starting in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) French became established as the language of polite society. Voltaire, the great wit of the age, rejoiced famously that there were French speakers in Astrakhan, and French language teachers in Moscow. [611]In Tolstoy’s War and Peace , a novel whose action is set in the following generation, substantial parts of the dialogue, including the opening lines, [141]are written—presumably for realism—not in Russian but in French.

It was in this period that French also replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy, giving it another link with elegance and influence. By 1642 Richelieu’s government had been corresponding in French with most of their northerly neighbours: but Spain, Italy and Switzerland had kept up resistance to it, preferring their own languages. In the second half of that century, in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire (whose domestic language was German), the French gradually presuaded them to shift the language of communication from Latin to French. In the next century, from the Treaty of Rastatt in 1712, the two sides switched to French exclusively. Treaties came to be written in French, even by powers with no direct French connections. The Danes used it for their traité de commerce de Copenhague in 1691, and the Russians and Ottoman Turks in the terms of their 1774 peace made at Küαük Kainarca (now Kaynarja in Bulgaria). [612]The general popularity of France itself evidently took a dive after Napoleon’s attempts in the early nineteenth century to conquer the whole of Europe, but French ceased to play its general intermediary role only in the twentieth century, ironically at Versailles itself, when during the 1919 peace conference held after the First World War the Americans and the British insisted on working in their own language, and so ensured that the treaty was drafted and published in both French and English.

What of le franšais d’ outre-mer , French overseas? Developments here were very different from the steady, and sturdy, spread of French round Europe through which it became, almost by spontaneous acclaim, the prestige language for elites. The projection of French overseas was very much a result of royal policy.

The policy came in two fits of colonial expansion directed by the French king, punctuated by comprehensive defeat and deflation in the second half of the eighteenth century. These fits of expansion were both extremely ambitious—in 1714, and again in 1914, France held the second-largest colonial empire by land area in the world [142]—but, aside from the sugar barons’ domain in the Caribbean, each of them produced only one territory that was to attract substantial French immigration: Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Algeria in the nineteenth. In neither case was France, or its settlers, long able to retain political control; and so French imperialism has been more like Dutch in its linguistic effects than any of its other European competitors. That is to say, the French language has persisted only where its settlers have retained a solid identity and a large population, even under foreign (specifically British) domination: French has survived and grown in Canada, just as Dutch (of a kind) has remained strong in South Africa. The situation in Algeria is clouded by politics. [143]But in the other colonies the French language has survived, if at all, as a lingua franca for the elite.