In the 1740s, the astronomer Jacques Cassini (son of the more famous astronomer Giovanni Cassini, for whom the saturnal probe is named), sent an expedition out to fully map the country for the first time. When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, "he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other's existence," author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (my primary source for most of what follows).

"To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible," Robb writes. "The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk-weavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass" (3-4).

The insularity was especially pronounced in this region, the mountainous Massif Central, where "roads and byways came and went with the seasons... rivers were unnavigable" and "links to the rest of France practically non-existent." Accentuating it was the truculent nature of the locals, who soon hacked Cassini's geometer to death, apparently believing that a strangely clothed man pointing odd metal instruments at rocks was a sorcerer who was behind recent crop failures. A century later, another geographer said this region was best-viewed by balloon, but "only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle" (Robb, 5). But most other parts of France were only a little better. This was a country that was four-fifths rural at the time of the Revolution; "almost a third of the population (about ten million people) lived in isolated farms and cottages or in hamlets with fewer than thirty-five inhabitants and often no more than eight" (Robb, 13).

The French monarchy had tried to impose the French language from above, "requiring priests and those in liberal professions to speak French, and for church registers and public acts to be kept in French." But "such controls only affected the surface of life in much of France," Peter McPhee writes in A Social History of France, 1789-1914. "Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect and lived within distinctive cultures of perception, language and ritual."

In the first few years of the Revolution, the Abbé Henri Grégoire conducted a survey of language use in the whole country, asking each town hall questions like: "Did the people of the region have their own patois?" and "Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths?"

Everybody knew that the border regions included non-French speakers — Bretons, Basques, Flemings and Alsatians. And much of southern France spoke not French but a different Romance language, Occitan or langue d'oc. But even the ostensibly "French" or "Occitan" areas "turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects."

In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: 'The patois's reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French.' In the Jura, there were 'almost as many different patois as there are villages'. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky. (Robb, 50-51)

Though the patois ("'language' proper is spoken only in the capital," the Encyclopédie wrote) were most prevalent in the countryside, peasants weren't the only speakers.

The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: 'The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own.' In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and 'felt ill at ease when speaking French. If certain quartiers of paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers. (Robb 52)

During the Revolution, in one Gascon département, "priests complained of peasants falling asleep during the reading of decrees from the Assembly, 'because they [did] not understand a word, even though the decrees [were] read in a loud and clear voice and [were] explained.' In consequence, successive assemblies encouraged the translation of decrees into local languages..." (McPhee, 38).

After his survey — presented to the National Convention on the very same day Robespierre was elected as the convention's president — Grégoire concluded that "while France was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million 'pure' French-speakers (11 per cent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly." More than six million couldn't speak French at all, another six million "could barely conduct a conversation in it" (Robb 53).

In fact, Grégoire's figures "were almost certainly an underestimate."

Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the communes in fifty-three out of eight-nine départements were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). (Robb 53. On page 54, he has an interesting map showing the spread of official French and dialects in 1863.)

In much of the country, French was a language for elites. Around 1780, an abbé from the southern Alps traveled through the Auvergne and remarked, "I was never able to make myself understood by the peasants I met on the road. I spoke to them in French, I spoke to them in my native patois, I even tried to speak to them in Latin, but all to no avail. When at last I was tired of talking to them without their understanding a word, they in their turn spoke to me in a language of which I could make no more sense" (McPhee, 8-9. The Auvergnat peasants probably spoke a dialect of Occitan. The abbé's local patois may have been his likeliest bet, as his village probably spoke Vivaro-Alpine, which is also a langue d'oc.) A century later, in some parts of the country, "prefects, doctors, priests and policemen were like colonial officials, baffled by the natives and forced to use interpreters" (Robb 53).

Outside of the Massif Central, the same problem existed in many regions of France. France's northern frontier region spoke Flemish, while a million Celts lived in Brittany, which though not mountainous could be no less inhospitable and isolating a territory than the area around Mont Gerbier de Jonc. "It is difficult to picture those Breton forests as they really were," Victor Hugo wrote in what Robb describes as resembling a "science fiction anthropology" in tone, though Hugo "had covered more miles on foot than any historian of France" and knew something of what he was talking about (Robb, 14).

"Nothing could be more secret, silent and savage than those inextricable entanglements of thorns and branches. In those vast thickets, stillness and quietness made their lair. No desert ever appeared more deathlike and sepulchral," Hugo wrote, in his novel Quatrevingt-treize or Ninety-Three — though he noted that the forest was not nearly as desolate as it appeared. If the trees could be magically removed, "as if by a flash of lightning, there would have stood revealed in those shades a swarming mass of men."

South of the Loire in the Vendée, which would resist the Revolution like no other region of France, "unmapped tracks ran for hundreds of miles through deep tunnels of vegetation. An aerial view would have shown a typical bocage landscape of fields marked off by trees and bushes. (But) on the ground, it was a muddy labyrinth sunk in a limitless wood" (Robb 15).

Robb notes that the "faceless millions" who lived and spoke in a different world from Paris did so in large part because their "patterns of settlement" made them "just as difficult to educate as... to conquer" (17).

Continued in Part Two

Follow-up question: What about North-American French? In 1789 France had just given away New-France as a result of being defeated in the 7 years war but places like Quebec had a strong Frenchman majority still. What language(s) did they speak?

Édit: i know they spoke a variance of French that evolved into today’s Québécois. It’s my first language. I’m looking for something a bit more in detail.

What languages did they speak?

