16th to 18th century Beginning in 1539 with Art. 111 of the
Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, non-French languages in France were reduced in stature when it became compulsory "to deliver and execute all [legal] acts in the French language" (
de prononcer et expedier tous actes en langaige françoys). Originally meant as a way to eliminate
Latin in official documents—few 16th-century French subjects were educated and familiar with Latin—it also stated that French and only French was legal in the kingdom (
en langage maternel françoys et non aultrement).
Late 18th to late 19th century Abbé Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois" The deliberate process of eradicating non-French
vernaculars in modern France and disparaging them as mere local and often strictly oral dialects was formalized with
Henri Grégoire's
Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language, In reference to "patois",
Jean Jaurès famously claimed that "one names
patois the language of a defeated nation". According to the
Chambers Dictionary, the origin of the term is disputed but could be a "corruption of
patrois, from
LL , a local inhabitant". Four months earlier (27 January),
Bertrand Barère, although an Occitan from
Tarbes himself, claimed before this same Convention:
The end of traditional provinces This policy can be noted by the way France's internal borders were redrawn, creating 83
départements. The law was passed on 22 December 1789 and took effect the following year, on 4 March 1790. As a result, the centuries-old singularities of the various Occitan-speaking parts were overlooked and shaken in a deliberate effort by the newly formed government to weaken and parcel out long-established feudal domains so that republican France would subdue traditional allegiances, as
Antonin Perbòsc reveals in the foreword to his
Anthologie: In the 20th century, the
départements were grouped into
régions, to create a level of government between the departmental and national. While the
régions were intended to replace the old provinces, they were not necessarily formed along the same boundaries. As the map shows, there were eleven Occitan-speaking enclaves in the pre-1789 state, such as the powerful lands of
Languedoc and
Gascony, but they were divided into seven
régions with no regard whatsoever for cultural and linguistic identities. This is how
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur was created out of portions of five Occitan provinces and three capitals were scrapped in favour of
Marseille; and
Auvergne came to comprise both native and ''langues d'oïl
entities. Meanwhile, the city of Nantes was administratively removed from Brittany, of which it had been one of two traditional capitals (along with Rennes), and the city of Toulouse was not included in the région'' of
Languedoc-Roussillon, though it had historically been located in that province. Many of the
régions contain hyphenated names, reflecting the merging of multiple historically distinct areas. This is true for four of the seven
régions of Occitania: Languedoc-Roussillon,
Midi-Pyrénées, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and
Rhône-Alpes. • Toulouse lost 76% of its territory of Languedoc • Bordeaux lost a little more than half its territory of Gascony and Guyenne • Limoges increased its administrative area by 43% • Guéret, Pau, Foix, Riom, Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Carpentras (1791) and Nice (1860) lost their status as capitals • Clermont-Ferrand, Montpellier and Marseille became capitals of Auvergne, Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, respectively • Languedoc was divided into five unequal parts, the largest of which forming Languedoc-Roussillon with the
Catalan-speaking province of
Roussillon • The County of Marche, Béarn, the County of Foix and subsequently Comtat Venaissin and the County of Nice lost their autonomy • Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur is made up of Provence and the County of Nice and bits and pieces of three other provinces • The north of Languedoc and Comtat Venaissin and the western half of Dauphiné became linguistic minorities in the new Rhône-Alpes region • The Occitan provinces spread over a little less than 200,000 km2 • Gascony and Guyenne, Languedoc, Provence and Auvergne accounted for 78.4% of Occitania in terms of land area, with Gascony and Guyenne making up for over a third of the total surface and Languedoc almost a quarter
Late 19th century – Policies and legacy of Jules Ferry School discipline In the 1880s,
Jules Ferry implemented a series of strict measures to further weaken
regional languages in France, as shown in Bernard Poignant's 1998 report to
Lionel Jospin. These included children being given
punishments by their teachers for speaking Occitan in a
Toulouse school or
Breton in
