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The Place of Words - The Academie Francaise and Its Dictionary during an Age of Revolution (Hardcover)
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The Place of Words - The Academie Francaise and Its Dictionary during an Age of Revolution (Hardcover)
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The primary responsibility of the Academie Francaise to compose a
dictionary of the French language intersected with major
undercurrents of the French Revolution, and its significance
continued through the Napoleonic period and into the Restoration.
Yet, despite being such a prominent institution under the Old
Regime, scholarship on the Academie during these periods remains
largely neglected. From its origins in the late seventeenth
century, there have been nine editions of the dictionary-of those
nine, the fifth edition (published in 1798) is unquestionably the
most controversial. When the National Convention commissioned it
two years after it had suppressed the Academie, it expected the
edition to highlight the ideals of the French Revolution and
republic. Instead, the Academie delivered a dictionary comprised of
anachronistic values and present-tense definitions of abolished
institutions, the Revolution mentioned only in brief in a
hastily-prepared supplement consigned to the end of the second
volume. For its failure to capture the current state of the French
language, most contemporaries judged it harshly, and its
deficiencies even led Parisian publisher Nicolas Moutardier to
publish a competing edition in 1802. The dictionary became the
focus of protracted litigation that Napoleon Bonaparte's government
increasingly used to assert its control over language. Indeed,
Bonaparte met personally with the Institut National preparing the
sixth edition, making clear his desire that it not contain
Revolutionary neologisms. Eager to see the new edition appear, the
Bonapartist regime committed financial resources and established a
timetable for its completion within five years. Bonaparte, however,
fell from power before it was completed. The restored Bourbon
dynasty, though also eager to see the new edition completed, was
less concerned with the control of language, and the sixth edition
appeared in 1835, five years after the Bourbon dynasty was
overthrown. Drawing on previously unused sources, A Place of Words
is the first book-length study of the controversial fifth edition
of the Academie Francaise. Spanning over half a century of changing
regimes, the edition provides unique insight into the ways in which
each government between the beginning of its preparation after the
fourth edition's publication in 1762 and the publication of the
sixth edition in 1835 viewed the role of language as an instrument
of control.
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