HIST 390 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Imagined Communities, Byrsonima Crassifolia, Montesquieu
22 Apr 2019
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Document Summary
The language question has fallen out of the historical discourse, but during the. French revolution, the language question mattered a great deal because minority languages were the dominant vernacular of their regions. Using a particular language in a particular context could be regarded as a political act. France"s multiplicity of languages was a political issue from 1790 onward. Jacobins: the language of a free people must be one and the same for all. Common factor: the language policies of the revolution = intrusions by the state or urban city into largely illiterate rural communities that had previously existed in a linguistic state of nature. Religion: the catholic church carried out its own linguistic politics among peasants since the. 16th century: the revolutionary polices took shape in imitation of and in reaction to these earlier e orts, this transformed a religious issue into a political/nationalist one. The extent of france"s linguistic diversity before the revolution cannot be measured.
