The Discovery of France (10 page)

A few days later, he told another correspondent, ‘I cannot understand the French of this region and no one can understand mine.’

If an educated man with relatives in Provence was unable to order a chamber-pot in Valence, was effectively illiterate further south and failed even to identify the language he was hearing, it is no wonder that ‘France’ sometimes seemed a rather abstract concept.

*

W
ITH A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY
satellite image of the languages of France, it is easy to see that the language Racine heard at his uncle’s home was not a form of French at all. Long before reaching Uzès, he had crossed the great divide between the northern
oïl
or French languages and the southern
oc
or Occitan languages (so named in the Middle Ages after the words for ‘yes’). It was not until 1873 that a heroic two-man expedition began to trace the
frontier of Oïl and Oc by interviewing hundreds of people in tiny villages. It covered one-third of the distance from the Atlantic to the Alps before one of the explorers died and the other lost an eye. Until then, the line was commonly supposed to follow the river Loire. In fact, it runs much further south, from the tip of the Gironde estuary, along the northern edge of the Massif Central, through a narrow mixed zone known as the ‘Croissant’ (crescent), which includes Limoges, Guéret and Vichy. About forty-five miles before the Rhône valley, Oc and Oïl are separated by a third Romanic group of dialects known, confusingly, as Francoprovençal. (Provençal itself belongs to the Occitan group.) The languages of Oïl, Oc and Francoprovençal together account for about 94 percent of the territory.
¹⁰

At his uncle’s home in Uzès, Racine found himself four branches away from French. He was in the realm of Occitan, in the area dominated by Provençal – specifically, Rhodanian (Rhône) Provençal, comprising five main dialects, one of which was the dialect spoken in Uzès.

This much was known, at least to scholars, by the end of the nineteenth century. About fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects had been identified, belonging to four distinct language groups: Romanic (French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Catalan and the Italic languages spoken in Corsica and along the Italian border); Germanic (Flemish, Frankish and Alsatian); Celtic (Breton); and an isolated group, Euskaric (Basque). Many more were unknown or unrecognized. Shuadit or Judeo-Provençal was a separate language spoken by Jews in the Papal enclave of Vaucluse. It became extinct in 1977 and survives only in liturgical texts. Zarphatic or Judeo-French was spoken in the Moselle and the Rhineland until the Second World War. The last speakers died in concentration camps. The Iberian gypsy language Caló had two main forms in France – Basque and
Catalonian – but little was known about the people, let alone their language.

Even if a place was known to outsiders, its language might remain a secret. The Pyrenean village of Aas, at the foot of the Col d’Aubisque, above the spa town of Eax-Bonnes, had its own whistling language which was unknown even in the neighbouring valleys until it was mentioned on a television programme in 1959. Shepherds who spent the summer months in lonely cabins had evolved an ear-splitting, hundred-decibel language that could be understood at a distance of up to two miles. It was also used by the women who worked in the surrounding fields and was apparently versatile enough in the early twentieth century to convey the contents of the local newspaper. Its last known use was during the Nazi Occupation, when shepherds helped Jewish refugees, Résistants and stranded pilots to cross the border into Spain. A few people in Aas today remember hearing the language, but no one can reproduce the sounds and no recordings were ever made. If such a remarkable language escaped detection, many other quieter dialects must have died out before they could be identified.

*

T
HE KNOWN DIALECTS
of France can all be placed precisely on the tree of languages – even the whistling language of Aas, which was based on the local Bearnese dialect. Naturally, to a cross-country traveller who leapt from one branch to the next, the effect was obscurity and chaos. The title of this chapter lists some of the major forms of ‘yes’ in clockwise order, starting with Provence and ending with Savoy. But even this is a simplification. In mid-nineteenth-century Brittany, a person who walked the five miles from Carnac to Erdeven could hear three distinct pronunciations of the word
ya
(‘yes’):
iè
,
ia
and
io
. Along the Côte d’Azur, from Menton to Mons (west of Grasse), fathers ten miles apart were called
païre
,
père
,
pa
,
pèro
and
papo
. As the sun travelled over the Franche-Comté, it changed its name to
souleil
,
soulet
,
soulot
,
s’lot
,
soulu
,
sélu
,
slu
,
séleu
,
soureil
,
soureuil
,
sereil
,
s’reil
and
seroille
.

Writers of travel accounts and official reports revelled in the blur of local words and the incomprehensibility of peasants. Just as
Romantic engravers surrounded their steeples with bats and birds of prey, they darkened the Dark Continent with tales of ignorance and isolation. Later, the impressions of the monolingual elite would be confirmed by professional linguists who identified variant forms of sub-dialects in tiny areas, sometimes in a single village and, in one case, in a single family. But these erudite descriptions gave only the faintest impression of what was after all a means of communication.

