When I was an undergrad, I heard many lectures about different kinds of knowledge. One distinction that always stuck with me was between normal discovery and revolution. Normal discovery describes work that is done within preexisting paradigms to develop or substantiate established theories. In a revolutionary phase, however, anomalies that challenge those prevailing theories will erode consensus, eventually resulting in a paradigm shift that overturns established ways of thinking to foment a whole new view of reality.
How well this describes the development of science remains open to question. In my own experience, however, every now and then I read something that does fundamentally reorient how I understand the world.
One such moment was the story of the creation of modern France, as it is told by Graham Robb in The Discovery of France (Norton 2007).
Up to the First World War, the French language landscape was incredibly complex. Robb writes that “[a]bout fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects have been identified, belonging to four distinct language groups: Romantic (French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Catalan and Italic languages spoken along the Italian border); Germanic (Flemish, Frankish and Alsatian); Celtic (Breton); and an isolated group, Euskaric (Basque)” (60). Many languages and dialects also almost certainly became extinct before their existence was recorded.
In this mix, the French language occupied a surprisingly small place. Robb writes that, in 1794, the Abbé Gregoire wrote a report titled The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language. According to his estimates,
more than six million French citizens were completely ignorant of the national language. Another six million could barely conduct a conversation in it. While French was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French speakers, and many of them were unable to write it correctly. (53)
And these numbers, Robb observes, were most likely optimistic: eighty-six years later, in 1880, after intense educational efforts and when the population of France was substantially larger, “the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one fifth the population).”
A consequence of this state of affairs was that the various parts of the nation were largely incomprehensible to each other. Although residents of a region could usually understand neighboring dialects, hard divisions often made communication over distance impossible. Using Mount Gerbier de Jonc in the Massif Central as an example, Robb notes that, in the 1740s, “to walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible” (4):
The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk weavers of Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveler had left the day before.
And how was France transformed into an linguistically homogeneous nation? By education underscored with humiliation and punishment. During the early phases of the Third Republic, there was a sustained effort to enforce linguistic conformity: “[a] pupil who was heard speaking patois was made to carry a stick or some other token that was then passed on to the next offender. The pupil who had the signum at the end of the day was thrashed, given lines or made to clean the toilets (325). This was accompanied by campaigns of public shaming of non French-speaking regions in newspapers and journals, which emphasized their backwardness and ignorance.
Robb argues that the efforts to transform France into a French-speaking nation “would look to some people like a colonial campaign to erase local cultures” (326). New world nations are aware that their existence is predicated upon violence. The fact that all nations have such origins, however, is still a revelation. The trauma that such forced homogenization has left is largely under-acknowledged, but could elucidate cultural tensions that continue to manifest.
Travel Only By Night 