Brittany. Art. 30 of (French Teaching Law, 1851) stated that: "It is strictly forbidden to speak patois during classes or breaks." school Among other well-known examples of
humiliation and
corporal punishment was
clogging, namely hanging a clog (
sabot) around their necks as one Breton woman recalled that her grandparents and their contemporaries were forced to endure: My grandparents speak Breton too, though not with me. As children, they used to have their fingers smacked if they happened to say a word in Breton. Back then, the French of the Republic, one and indivisible, was to be heard in all schools and those who dared challenge this policy were humiliated with having to wear a clog around their necks or kneel down on a ruler under a sign that read: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak Breton". That's the reason why some older folks won't transmit the language to their children: it brings trouble upon yourself... This practice was referred to as
le symbole by officials and
la vache (the cow) by pupils, with offenders becoming "vachards". Many objects were used, not just clogs: horseshoes, shingles, slates, wooden plates with a message, coins with a cross on them. The following are official instructions from a
Finistère sub-prefect to teachers in 1845: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language." The prefect of
Basses-Pyrénées in the French
Basque Country wrote in 1846: "Our schools in the Basque Country are particularly meant to replace the
Basque language with French..." School has had a unifying role inasmuch as speaking the "noble" language [French] reduced the use of regional dialects and
patois. Let us mention the humiliation of children made to wear a clog around their necks for inadvertently speaking a word in the language of the people. As for signs, they were also found in
Poitou schools: It seems as though Jules Ferry making school free and compulsory in 1881 materialized the work started four centuries earlier [with the
Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts]; the method of repression and humiliation that was undertaken bore fruit with, for instance, the famous signs in school reading: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak
patois." The ''Conselh de Representacion Generala de la Joventut d'Òc'' (CRGJOC, General Representation Council of the Occitan Youth), through the Youth of European Nationalities website, reports that Our language [Occitan] lost its name, becoming some "
patois", first at school and then in families through putting pressure on women in education ("
Interdit de cracher par terre et de parler patois") with the French Third Republic,
Mussolini and
Franco. The Confolentés Occitan (Occitan-speaking
Limousin) website testifies to the methods used by French authorities over the past century or so: To help efface traditional regional identities, the Occitan language was not merely discouraged but actively suppressed. School pupils were punished well within living memory for speaking their native language on school premises. The French administration managed to make the Occitan speakers think of their own language as a patois, i.e. as a corrupted form of French used only by the ignorant and uneducated. This alienating process is known as
la vergonha ("the shame"). Many older speakers of Occitan still believe that their native language is no more than a shameful patois. This is one reason why you rarely hear it in public—or anywhere outside of the neighbourhood or family circle. Of the school of Camélas in
Northern Catalonia, a former pupil recalled in a 1973 interview, Everyone but the teacher's children spoke Catalan among themselves. We'd even get punished for that, because at the time, we all had to speak French.
Be Clean, Speak French could be found written on the school's walls. And if you refused to speak French, they'd give you some sort of wooden sign to wear
until death came, as we said, which meant the last offender, in the evening, had twenty lines to copy. We'd speak French in the schoolyard, and for the first ten metres of the way back home, for as long as we thought the teacher would overhear us, and then we'd switch back to our own mother tongue, Catalan. In those times, Catalan speakers were rather despised. My generation associated speaking Catalan with a disadvantage, with being less than the others, with running the risk of being left behind on the social ladder, in short with bringing trouble. Abbé Grégoire's own terms were kept to designate the languages of France: while Breton referred to the language spoken in Brittany, the word
patois encompassed all
Romance dialects such as Occitan and
Franco-Provençal. In his report,
Corsican and
Alsatian were dismissed as "highly degenerate" (
très-dégénérés) forms of
Italian and
German, respectively. As a result, some people still call their non-French language
patois, encouraged by the fact they were never taught how to write it and made to think only French exists in the written form.
