Abstract
In 1783, Rivarol won a prize at the Berlin Academy for his speech on the universality of the French language. This, he claimed, had now replaced Latin as the European language of scholarly and aristocratic communication, thanks to the glory of the Louis-Quatorzian monarchy and the French writers of the 18th century, with Voltaire at the forefront ." The time seems to have come to describe the French world as the Roman world once did ".
With the Revolution, an entirely different conception of the universality of the French language was promoted, notably by Abbé Grégoire, whose famous investigation into patois, launched in 1790, culminated four years later in a report " sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française ", presented to the Convention on 16 prairial an II. It was no longer the language that was to be universal, but its use ; and not on a European or world scale, but on a French scale. French was to be the instrument for regenerating the nation and extending to everyone the benefits of the universal rights guaranteed to citizens." Universaliser ", here, means building a homogeneous nation, doing away with local particularities." The Republic, one and indivisible in its territory (...) must be one and indivisible in its language " wrote grammarian François-Urbain Domergue.
French, however, was not only the language of the French nation. It had also become the " language of liberty ". After Thermidor, and following French victories and conquests in Europe, the two discourses tended to merge, with French revolutionaries, or at least some of them, proposing to impose the language of liberty on the new Europe born of the Revolution.
The Revolution thus produced a powerful and lasting ideological combination of language, nation and Republic, making French, a vector of cultural uniformity and international influence, one of the main vehicles of the discourse of republican universalism.
