Syntax and Passions. Bouhours, Vico, and the Genius of the Nation

Contemporary scholars of nationalism agree that language does not constitute a necessary and sufficient criterion of nationality any more than religion or territory. (1) They usually ascribe the belief that a national language expresses the unique character of a people and therefore is the nation made manifest to Johannes Gottfried Herder and to German Romantic thought, which inspired nationalist movements in Germany and in Eastern Europe. (2) Herder, actually, linked the "spirit of language" (Sprachgeist) with the soul of the people (Volksseele) and did not refer to the nation. (3) It was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807-1808), who translated Herder's ideas into incendiary political arguments, and then Wilhelm von Humboldt who linked the two concepts of the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the language (Uber die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues, 1827-1829). (4) Yet many of the German "Romantic" arguments were anticipated in a series of exchanges between Italian and French intellectuals (frequently called the Orsi--Bouhours controversy) (5) at least one generation before Herder. In these exchanges, explanations of the "genius of the language" (genie de la langue) shifted from internal definitions (phonetics, syntax, and idioms) originating in the Renaissance, to external causes (climate, politics) and, in particular, to national character. (6) For the first time, the relationship between the "genius of the language" (genie de la langue) and the "genius of the nation"--a fundamental paradigm of linguistic nationalism--was extensively articulated and used with polemical, often explicitly chauvinistic intentions. Stretching throughout the eighteenth and into the first decades of the nineteenth century, the discussion on genius not only articulated nascent arguments of linguistic nationalism but also shaped several issues that were applied to later definitions of the nation. (7) I believe, therefore, that the study of national character, of its formation and uses not only in Germany but also in France and Italy, (8) should include an understanding of the earlier notion of the genius of language and of how the two concepts (national character and genius of language) merged into the core of the discussion. (9) Here, I shall concentrate on a specific aspect of the French-Italian debate, that is the controversy about the hyperbaton (inversion), or the use of an unexpected word order characterized by Longinus as the "truest mark of passion" (10)--a figure able both to express and to evoke emotions. In order to establish the place of Dominique Bouhours, a Jesuit lexicographer and a member of the Academie Francaise, and that of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico in the context of the debate on genius, I shall discuss their views on the emotive function of utterance and analyze the political implications of their positions. (11) The controversy over the hyperbaton may seem to be an overly specific and 'technical' issue, however it articulates on a fundamental level the clash of opposite ideas about the nature of language, the conflict of different traditions of rhetoric and, of singular interest to the modern observer, it provides a vivid example of how the notion of the genius of language came to shape the idea of national character. In this controversy, sets of complementary propositions concerning origins and boundaries--that is the essential elements of national identity formation (12)--are developed. Moreover, in true nationalistic fashion, a few cultural features, mostly mediated through literature and perceived as negative within one nation's system of belief are selected as representative of "the other" nation and employed to prove its inferiority. (13) It turns out that disputes concerning the hyperbaton are ultimately used to support claims of the superiority of this or that language and through language, the superiority of this or that nation. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, several treatises concerned with the genius of the French language appeared in France. …