Pressure on the church In 1902, in a speech before the
Conseil Général of
Morbihan, Chief Education Officer Dantzer recommended that "the Church give
first communion only to French-speaking children". In the same year, prime minister
Émile Combes, himself an Occitan, told the prefects of Morbihan,
Côtes-du-Nord and
Finistère When at the mid-19th century, primary school is made compulsory all across the State, it is also made clear that only French will be taught, and the teachers will severely punish any pupil speaking in
patois. The aim of the French educational system will consequently not be to dignify the pupils' natural humanity, developing their culture and teaching them to write their language, but rather to humiliate them and morally degrade them for the simple fact of being what tradition and their nature made them. The self-proclaimed country of the "
human rights" will then ignore one of man's most fundamental rights, the right to be himself and speak the language of his nation. And with that attitude France, the "grande France" that calls itself the champion of liberty, will pass the 20th century, indifferent to the timid protest movements of the various linguistic communities it submitted and the literary prestige they may have given birth to. [...] France, that under
Franco's reign was seen here [in
Catalonia] as the safe haven of freedom, has the miserable honour of being the [only] State of
Europe—and probably the world—that succeeded best in the diabolical task of destroying its own ethnic and linguistic patrimony and moreover, of destroying human family bonds: many parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren, have different languages, and the latter feel ashamed of the first because they speak a despicable
patois, and no element of the grandparents' culture has been transmitted to the younger generation, as if they were born out of a completely new world. This is the French State that has just entered the 21st century, a country where stone monuments and natural landscapes are preserved and respected, but where many centuries of popular creation expressed in different tongues are on the brink of extinction. The "gloire" and the "grandeur" built on a genocide.
No liberty, no equality, no fraternity: just cultural extermination, this is the real motto of the French Republic.
Constitutional issues In 1972,
Georges Pompidou, the President of France and a native of an Occitan-speaking region, declared that "there is no room for regional languages in a France whose fate is to mark Europe with its seal". In a pre-election speech in
Lorient, on 14 March 1981,
François Mitterrand asserted that: These declarations however were not followed by any effective measures. In 1992, after some questioned the unconstitutional segregation of minority languages in France, Art. II of the 1958
French Constitution was revised so that "the language of the Republic is French" (). This was achieved only months before the
Council of Europe passed the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which
Jacques Chirac ignored despite
Lionel Jospin's plea for the
Constitutional Council to amend Art. II and include all vernacular languages spoken on French soil. Yet again, non-French languages in France were denied official recognition and deemed too dangerous for the unity of the country, and
Occitans,
Basques,
Corsicans,
Catalans,
Flemings,
Bretons,
Alsatians,
Nissarts, and
Savoyards have still no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands. The text was again refused by
majority deputies on 18 January 2008, after the voiced their absolute disapproval of regional languages, the recognition of which they perceive as "an attack on French national identity". On the
UMP website,
Nicolas Sarkozy denies any mistreatment of regional languages. In a pre-
electoral speech in
Besançon on 13 March 2007 he claimed: His
Socialist rival,
Ségolène Royal, on the contrary, declared herself ready to sign the Charter in a March 2007 speech in
Iparralde for the sake of cultural variety in France: On 27 October 2015, the
Senate rejected a bill for the ratification of the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, preventing the adoption of a constitutional reform that would have given a degree of official status to regional languages such as Occitan. On 8 April 2021, the Breton MP
Paul Molac tried to pass a law to protect minority languages, and this law was passed by the French Parliament in Paris. However, the French Minister of Education, opposed to the teaching in minority languages, asked the
Conseil Constitutionnel to declare it unconstitutional. This led to the law being constitutionally struck down on 21 May 2021. The use of regional languages in local governments is still severely contested. In 2022, some local councils in the traditionally Catalan-speaking department of the Pyrénées-Orientales, such as
Elne, passed a modification of their statutes to allow the intervention in Catalan language by their elected members, as long as they provide an exact oral translation in French, as well a written French translation of the session. Despite being considered a symbolic gesture, the prefect of the department, arguing that the political rights of French speakers will be violated, appealed to justice to repeal these initiatives. In April 2023, the Administrative Court of
Montpellier sided with the Prefect, thus declaring illegal the decisions of the local councils. ==See also==