The Story of French (17 page)

The French made important scientific advances during the eighteenth century. Pierre Fauchard inaugurated modern dentistry. René de Réaumur refined the process of steelmaking and invented one of the first working thermometers. Claude Berthollet was famous for his studies of chlorine and chlorides. Georges de Buffon theorized on scientific experimentation, proposed a model for the classification of species and wrote a thirty-six-tome
Histoire naturelle
(
Natural History
). Joseph Louis de Lagrange is famous for his theories of mathematics. One of the luminaries of the century was Antoine de Lavoisier, who demonstrated the composition of water (H2O) and created the first periodical chart of the elements. Abbé Jean Antoine Nollet invented the first electroscope and observed the transmission of sound in liquids. A family of Swiss mathematicians and physicists, the Bernoullis (Jacques, Jean and Daniel), developed a number of theories in the fields of calculus, statistics and oscillation, one of which proved essential for designing the wings of an airplane.

But it was unarguably the ebullient intellectual climate of eighteenth-century Paris that turned French into Europe’s universal language of communication and scholarly exchange. In France the eighteenth century is known as
le siècle des lumières
(the century of light and knowledge, or the Enlightenment). During that century, universities were still controlled by the conservative Catholic Church, but free discussion began popping up in salons and cafés, and arts and science academies were sprouting up throughout the country. Paris already had cafés in every neighbourhood (the most famous, Le Procope, is still operating, though in a different location) and there were dozens of bookstores in the Latin Quarter alone, mostly along the Rue St-Jacques. The press in France was still censored by the government, but it was very active.

The salons created a climate of intellectual rebellion, notably by encouraging the philosophes, a group of French thinkers (also called the Lumières) whose influence reached its peak in the 1750s. Many of the philosophes attended salons or were directly supported, if not actually protected, by their hostesses. Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV, was considered a great friend of these philosophers.

The philosophes believed that empirical investigation could be used to question matters that had previously been explained by religious dogma. They were interested in many subjects, from science and the trades to literature and social criticism, and were really united only by their approach, which was reformist, anti-despotic and anti-authoritarian. They were optimistic thinkers whose central interest was human happiness. They believed that man (feminism was not part of the program) was born free and that his liberty was inalienable. Political authority was something he submitted to willingly.

One of their central tenets, which was extremely radical at the time, was that a government could not justify its existence merely by divine right to rule. To be legitimate, rulers had to contribute to the happiness of their subjects. The challenge was, how do people retain their liberty and reconcile their competing interests in order to live happily together in a single society? The philosophes believed that, in one form or another, reason and natural laws would solve this dilemma by allowing men to find a better way of organizing society. This triumph of reason and individualism over tradition and religion fed a climate of almost constant intellectual research, not just in philosophy, but also in science, technical knowledge and political thought.

One of the great intellectual undertakings of the century was the
Encyclopedia.
The project was the life’s work of Denis Diderot (1713–84). Educated by the Jesuits, Diderot had set out to become a priest, but instead ended up in Paris in the late 1720s and began writing essays. He wasn’t too successful, so in 1728 he switched genres and set out to create a catalogue describing all the arts and sciences and vocations being practised in France at the time. The idea had been kicking around for a while—Diderot was inspired by the
Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences,
which had appeared in London in 1728 (itself inspired by Furetière’s 1690
Dictionnaire universel
). Such a concept was considered revolutionary because an encyclopedia would enable anyone to gain knowledge about almost anything, allowing individuals to circumvent schools or masters of trades, who up until then had a monopoly on knowledge. The
Encyclopedia
was an attempt to organize all the fields of knowledge into a single system and to show the relationships between them. It put noble arts such as poetry on the same footing as common trades such as tanning or
chaudronnerie
(boilermaking).

Diderot, like Voltaire, was jailed more than once for his writing. Ultimately it was their extraordinary celebrity that saved them both. The first volume of the
Encyclopedia
appeared in 1759, after Diderot had been thrown into prison for three months for his writings on religion (it was salon hostess Madame de Chatelet who reportedly got him out). The influence of the
Encyclopedia
was such that the Empress of Russia, Catherine II, a friend of Voltaire, bought Diderot’s library in 1765, allowing him to use the books while supplying him with a fifty-year salary so he could complete the
Encyclopedia.
The project was finished in 1778 and had twenty-eight volumes. Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire contributed articles to it—Rousseau on music and Voltaire on history. In one article Voltaire defined history as “an account of facts given as true, contrary to fables, which are the account of facts given as false.” He divided history into sacred and profane; in the entry for sacred history he saucily wrote, “I won’t discuss such respectable matter.” He divided profane history into “what you can know because there are physical traces left of it, and what you can’t (like the lost language of ancient Egypt).” As an irreverent warning to his readers, he noted that historical profiles were often written to “make people shine” rather than to instruct the reader.

Better known as Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) was one of the strongest intellectual forces pushing French across the Continent. His pseudonym is an anagram of
AROVET L
e
I
eune (Arouet the Young) as it was spelled in the early eighteenth century—U and V, J and I were still interchangeable. Voltaire, born into a prosperous Paris family, went on to become the most influential French philosopher of the eighteenth century—much more famous at the time than he is even today for his essays, historical works, poetry, novels, plays and philosophical tales. He was the rock star of salon culture. A brilliant polemicist, he became a correspondent and confidant of kings and queens such as Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia; he wrote more than eighteen thousand letters in his lifetime. But he did not invent ideas so much as popularize them. He imported the ideas of Newton and John Locke and popularized the philosophes’ love of clearly expressed ideas, their faith in human experience, criticism of the structures governing society and opposition to absolutist rule. He was outspoken on every issue and used any opportunity he found to attack authoritarianism and traditionalists of all types. He even led a campaign against France’s keeping the colony of Canada (being outspoken did not always make him right).

