Grace Neville

Minority languages in contemporary France

Abstract In this paper, I propose - to trace the history of regional languages in France, - to describe the present state of these languages (Alsacien, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish, Occitan), - to analyse the common problems encountered by speakers of these languages (inadequacies of La Loi Deixonne, absence until 1985 of any state‐recognised certificate in the teaching of regional languages, lack of standardisation within families of dialects, transcription difficulties, dearth of teaching material, lack of time devoted to regional languages in the media), - to discuss the range of solutions proposed by individuals and voluntary organisations to these difficulties (establishment of private, regional language‐speaking nursery schools, development of a corpus of teaching material). - to plot the usage of French versus regional languages in a series of oppositions : urban/rural, ‘bourgeois/paysan’ (townsperson/country person), employer/employee, young/old, written/oral, public/private). - to e...

Remembering and Forgetting the Great Famine in France and Ireland

The columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole posed a characteristically provocative question in the Irish Times on August 5, 1997, when, in the course of discussing the scarcity of artistic responses to the seminal event in modern Irish history, he asked “Whatever happened to the Famine?” The Great Famine of the 1840s is often seen as a lieu de memoire, or site of memory, but also as a locus of forgetting in Irish history. Despite the seismic shift that it set off across Irish society, the Famine was frequently shrouded in silence throughout succeeding generations. One might wonder, therefore, what was known of it elsewhere— for instance, in Ireland’s nearest continental European neighbor and age-old ally, France? A great deal, it would seem. To date, I have identified more than two thousand French texts from the nineteenth century that refer briefly or at length to the Famine. The French commentators include journalists, priests, poets, playwrights, satirists, statisticians, scientists, lawyers, horticulturalists, botanists, epidemiologists, postgraduates, aristocrats and proletarians, conservatives and revolutionaries. They published mainly in Paris but also in provincial cities like Grenoble and Clermont, and even further afield—for instance, in Montreal. Yet, even as they set pen to paper, the French observers repeatedly question the very aim of their work as they cast doubt on the ability of mere words to capture a catastrophe so huge as the Irish famine. Decades after the event, Ernest Fournier de Flaix wondered, “Comment ecrire sur l’histoire de cette famine? Des milliers, des dizaines de milliers, des centaines de milliers d’hommes et de femmes perirent. Elle a coute plus de vies que l’Angleterre n’en a perdu dans aucune de ses guerres depuis Hastings jusqu’a Waterloo” (“How can the story of this famine be written? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and

“Into the West”: The West of Ireland in the Writings of French Travellers

Through nine texts written between the late eighteenth and early twentieth century and representative of a far larger corpus, this study focuses on depictions of the west of Ireland by French travellers of that period. The west looks not Irish but Spanish (people’s physiognomy, their clothes, urban and rural landscapes). For some commentators, the west is exotic but also “authentic” in its loyalty to old ways (religion and language, for instance). They deplore the homogenising power of encroaching modernity. Others lambast old ways as proof of primitivism and even degeneracy.