adapted very well to the patois when it needed to make itself understood: it
said mass in Latin and prayers in the patois. Finally, by a typical ruse of
reason, Abbé Grégoire was also the representative of the rising bourgeoisie,
a class that required an efficient, mobile army of labour for the emerging
industrial revolution: this unification via proletarianisation also took the form
of unifying the language, just like the defence of the Revolution by a conscript
army. The result of this complex set of factors, in addition to offering a snap-
shot of the linguistic state of France, was a policy of national education – the
first of the kind – which Napoleon was to implement and of which we remain
the inheritors. The objective, which was obviously not realised straightaway,
was seemingly modest: to establish in each village a teacher holding classes
in French. That glorious figure of our not so distant past – the teacher of the
Third Republic – was already planned.
So, patois was the enemy that had to be eliminated. A little over two centuries
later, it will be noted that this policy was very largely successful, even if it
took a long time to establish the institutions and apparatuses capable of
completing the task: a conscript army, courts of justice, and especially the
educational state apparatus that replaced the Church as the principal ideological
state apparatus (this is Althusser ’s thesis, which Balibar and Laporte develop).
Only the foreign ex-languages still resist, with varying degrees of success.
The situation has, it is true, become complicated with the melting-pot of the
twentieth century and the appearance on the national territory of new foreign
languages – Spanish, Portuguese, Arab. The problem of linguistic diversity
persists and, with it, the necessity of a politics of language. The language is
at the heart of the political issue that continues to haunt us – the nation: to
be convinced of this, it is enough to see the role assumed by questions of
European integration, regional decentralisation, immigration and assimilation,
and not only the issue of state schools and what they teach, in our everyday
political life. But it is clear that the ‘question of the national language’, which
refers to the imbrication of language and politics, actually names the
contradictions that make up this complex: to the progressivism of a language
that delivers the masses from the dark night of superstition and facilitates
international co-operation corresponds the linguistic nationalism that plagued
thinking about language throughout the nineteenth century and for part of
the twentieth. These contradictions were already present in exemplary fashion
at the time of Abbé Grégoire. Witness this extract from a speech by Barère
dating from 1794:
Propositions (II) • 189