Visions de “l’idiome natal” à travers l’enquête impériale sur les patois (1807-1812) - René MERLE

Visions de "l'idiome natal" à travers l'enquête impériale sur les patois (1807-1812) - René MERLE

(langue d'Oc, catalan, francoprovençal) France, Italy, Switzerland
(Visions of the "native idiom" through the imperial survey of the patois)

In 1807, the Minister of the Interior asked the prefects of the Empire, geographically hypertrophied by the conquests, to make an inventory of the "native idioms" of their departments. Inventory before disappearance: all these languages, languages of former states or regional "patois", had to give way to French.
In the space of present-day France and Switzerland, while the survey proposes a meticulous geography of the idioms, the Minister questions the reality and the space of the great linguistic slope of the South, that of the langue d'Oc, on its relations with Catalan and with the group that today is called Francoprovençal.

René Merle has inventoried the comments of the investigators, who often have no other competence than their practical knowledge of the idiom. In a context of generalized bilingualism (French "native idiom"), structured by the vertical hierarchy French-"idiom", their dispatches highlight, while there is no horizontal communication between them, convergent visions of French and "native idiom", their origins, their present situation, their future. Proposals, as far as the "idiom" is concerned, mixed with pejorations and compensatory valuations, as well as complex internal hierarchies.

Collection Cal al sud, editions Trabucaire.

The author:
René Merle is an associate professor of history and holds a doctorate in literature. A historian of linguistic usage, he has studied public intervention (political, religious, social) in Occitan and Franco-Provençal in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, in the great French southeast and in Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles, a thesis and several books, including Culture occitane, per avançar, L'écriture du provençal de 1775 à 1840, Une mort qui n'en finit pas (parlers occitans et francoprovençaux du grand Sud-Est), Une naissance suspendue, l'écriture des "patois de la pré-Révolution au romantisme ("patois" suisses), Les varois, la presse varoise et le provençal, 1859-1910... He is also the author of several black novels.