The language landscape as it appeared to the speakers themselves was harder to describe, though some of its contours and vistas can be seen even in the earliest surveys. The Abbé Grégoire’s questionnaire was just the first of many reports from the linguistic frontier. In 1807, Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior ordered the prefects of every
département
to supply him with translations of the parable of the Prodigal Son into the local patois. (The story of a swineherd who returns to civilization must have seemed appropriate.) The results, in ninety different patois, predictably showed huge differences, even within the same group of dialects. The sample sequence below follows the arc of the Mediterranean, staying within forty miles of the coast, from the eastern Pyrenees to Marseille. The average distance between each phrase is forty-six miles.

The fact that would have been obvious to the speakers of these dialects is that the similarities outnumber the differences. Mutual comprehensibility rather than isolation was the norm. The effective range of some dialects was astonishing. The ‘Friends of the Constitution’ who wrote to the Abbé Grégoire from Carcassonne noted the ‘infinite number’ of dialects in villages and towns, but they also pointed out that a person could travel twenty or thirty leagues (fifty-six or eighty-three miles) ‘and understand this multiplicity of dialects despite knowing only one of them’. In the Landes, though forms of Landais or ‘Gascon noir’ still differ from town to town, a writer from Mont-de-Marsan assured the Abbé that ‘all Gascons understand one another without interpreters, from Bayonne to deepest Languedoc’, which suggests a range of about two hundred and fifty miles.

Even mountains and gorges were not insuperable barriers. An isolated village that was forced to find resources in the world beyond was more likely to be bilingual than a community that could feed itself. Travelling teachers in the Dauphiné and Provence who walked among the livestock at fairs with an ink-bottle tied to their buttonhole crying ‘
Maître d’école!
’ traditionally came from the mountainous area around Briançon, where seasonal migration had produced a population of polyglots. The Provençal shepherds who walked two hundred miles from Arles to the Oisans could converse with locals all along the route and, when they arrived in the Alps, negotiate the rental of summer pastures with people who, from a linguist’s point of view, spoke a different language.

*

T
HE NOTION THAT
French rapidly became the common tongue and supplanted other languages is only partly true. Before the Revolution, in the centre, but not the suburbs, of commercial cities like Bordeaux and Marseille, people from all walks of life could converse with French-speaking strangers from the north. In the Périgord, speaking French (once known derisively as ‘
francimander
’) was no longer considered a silly affectation, though many people refused to speak it in case they made mistakes and sounded foolish. In the Provençal Alps, where French was of little practical use in daily life, speaking the national language was the equivalent of putting on one’s
Sunday best, just as speaking Latin must have been several centuries before.

At the same time, some of the other languages of France, far from being smothered by French, were thriving. Improved communications spread the use of French, but they also gave some dialects a wider range than they had ever had before. The Abbé Grégoire would have been dismayed to learn that French-speaking town-dwellers in Brittany were learning Breton. According to the farmer who wrote to him from Tréguier, Breton had ‘become necessary to the inhabitants of towns who have to deal with peasants every day to buy their produce’. Breton was ‘now more familiar to townspeople than French’. At Avignon and Carpentras, according to an official report in 1808, ‘wealthy, educated people’ were ‘obliged to know and all too often to speak patois’ in order to communicate effectively with workers, tradesmen and servants. Priests delivered sermons and magistrates heard witnesses in Provençal. (For the same reason, presumably, when she revealed herself to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, the Virgin Mary used the local dialect of Lourdes.) ‘It follows from this’, said the report, ‘that the French that is spoken in this region, and even the French that is taught, is not only inelegant, it is not even correct.’ French itself, in other words, was not imported to the provinces like a crate of merchandise. It was acclimatized and hybridized like a plant. About twenty regional varieties of French are still recognized today as distinct dialects.

In northern France, where statistics seem to show the gradual retreat of Flemish before the tide of French, many French-speakers were just as keen as Flemish-speakers to acquire the second language. In towns and cities bordering the realm of Flemish – Lille, Douai, Cambrai and Avesnes – almost everyone was bilingual. In the Lys
département
, which was created in 1795 from part of Belgium, a language-learning programme had been in operation since before the Revolution. Farmers and tradesmen exchanged their children when they were eight to ten years old. ‘The aim is to familiarize one group of children with French and the other with Flemish. These emigrations last only a few years, after which each child returns to his own country.’ The same practice was reported after the Revolution in Alsace and Lorraine.

Private arrangements like these would not have appeared in official statistics, which are extremely sketchy in any case until the twentieth century. The use of minority languages was certainly under-reported, as it still is today. Even now, there are French people who speak a language other than French without knowing it. An elderly innkeeper in Villard at the foot of the Little Saint Bernard Pass told me that he and his friend had been punished at school in the early 1940s for not speaking proper French, but he was uncertain whether the idiom they used was Savoyard or a patois form of French.