This multinational collection of essays challenges the traditional image of a monolingual Ancient Regime in Enlightenment Europe, both East and West. Its archival research explores the important role played by selective language use in social life and in the educational provisions in the early constitution of modern society. A broad range of case studies show how language was viewed and used symbolically by social groups - ranging from the nobility to the peasantry - to develop, express, and mark their identities.

For centuries, French was the language of international commercial and diplomatic relations, a near-dominant language in literature and poetry, and was widely used in teaching. It even became the fashionable language of choice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for upper class Dutch, Russians, Italians, Egyptians, and others for personal correspondence, travel journals, and memoirs. This book is the first to take a close look at how French was used in that latter context: outside of France, in personal and private life. It gathers contributions from historians, literary scholars, and linguists and covers a wide range of geographical areas.

Suisse romande depuis son mariage, mais ayant passe la premiere moitie de sa vie aux Pays-Bas ou le francais etait devenu tres tot sa langue " naturelle ", Belle de Zuylen / Isabelle de Charriere joue quelque peu les trublions dans nos habitudes academiques. Lire son oeuvre - ses lettres, ses romans, ses pamphlets et ses pieces de theatre - c'est accepter des retouches a notre tableau des Lumieres qui n'en ressortira pas indemne ; c'est revoir les limites du champ de la critique litteraire, structure et hierarchise depuis le XIXe siecle en fonction de litteratures " nationales ". Bilingue (francais et anglais), ce recueil contient des articles bases sur les contributions a un colloque international qui s'est tenu a l'Universite d'Utrecht en avril 2005 pour commemorer le bicentenaire de la mort de l'ecrivaine. As a Dutch woman who spent half her life in Switzerland and chose French as her writing language, Belle de Zuylen / Isabelle de Charriere parades a defiant attitude towards the constraints of the literary field. To read with care her letters, her novels, pamphlets and plays means accepting some modifications to our picture of the Enlightenment, and obliges us to question the limits of the field of literary criticism such as it has been structured since the nineteenth century, that is, along the lines of national canons. This bilingual volume (English and French) contains articles based on contributions to the international congress that was organized at Utrecht University in April 2005 on the occasion of the bicentennial of the author's death.