In the period from 1800 through 1870, non-native French speakers came to form a “Global Lingua Franca” (GoLingua): a Francophone space that expanded through technological progress and global interconnection. “GoLingua” conducts case studies of Francophones in three regions—Russia, Germany, and Haiti—to challenge the ways that French historians think of “French” space outside of France. Instead of focusing on formal French territories, I take on more difficult work by moving beyond the French colonial sphere and approaching the concept of language as a theme of transnational history. The project applies the methods of Bourdieuvian social theory and discourse analysis to analyze the speech of non-native French speakers in archives from Germany, France, Luxembourg, and the United States.
French was the most widespread foreign language among the European upper classes in the period of the Old Regime. According to one of its most well-known speakers, King Frederick the Great of Prussia, French could be understood “from Lisbon to St. Petersburg”—even if many commoners and a majority of French people were still ignorant of their own supposedly “national” tongue. Yet even as early as the 1780s, French linguistic hegemony within Europe had already begun to crumble. Many international speakers began to use English or German in contexts where they would have used French only a few years before. Historians have for this reason long supposed that the Revolution, followed by the fall of Napoleon, marked the beginning of a century-long caesura in the history of international French. The three leading works on the development of French abroad link the birth of contemporary francophonie to the foundation of the Alliance Française in 1883 and thus wholly ignores earlier developments.
The research objective is as follows: How can global French offer a transnational framework for the study of the history of language? “GoLingua” shows how and why French became so important to new elites who came into contact with European space. While the reign of Louis XIV had once seen the establishment of French as the lingua franca of a tiny but influential European elite, resistance to French Revolutionary and Napoleonic invasions gave increasing prominence to English and German in established circles. Yet within many previously excluded groups, French actually gained in prominence as women, members of the European bourgeoisie, and local elites from faraway lands learned the language to join an increasingly interconnected world.
This inquiry, in turn, leads to four associated research objectives:
O1: Contrast the failure of French military action in three regions—Haiti, modern-day Germany, and Russia—against the continued prominence of the French language therein (WP1, Pre-Research; WP2, German, Luxemburgish, and US Archives; WP3, Secondment and Archives in France).
O2: Identify and describe the variants of French as the language was spoken in each region (WP2; WP3; WP4, Russian Language Training and Knowledge Transfer).
O3: Connect new information about Francophone women and isolated elites with large-scale trends in global history, paying particular attention to technological progress and the growing interconnection of the nineteenth-century world (WP2; WP3).
O4: Receive feedback from academic audiences through a conference paper in sociolinguistics and a conference paper on French in western Germany and Frankfurt-am-Main. Submit a peer-reviewed article on French as one of many languages in independent Haiti; submit a second peer-reviewed article that connects the stories of Russian Francophones and travelers to Europe in the nineteenth century with ongoing debates over Russia’s European identity today. Academic dissemination will lead to a scholarly monograph after the conclusion of the grant. Conduct conversations with French language officials in Paris and Institut Français officials in Luxembourg and Frankfurt to contribute to two popular articles in French and in English for popular communication (WP5, Management; WP6, Communication).
