The Need and Means to Annihilate
A Conversation on Henri Grégoire, The Counter-Revolutionary Nature of the Italian Language, and our Personal Relationship to The State
French bishop Henri Grégoire died in 1831. A radical abolitionist and a major leader in the French revolution, he left behind a will that left a large portion of his estate up to whoever could answer the questions of how to end war and racism. He stood against Napoleon and was one of the five French senators to vote against the French Empire’s formation. He truly stood for the values of a new world he thought the revolution would create. He was in almost every way the ideal progressive of the age. Still, near his peak power, he also laid out the means and need to annihilate every minority language in France. And so, the question remains, why?
To discuss the work of Grégoire on the topic of language policy, we need to discuss a bit of history as well as the work of his peer Bertrand Barère. Before the revolution, French was seen as an essential language through Europe; aristocracy across the continent would use it in diplomacy and governance. It was the unifying tongue of the European nobility. However, the elite had a hands-off approach to the role of a national language inside of France itself. So, the state of France continued with most of the population unable to speak French. This is post-revolution began to be seen as a method for which the French nobility had used to keep the presents in this state of obscuration, materially separated from the state’s goings-on and the well to do. In this context, Barère said the quote above, “Citizens, the coalition tyrants said: ignorance was always our most powerful auxiliary.” Barère’s report on idioms was what moved the revolution’s focuses in 1794 to language policy. However, his statements were relatively uninformed on the actual situation of language in France, fairly unorganised and very focused on the use of foreign language in the state. It wouldn’t be until later that year when Grégoire would give his report to the revolutionary government on the French language’s actual situation and what it meant in a revolutionary context.
Starting in 1790 and ending in 1794, Grégoire had been studying the linguistic situation of revolutionary France. Through a survey, he had determined that France was divided into 30 or so languages and that the national language was only well known and used by 3 million or so of the nation’s 25 million inhabitants. These findings, as well as suggestions on policy to deal with it, were laid out in the “Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language.” The findings were an utter shock to many in the revolutionary government and many governments to follow. This document would outline the justification for not just France’s policy towards language but towards the idea of multiculturalism as a whole. But what were the ideas Grégoire presents?
The “Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language” is a document effectively divided into three sections. The first and what most of this post will discuss is a conversation on the moral and political need for a state to operate with a “one nation, one language” style policy. The second is a conversation on the means to accomplish this. The third is a bit on the idea of language formalisation and will not be discussed here. The first selection discussing the need to annihilate both mirrors and diverges massively from Grégoire’s contemporaries. It remains a piece grounded in reaction against the aristocratic use of French for obscuration, which remains the critical assumption, but it also drops much of the pretentiousness of the French language itself being naturally the grandest of all languages. It also drops much of the xenophobia and realpolitik found it Barère’s rants around things like Italian being the language of the counter-revolution. But let’s get into what the actual argument was; what was the need to Annihilate?
1. The French language was created through the various arrivals of people (Celts, Romans, Goths, Arabs, etc.…) who have come to our shore and thus represent the nation’s diversity altogether.
2. The tyrannical Feudal system purposefully divided the peasantry both from each other through the creation of so many different local dialects and languages, as well as separating them from the state by not educating the peasantry in the language the nobility used.
3. This has led to a population that does not operate as though it were part of a single nation.
4. While it would be genuinely liberating for a single global language to exist, that is not politically feasible, but a single language inside the state would be a viable project
5. The single language in the state would facilitate many things in the realm of politics. It would allow people to be able to exercise their freedoms all across France. Knowledge will spread more efficiently, including the ideas of the revolution and enlightenment. People would more easily be able to understand the law and thus participate in politics and the state. Along with A reduction in the possibility of conflict between people inside the state due to the ability to communicate
6. We have tried universal multilingual translations of state documents in the past; however, this was both a costly process and difficult for many rural tongues that do not have words for many functions of politics.
7. A single language state will facilitate many things in the ways of economic development from the expansion of trade networks and commerce inside the state to the spreading of new books on science and agriculture that will help rural farming and increase production and wellbeing. It will also facilitate people moving from cities back to the country and take their expertise with them, leading to a rejuvenation of the countryside (an almost reverse of W. Arthur Lewis’s concept of the unlimited supply of labour).
8. There is a bit of moral luck to us choosing French as the state’s language; if the capital was in the south, it would be Occitan or something of the like being discussed. So in integration, there should be a level of respect given to these other cultures and languages.
9. In the end, however, we must break down the material boundary that linguistic differences have placed between someone and their fellow countrymen, the state, and the revolution.
While Grégoire concerns himself in this report with much of the gains in efficiency that a single language would produce inside the state, the real core of why he has built this argument is to remake the individual’s relationship to the new revolutionary state. In Grégoire and his peers’ minds, the new French republic would be a different kind of state from what had come before. In many ways, the pre-revolution state had been nothing more than a cabal of elites extracting value from the people for vanity and personal gain, but the nation that would hopefully be born from revolution would be an embodiment of the general will of the people themselves. The state would be of and for the people, and language would be critical to this. The fundamental shift could only be done with a rejection of the old nobility’s controls placed on them. Language was, if anything, a material wall used to isolate communities from others in the nation and from loci of power.
