its anchorage in the bodies of speakers, its expressiveness. We are clearly
dealing with a primitivist myth.
But this myth allows Pasolini to offer a highly pertinent analysis of the
state of the French language just before the Revolution and during it. He asks
what the French language was composed of at the point that it became the
national language, in opposition to dialects – i.e. at the end of the ancien
régime– in a process which was to be significantly accelerated by the Revolution
and Napoleonic centralism. This situation could not but fascinate an Italian,
for whom the question of the relations between dialects and the national
language remained a topical one. French at the end of the ancien régimewas
the product of the addition of three components: a spoken component, a
spoken-written component, and ‘the language’ produced by their intersection.
The spoken component was the result of a continuum – i.e. of a historical
sedimentation: the historical continuity that runs from Latin to old French
and modern French – but also a cultural sedimentation, of superstructures
that have become antiquated – such as the culture of the burgher communes
of the Middle Ages or that of the Roman period. A kind of gravitation caused
the spoken-written culture to subside into the oral state once it was no longer
living: here we have a possible theory of cultural survivals. The spoken-
written component was composed of the various languages of superstructures
that were still active, which gave ‘the language’ its content in a concrete
historical conjuncture. The language lay at the intersection of these two
components: it inscribed royal power throughout the whole territory, which
thereby became national territory, and gave the French nation its identity.
This ‘language’ is not construed as a Saussurian system, but as a point of
contact between spoken language and the spoken-written language of the
superstructures (military, literary, scientific, religious).
What happened with the Revolution? Here, Pasolini distinguishes himself
from Stalin, for whom revolutionary change also affects the language and,
in advance, from Bourdieu, who analyses this conjuncture in terms of the
triumph of the national language over dialects. For Pasolini, the spoken
language did not change: speakers continued to speak the same language,
enriched by sedimentation from the ruins of superstructures that were no
longer contemporary (snatches of courtly language even percolated into
popular language). Here is something to gratify the good sense of Marr’s
opponents. But the language changed; the ‘social language’ characterised by
86 • Chapter Four