READINGS IN LANGUAGE

Once upon a time when the international language was French

It may seem such a farfetched notion now, but once upon a time—in the 18th century, to be precise—the international community of the learned spoke, wrote, and published mostly in French, with English still not in the horizon as the world’s global language of literature and commerce that it would become. The adoption of the French language by the best minds and leading lights of Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Spain, Austria, and America necessarily also entailed their absorption of the whole system of French cultural values—a major point made by the French historian and essayist Marc Fumaroli in his book When the World Spoke French (New York Review Books, 519 pages, translated into English by Richard Howard).

Of that time of France’s ascendance in the world of letters and the fine arts, Fumaroli, an eminent scholar of French classical rhetoric and a member of the Académie Française, writes glowingly: “Diplomacy and freedom of manners, the Republic of letters and of the arts, royalty and Aristocracy of court and city, ‘good company’ mingling men of the world and men of letters, conformity of the arts and skilled crafts in the service of social pleasures, Lumières in every realm of the mind and their role as educators—on all these levels France was now mother and uncontested mistress.”

Fumaroli extols 18th-century French as a language that in itself was inconvenient, difficult, aristocratic and literary, yet one that was inseparable from good manners and social bearing as well as witty conversation. And he says that although it was the language of Enlightenment liberalism and universalism, it paradoxically evinced the finest qualities of the French nobility: cleverness, leisure, cultivation and charm.

Today, Fumaroli writes, even long after those glory days for the French language, the old-school sophistication of French still holds sway among a small, if obscure, international elite. He says that unknown to the majority of the French, it is in this clandestine worldwide minority that the life and future of French as an irreplaceable idiom, literary language, and language of company still resides—even as English has now long supplanted it as the language of choice for commerce, technology and geopolitics.

Read an excerpt from Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French now!

Read Caroline Weber’s “When French Was the Language of Enlightenment,” a review of Marc Fumaroli’s  When the World Spoke French, in The New York Times now!

ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “Off-putting behaviour,” an article that came out in the Guardian.co.uk website, Scottish novelist AL Kennedy writes about the subject of procrastination among writers. She says: “Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What's that funny noise? Oh look, it's raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache? The possibilities lend new meaning to the words eternity and purgatory.”

Read AL Kennedy’s “Off-putting behaviour” in the Guardian.co.uk website now!

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