It was Voltaire who popularized the idea that the French language had a particular genius for conveying ideas. He wrote, “What we call the genius of a language is its ability to express, clearly and concisely, and in a harmonious manner, what other languages express in a poorer fashion.” In retrospect, he was probably confusing language with an attitude towards language. If anything, the philosophes themselves were the source and vehicle of this attitude about French. Their writing was clear and concise and they valued language as a tool for making ideas understandable. In other words, they fulfilled Malherbe’s doctrine of clarity and precision, and brought it to new heights. But brilliant as he was, Voltaire was primarily a communicator. As a thinker he was much less original than two of his peers who each made a mark on political theory that is still felt to this day: Montesquieu and Rousseau.

The Bordeaux judge Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), was a regular at the Paris salon of Madame De Lambert from 1724 on and was also known to frequent those of Madame de Tencin and Madame du Deffand. In 1721 Montesquieu arrived on the French literary scene with his
Persian Letters,
a fictional account of a faux Persian living in France who observes the country’s social customs, manners and political institutions with the eye of an outsider. In a loosely concealed criticism of the French monarchy, Montesquieu’s hero naively describes the absolutist king as a magician who has a magical ability to get people to agree with him—his take on authoritarianism. His criticism of religion was just as harsh. He wrote, “If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.” Montesquieu was perceived as a comic writer, and many French people can still quote humorous lines such as “Heirs prefer doctors to confessors” and “Frenchmen rarely talk about their wives; they fear speaking in front of people who know them better.”

Outside France, Montesquieu is best remembered for his political essay
De l’esprit des lois
(
The Spirit of Laws
). In this groundbreaking work he introduced a new classification system for governments—those that governed by consent, by honour or by fear. His most famous chapter, on the separation of powers, inspired the U.S. Constitution, thus earning Montesquieu a solid place in the pantheon of American political philosophy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the other political thinker who made his mark in the eighteenth century. Born in Geneva, the son of a watchmaker and fifth-generation Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, Rousseau had an unhappy childhood that turned him into an unstable, paranoid character. His mother died shortly after he was born and his father abandoned him when he was ten; later in life he became obsessed by the idea of lost innocence (though he himself abandoned the five children he fathered out of wedlock with his maid). An accomplished musician who began writing in the 1740s, Rousseau shot to fame in 1750, when he won an essay contest sponsored by the Dijon Academy. The question was, Have the arts and sciences purified or corrupted manners? Rousseau argued that progress in the arts and sciences had “denatured” the soul of man. Although he never actually used the term “noble savage,” this notion has forever been associated with him.

Rousseau’s main preoccupation was not government per se, but the more strictly philosophical question of how to reconcile man’s natural, psychological and moral qualities with his life in society. There is still much debate over whether Rousseau considered people to be inherently “good” or not. What’s clear is that he launched the idea that people are born with something natural and inalienable, some potential that is either realized or thwarted by society. In his widely read treatise
Émile,
published in 1762, he outlined an ideal education that could preserve a child’s essence while turning him into a citizen. In
The Social Contract,
published the same year, he argued that to reconcile “good” people with institutions, society must ensure that human security and liberty are both preserved. Rousseau rejected the idea of authority based on mere privilege or might, arguing that only the people are sovereign, and that only common agreement of the members of a society can form a legitimate basis for authority. Rousseau’s later criticism of religion enraged the conservative Sorbonne, and he was forced into exile in England, returning to France only for the last few years of his life. But his thinking, and that of the philosophes, established an association between French and anti-conformist, universal thinking that would last until the present day.

The philosophes spread and sealed the reputation of French as the language of the future, both through the influence of their writing and by travelling to the European capitals. Rousseau was widely read and particularly influential in England, where
Émile
was very popular. Montesquieu and Diderot visited Holland. Voltaire travelled to Holland five times, as well as to Berlin, and lived in exile in England for two years in the late 1720s and in Geneva a number of times. Their influence, along with the mystique of the salons, explains why the Swedish, German and Russian languages became sprinkled with French expressions during this period. Russians used words such as
coquetterie
and
galant.
Dutch speakers picked up numerous Gallicisms, especially in the arts, public life and social life. The English, who were particularly susceptible to French influence because of their proximity to and long rivalry with France, picked up hundreds of words during this period, including
elite, avalanche, reservoir, bouquet, engagement, salon, buffet, liaison, caprice, façade, fanfare, pirouette, maladroit, bourgeois, éclat, manoeuvre
and
début.
French expressions also came into use in England, including
bon vivant, coup de grâce, beau monde
and
tête-à-tête.

During the eighteenth century, French spelling and grammar took on the written forms that make the language instantly recognizable to modern readers. The logical order of subject-verb-object became fixed in French sentences. The letters I and J, as well as U and V, became completely distinct, largely thanks to spelling reforms undertaken by the French Academy in 1760. French language theorists also continued their work of codification. A hot debate erupted over whether past participles should remain neutral or
s’accorder
(agree with the gender and number of the nouns they relate to). In the end, some would agree and others would do so only under special conditions, but at least the situations were defined. Pronunciation evolved little during the century, except that some class differences became more marked; aristocrats tended to say
moi
and
anglois
as
mway
and
anglway,
while the populace, especially in Paris, said
mwa
and
anglay
(as they do now).