Between monarchy and republic [electronic resource] : the dictionary of the Académie Française during the French Revolution, 1762-1798
Keywords: History

This dissertation shows how Revolutionary politicians and intellectuals attempted to transform the Dictionary of the Académie Française from a handmaiden of the absolutist state into an expression of republican regeneration during the last third of the eighteenth century. The editing of the fifth edition of the Dictionary was anything but a smooth process. From the last days of the Old Regime through the Directory period and into the Napoleonic Consulate and Empire, many political and ideological factions competed to enshrine in the Dictionary their vision of what the Revolution meant and what had been at stake politically and socially. That so many Revolutionary intellectuals and politicians saw the Dictionary as vital to their political program shows the extent of their fears that linguistic disunity would undermine the nascent republic. It also shows the extent to which they imagined a new edition of the Dictionary, which had been used during the Old Regime to consolidate the power of the absolutist state, as a means to unite a linguistically (and politically) fractured nation by dictating language rules to peripheral groups, whether they were non-French speakers from outlying provinces or from rival parties trying to seize the political center. In five chapters and an epilogue, the dissertation narrates the story of the Dictionary's fifth edition. Chapter One argues that during the Old Regime, the Dictionary served as an important instrument of absolutist politics. The king and influential aristocrats at court used the work to authorize their language as correct usage throughout France and Europe, and thus expand their power and influence. Chapter Two shows that during the Revolution, intellectuals and politicians at the Convention's Committee on Public Instruction and the National Institute were drawn to the Dictionary because of the normative and symbolic functions it had played during the Old Regime. In other words, they hoped to use it in their attempts to control the representation of the Revolution. This required that it be freed from the ideological and institutional baggage of the Old Regime it had accumulated over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first step in this transformation was accomplished by the suppression of all royal academies in 1793 that took the Dictionary project out of the hands of the Académie Française and delivered it to the Convention's Committee on Public Instruction. Chapter Three details the first steps toward transforming the Dictionary from an anachronism of the Old Regime into an expression of Republican regeneration. This meant both altering its structure and revamping the way it was edited. The Convention's Committee on Public Instruction gave the Dictionary manuscript to new publishing houses and editors with close ties to the new regime. These new editors added definitions in keeping with the spirit of work done by members of the philosophe party at the Académie and attempted to downplay (with mixed results) the Dictionary's more regressive definitions held over from the Old Regime. Chapter Four shows that when the new editors were unable to transform the work sufficiently a third group of editors associated with the Ideologues added a supplement defining Revolutionary neologisms from their perspective. These chapters highlight the way the language of the Dictionary was politicized in a way unique to the Revolutionary period. Chapter Five tells the story of a piracy case begun in 1802 by the Dictionary's new editors, who appealed to the French courts to protect their exclusive rights to the title Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Despite their crossed purposes, the new editors, old members of the Académie, and the Napoleonic Ministry of the Interior saw a need to protect the copyright of the Dictionary from Revolutionary legislation expanding freedom of the press and placing into the public domain works published during the Old Regime. The trial's verdict affirmed that the national interest in having the Dictionary edited under government supervision overrode claims that it belonged in the public domain. The Epilogue traces attempts by the Napoleonic Ministry of the Interior to reestablish the Dictionary's legitimacy by involving the old members of the Académie in the editing process. These overtures to the old members were only successful when the Ministry put them in charge of the project and restored to them many of the vestiges of the Old Regime Académie.