Learning French

In the course of rereading the excellent reference 2 - not now sure why it came down off the shelf - I come across this interesting bit about the French language.

This bit of the discussion about national thought being organised under three heads. First, the big old countries trying to homogenize their populations, getting them to speak and dress the same. To have the same laws, the same weights and measures. Centralist nationalism. The French after the revolution. Second, ethnic or cultural communities scattered across a number of states, trying to bring together the parts. Unification nationalism. The Kurds now. Third, the old empires trying to hold together all kinds of different peoples and groups. The different peoples start pushing for national independence, for the freedom to do their own thing. Separatist nationalism. The Ottoman empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Which brings us to Henri Grégoire who wrote a report for the French National Assembly in 1794 explaining that French was the lingua franca in just 15 of the 83 départements. There were 30 or so regional languages. And of the 28 million people in France, only 3 million used French in the ordinary way, in their homes and streets. 6 million struggled in French and another 6 million did not do French at all. The relatively new départements might have smashed the old regions, as intended, but there was clearly still plenty of work to do.

And while the Comité de salut public was in the chair, attempting to promote diversity in these matters was apt to be construed as treason, with possibly fatal results. No surprise that education was gathered into safe, central hands, away from those of the church and other meddlers.

PS: the 28 million above checks out with Wikipedia. I am reminded that in the 200 years from 1800 to 2000, the population of France something more than doubled. While that of Great Britain grew by a factor of around six. Contrariwise, that of Ireland has not changed that much over the same period - still around five million - but that is a story dominated by the catastrophe of the famine in the mid 19th century - and complicated by the split into two parts.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/12/napoleons-new-years-party.html. A previous outing for the picture snapped above.

Reference 2: National thought in Europe: a cultural history - Joep Leerssen - 2006.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joep_Leerssen.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=leerssen. Previous outings for Leerssen. Quite a long time ago now.