8 - Variation under the Ancien Régime

Summary

The extreme violence with which the Ancien Régime was overthrown in 1789 gives an idea of the depth of social division and conflict which had been developing in Paris society during the preceding century and a half. Hierarchisation of society engendered rigid stratification of language, and over the two centuries that concern us here, reallocation of variants between H and L, which we saw happening in the sixteenth century, became a major social concern. J.-P. Seguin (1999: 280) observes that ‘Il y avait toujours eu des prononciations méprisées. On peut dire que les deux grands siècles classiques ont donnéàce mépris une force institutionnelle.’

In standard-oriented histories of French the codification which took place in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris is portrayed as a matter of straightforward rational development:

Le 17e siècle, qui a cru pouvoir tout plier aux exigences de la raison, a sans doute donné à la logique l'occasion de transformer dans le sens de la raison la langue française. Aujourd'hui encore il est évident qu'elle répond beaucoup plus que toutes les autres aux exigences de la logique pure.

(von Wartburg 1962: 170)

It is more likely that codification (and the reallocation of variants this entailed) occurred in a conflictual manner, the allocation of variants to the high-prestige standard being determined not by their inherent quality, but by their capacity to symbolise social distinctions.