Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [225]
The Parisian standard for French spread to neighbouring countries before the French state started its serious efforts to spread its power and language abroad. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, whose boundaries have always included Romance speakers as long as both the boundaries and the language have existed, ever attempted to set up a competing national standard. Geneva had its own distinct Romance dialect, Savoyard, but has used French for official business since the thirteenth century; it was the effective capital of the French Protestants during the wars of the Reformation. Farther south are Savoy, Nice and Monaco. They all had historic links across the Alps, and long resisted becoming part of metropolitan France. But they have largely accepted its language.
Why did French gain such an association with high culture in Europe, especially spreading eastward? The fundamental reason was the growth of France’s population and agricultural wealth; the rich of France could afford the best, and their taste was influential.§ France was the most densely populated country in medieval and early modern Europe, and so tended to set the standard for the rest. French became the business language of European merchants. And the same principle of geographical centrality that had made Paris the crossroads of France made France itself the crossroads of west European Christendom. In 1164 John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas à Becket: ‘I took a detour by Paris. When I saw the abundance of foods, the happiness of the people, the consideration accorded to the clergy, the majesty and glory of the whole Church, the diverse activities of the philosophers, I thought I was seeing, filled with admiration, Jacob’s ladder, its top touching the sky and angels passing up and down upon it.’30
This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. France remained the richest and most populous country in Europe; its geographical advantages simply could not be challenged until the power base of European politics spread beyond western Europe. Certainly, the cultural predominance of French was shaken by the rise of the Italian city-states in the fifteenth-century Renaissance, and by the sixteenth-century Reformation, since the French king chose to associate France resolutely with the Catholic Church. France itself ceased to be the centre of the action for a time, yet the Reformation prompted many influential French speakers to flee eastward: Huguenots, the French Protestants, took up residence in the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, and there was an explosion of French-language publishing, especially just over the border in the Netherlands. The Reformation added to the French language’s eastward momentum as a language of culture.
In the seventeenth century, French power and influence in Europe reached their height, during the long reigns of Louis XIII, 1610-43, and of Louis XIV, the famed Roi Soleil, ‘Sun King’, 1643-1715. Increasingly complacent, France began to reflect on its own cultural attributes. As all nations do when they enjoy pre-eminence, the French began to look for some particular virtues that could explain their success. Increasingly, they saw evidence of excellence in their language itself. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, founded the Académie Franαaise in 1635, with a concern that transcended the practical: by its statutes its principal function was ‘to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.
This was a new step in language consciousness, the world’s first academy dedicated to the care of a language.* The particular