I find this the most essential piece of Grégoire’s writing on the topic, the need for the population to be able to participate in the state and fears over what would happen if people were again separated from their ability to participate with the state. It continues to be an important take away from his writings. At its core the logic behind why the state must annihilate the borders between it and the people it represents. If it doesn’t, society may face a renewed age of obscuration. The powerful will take control and again use the state’s mechanisms for their own gain. It’s foundational for a democratic state that the people in it can participate with the state and understand the machinations of power. And foundational to that is the idea that the state speaks the language of the people, and the people speak the language of the state.
But there are quite a few objections to this line of reasoning concerning not language policy but the nature of the state itself. Much of the writing on the topic looks at the people of France having been a historical and essential unit that had been broken apart by language, and not a false project of the nobility to control an arbitrary piece of territory. In Grégoire and his peers’ minds, French was a birthright deprived from them and not something which they may be looking to forcefully impose on cultures and people who didn’t even want to be a part of the state. In the case of the Basque, Barère describes them as harbouring fanaticism due to their language and that they need to change for them to be more devoted to the revolutionary state, without really questioning if the Basque have any desire for self-determination. This supports the idea that the revolutionaries didn’t see France itself or its creation as unjust, just the temporary feudal system which they had removed as unjust. And I guess that brings up a question, why didn’t Grégoire, after observing the vast linguistic diversity of the nation and understanding the need for the people of a state to be able to speak the language of the state, just calls for the dissolution of France itself? To let every linguistic group form their own republic, to let self-determination bloom.
That’s a bit of an edgy question, with a few simple answers to it. France was under the constant pressure of invasion, so France’s dissolution into various small states would surely mean the control would shift from the people to foreign states. How would the regions of France be divided, and who would do the dividing? Wouldn’t this plan, in many cases, just hand power back to local elites defeating the point of revolution? And in a Nozickian sense, how would reparations outside of just self-determination work for regions that had their value extracted to the capital? How would the vines of history unwind themselves for a new world? But I don’t think any of that truly mattered to Grégoire because at the core of this was a desire to spread the revolution, the enlightenment. I believe that they saw that as intrinsically tied to the French language and the new revolutionary state. But that was the need; what were the means which Grégoire discusses?
Honestly, the means described are fairly silly. They range from creating lots of new songs in French or maybe revoking a man’s right to wed unless he could speak French. This section is not very well thought out. (the third section, which is also partially about the means though, is a very cool read, not super great, but an early attempt at policy around language formalisation, kinda neat but also equally as silly as section two) And the means here were not really used, however the need to eliminate the patois was. Several decrees and policies were implementing a solution to the need that Grégoire had described. That solution was the establishment of a primary education system that would teach French to the youth and to put government officials caught using a language that wasn’t French in jail for six months (However, with the fall of Robespierre a bit more than a week later the decree throwing officials in jail never went into effect). The fervour around the French language died down a bit after this, and with the ascent of Napoleon (A Corsican whose first language was not French), the ideals of the revolution went into hibernation.
I think with the rise of Napoleon and a more conservative approach to language policy Grégoire thought his vision of a France freed from obscuration, a people united by a single tongue able to rebuild Babel, would never come to pass. He doesn’t even bring up his work on language in his autobiography. However, today the French language dominates the French nation, and many of the dialects and languages described by Grégoire have been annihilated. Some remained, fighting on for their continued existence (the third chapter of my undergraduate thesis you can find here is on this topic). Still, the ideas, the need, of Grégoire would win out. The French language serves as a unifying bond today, as Grégoire intended. There would be no “minorities” in France, no separate cultures, just the individual and the state. All barriers between this would be torn down. It’s a concept that goes beyond language towards all aspects of culture, religion, and ethnicity. It’s something that has faced many controversies in today’s France, and to give that debate enough room would require a much longer post. So, let’s return to language.
In many colonial states, European powers would establish governments in the colonizing state’s language, then not really spend much effort teaching the locals that language. Except for France. France in the colonial period was adamant that French would be taught to the natives. These newly conquered lands would learn the importance of the French idiom if they wanted to or not. French was intended to serve as a unifying tongue in these new arbitrarily drawn states, just as it had done in France itself. If anything, the French were consistent in the belief that the French language was a gift to the world. But there is nothing special about French itself. While Grégoire was on to something about a state’s need for a unifying tongue (or at least a universal second language), French didn’t need to be that language. In states like Rwanda, the French imposed on them to be that unifying tongue has been replaced with English education. French just isn’t by itself more valuable than other languages. But I don’t really think any of this was the point of what Grégoire wrote.
Near the end of his life, Grégoire wrote an autobiography, “Memoirs of Grégoire, former bishop of Blois.” In a scene of great sadness near the end of his life, Grégoire looks at the situation of France and sees only “despotism and nepotism on all sides, escorted by ignorance, applauding the sect of the obscurans.” He wishes to leave, to travel to the new world, where he could be free of the tyranny and obscuration he decried during the revolution. He ends with a single fear, “to be only an inhabitant of a country and not a citizen of a homeland.”
