We have noted that the dialect known as Low Breton, the Basque dialect,
and the German and Italian languages have prolonged the reign of fanaticism
and superstition, they have guaranteed the domination of the priests, nobles
and lawyers, they have obstructed the advances of the revolution into nine
large departments, and they are capable of favouring the enemies of
France....
Federalism and superstition speak Low Breton. Emigration and hatred of
the Revolution speak German. Counter-revolution speaks Italian. Fanaticism
speaks Basque. We must smash these tools of sabotage and delusion....
Our enemies turned French into a court language, and thus they brought
it low. It is for us to make it the language of peoples.... It is the destiny of
French, alone, to become the universal language. That ambition, however,
we leave to the genius of the French language to fulfil, as indeed it will.
For ourselves, we owe it to our fellow citizens, and we owe it to the
strengthening of the Republic, to ensure that the language in which the
Declaration of the Rights of Man is written will be spoken across the whole
territory of the Republic.^20It is clear that here we are not only dealing with the expression of a centralising
mania: a complex political struggle, in which the survival of the Republic
was at stake, but also its internationalist ambitions, is registered via the issue
of the language. But we can see that the triumph of the Rights of Man takes
the form of denying the right of the majority of the French population to
practise its mother tongue. This irony of history has frequently been repeated.
Thus, the country of liberal free choice – the USA – has shamelessly practised
a glottophagic politics that destroyed the Indian languages, whereas the USSR
of the dictatorship of the proletariat pursued, at least at the start of its existence,
a policy of protecting and developing minority languages. In 1925, the US
authorities burnt dictionaries of Chamorro, the mother tongue of the inhabitants
of the island of Guam; in the same years, cohorts of Soviet linguists were
employed providing a script for spoken languages threatened with extinction
(this is an opportunity to salute the greatest of them, Polivanov, who was
killed during Stalin’s purges).^21
Accordingly, it is clear that this stress on the question of the national
language is not exaggerated, even if, of the five thousand languages spoken
190 • Chapter Seven
(^20) Quoted in Dalby 2003, pp. 133–4.
(^21) See Dalby 2003, p. 141 and the whole of Chapter 4.