Short answer: yes. The National Convention did an inquiry that revealed that 12 millions French (about 50% population of France at that time) were incapable of speaking French and only 3 millions spoke it fairly well (about 12.5 %).

Some languages spoken in France were langue d’oïl ou langue d’oc dialects, but some others were completely different languages like Breton (Brittany, West), Basque (South-West), Catalan (South), Flemish (North), Italian (Corsica) or German (Alsace) dialects.

Long answer start here. In Ancient Regime France, the majority of the population spoke a local dialect, only the educated and the civil servants spoke French, which was the language of the administration since the Villers-Cotterêts ordonnance of 1539. But with the development of big agricultural estates, and internal exchanges in the late eighteenth century we assist to a bit of standardisation in vocabulary, notably agricultural words, where local particularism where previously abundant (examples: rave, rabioule, raifort, radis, navet, turnip where all used for the same or for different species of turnip depending on the region). The internal exchanges where stimulated by new roads (40,000 km in 1789 with the same amount being built) and by the transformations of the economy.

But French people spoke many languages and dialects, rounding a bit the numbers given by a rapport by Coquebert de Montbret in his essay Essai d'un travail sur la géographie de la langue française (Essay of a work on French language geography) published in 1815 a quarter of a century after the Revolution we have:

Langues d'oïl including French (about 60%):

• berrichon around Bourges (Center of France)
• bourguignon in Burgundy (East)
• lorrain in Lorraine (North-East)
• champenois in Champagne (North-East)
• picard in Picardy (North)
• poitevin-saintongeais in Poitou (West)
• normand in Normandy (North-West)

Occitan with its dialects like Gascon (remember D’Artagnan?) in the South and South-West (25%), which derived in Franco-Provençal around Lyon (East, South-East) (8%). German dialects around Alsace (East) for 3.5%. Breton in Brittany (West, North-West) for 3.3%. Corsican in Corsica, Catalan in the South and Basque in the very South-West, Flemish in the far North, each about half a percent.

As you would expect, some of them (oïl and oc) are understandable to a modern French reader with a bit of work, for example:

Et din la rigueur de l’iver / Et dans la rigueur de l’hiver (first part is Franco-Provençal, second is French)

is pretty understandable, but

A bin fai vi, pè on desande nai / A bien fait voir, par une nuit de samedi

is a bit harder, nevertheless they would surely be quite understandable to someone from another part of the nation. While some like Breton or Alsatian, the first being a bit like Welsh (I'm tired today: Skuizh on hiziv / Je suis fatigué aujourd’hui – Breton/French) and the second like German (house: s'Hüs / maison – Alsatian/French), are not understandable from a modern perspective and that would still be true in eighteenth century France.

Then the Revolution began adding some new fuels to the acceleration of internal circulations by abolishing tolls and standardizing weight and measures, which ultimately would conduct to the adoption of the metric system. This frenzy of standardization would also touch the linguistic domain, and the idea of a national language, which would be the same for all the citizens and unite them to the nation, began to emerge. Some people where very vehement in that regard, notably Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, known as Abbé Grégoire (Abbot Grégoire), bishop of Blois, they advocated for an uniformisation of the language in order to make the Republic one and indivisible, they linked French language to liberty and progress in the arts and sciences. They also put forward some economic arguments about the costs of translation and speak about the difficulties of it in some patois.

And when some people want something to happen they try to pass a law –this is were we will answer your question. The rapport given before the National Convention by Abbé Grégoire, and titled Sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française (On the necessity and means to annihilate the dialects and universalise the use of the French language) on the 16 Prairial II (4 of June 1794) read as this:

On peut assurer sans exagération qu'au moins six millions de Français, surtout dans les campagnes, ignorent la langue nationale ; qu'un nombre égal est à-peu-près incapable de soutenir une conversation suivie ; qu'en dernier résultat, le nombre de ceux qui la parlent purement n'excède pas trois millions ; et probablement le nombre de ceux qui l'écrivent correctement est encore moindre.

Which can be translated as: We can assure without exaggeration that at least six millions French, mostly in campaigns, ignore the national language; an equal number is somehow not capable to hold a good conversation; at last, the number of those that speak it purely does not exceed three millions; and probably the number of those, who write it correctly is even lower.

In the same report he says that only in fifteen departments French is the only language and that in some it is quite modified or full of old fashioned words or expressions, he also lists thirty dialects and some foreign languages to add to the mix. This report is the result of a survey done by the same man, who in 1790 sent 43 questions on the dialects and mores of the campaign people to correspondents in the provinces.

On a side note, Abbé Grégoire, was well informed about the world in a passage he speak about the Americans "where everyone know how to read, write and speak the national language".

We can then distinguish three big phases in the political responses to the language question in Revolutionary France: from the États Généraux (end 1788- may 1789) to the reunion of the Convention (20 of September 1792), mostly liberal where texts were translated in local dialects, newspapers in German were edited in Strasbourg, in Flemish in Dunkerque, in Occitan in Toulouse; then from that reunion to the 9 Thermidor an II (27 of July 1794) we have something called the Linguistic Terror, where dialects and foreign languages where actively suppressed and the use of French everywhere was imposed by decrees; after that some kind of appeasement, which will become the imposition of French trough school instruction but will take far longer (when Jules Ferry passed his school laws in 1881-1882, some dialects where still spoken in France).

Sources:

• R. Balibar and D. Laporte, Le français national
• J.-C. Martin, Nouvelle histoire de la Révolution française
• J. Godechot, Annales historiques de la Révolution française

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