Philippe Martel

Langue d’oc, French and the Construction of a State in France

The current chapter proposes a return to the past, which essentially leads us from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of Modern times. Initially, this return to the past can appear to be a detour in a symposium principally focused on the analysis of contemporary situations. However, there is a common ground to speak of that reveals “l’exception francaise” on the issue concerning linguistic policy, which has planted its roots in a very distant past. Another common ground that has come about, are the a prioris, understandings and cornmon sentiments which continue to structure the French attitude regarding the spoken languages on their national land. It is therefore not entirely useless to return to the past in order to examine the birth of the policies concerning the French language.

THE TROUBADOURS AND THE FRENCH STATE

In the investigation of the earliest medieval manifestations of their national culture, nineteenth-century French scholars and intellectuals faced a problem: the Troubadours use an idiom which some centuries later had come to be rejected as mere patois. Paradoxically, a literary tradition of Europe-wide prestige, born on French territory, is not properly French. The discovery of the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland (1837) and other Chansons de geste of the langue d’oil afforded more convenient Great Ancestors to the French intelligentsia; accordingly, poetry of the langue d’oc drops out of the canonic corpus of the beginnings of the nation’s literature. Meanwhile, the theme of the Albigensian crusade is being re-discovered and quickly sidelined as a threat to the French national mythology. But some southern French intellectuals, sensitised to this heritage, devote themselves to its promotion. Mistral and his Felibres make it the basis of their planned Occitan Renaissance. This incipiently nation-building project faces two drawbacks: the social status of the actors of the Occitan renaissance (modest middle-class in the main) bars them from attaining any significant political or intellectual power; and no room is provided for Occitan-related research either at University level or in local institutions of learning. The attempt to re-integrate the Troubadours and Occitan literature and history into the mainstream of canonical French culture was doomed to fail.