Revel.^18 I am not going to go into the divergences between these analyses
here, or the polemics they provoked, and will rapidly summarise the main
points. Abbé Grégoire was, in a sense, the Convention’s education and culture
minister. In 1790, he sent a series of correspondents, individual or collective
(various Jacobin clubs), a questionnaire on the use of the patois in their region.
As his correspondents were spread across the whole country, we have the
first survey of the state of French in France. The result is instructive. It appears
that, of the 24 million French, 12 million did not speak the French language
at all, 8 million spoke it badly, as a second language that they had learnt, and
only 4 million (or one-sixth) spoke it fluently.^19 What the French spoke was
foreign languages (German in Alsace, Italian in Corsica, Dutch in Flanders,
Breton, Catalan: as we can see, there was still no notion of ‘regional language’);
or patois that were distinct from French (Picard or Poitevin patois, both patois
derived from langue d’oc). This linguistic division was not only geographical;
it coincided with a social division: French was spoken in towns by bourgeois
and petit-bourgeois; in the country, by aristocrats and the clergy. Patois were
therefore decidedly rural and peasant.
Abbé Grégoire’s questionnaire, which gave rise to a report on the situation
of French and the Convention’s tasks in this regard, was obviously not neutral.
The questions are slanted and various political orientations emerge: they are
hostile to patois, which are an object of concern. There were many reasons
for this. On the one hand, there was the Enlightenment universalism that
desired a united nation and people, and united in and by a language. There
was the preoccupation of the democratic statesman who wanted the laws to
be understood by all those to whom they applied. There were the concerns
of the militants of the Revolution, who, as representatives of the new, were
opposed to age-old traditions, customs and superstitions, of which patois
was the privileged vehicle: a unified language was required for the Revolution
to diffuse its ideas, to conduct propaganda. There was also the desire to
combat the hitherto dominant ideological apparatus – the Church – which,
tendering to the faithful a discourse in a language they did not understand,
188 • Chapter Seven
(^18) See Balibar and Laporte 1974 and de Certeau, Julia and Revel 1975.
(^19) These figures are from Balibar and Laporte 1974, p. 32. Dalby 2003, p. 135 gives
significantly different figures: 26 million inhabitants, 11 million French-speakers, plus
an additional 3 million who spoke French as a second language, leaving 12 million
non-French-speakers in the national territory.