Judging a Multilingual Society: The Accommodation of Linguistic Diversity in French Law Courts, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Early modern France was an intensely multilingual society where proper French rubbed shoulders with Latin and local dialects and tongues.  This polyglossia introduced a very real dimension of complexity to social relations.  Given that the ability to read, write, speak and understand the languages of written record and legal procedure was largely reserved for an elite, it was necessary for this elite to accommodate those who did not possess these skills.

This paper proposes to examine one crucial dimension of the mediation of linguistic difference in early modern France: judicial practice.  Lawyers, judges and court scribes who kept records and deliberated in French, as well as notaries who recorded marriage contracts in Latin or French, developed procedures or improvised ways to interact with those who did not speak or read French and Latin.  They served as mediators between the world of text, writing, and the law, conjugated in Latin and French (and in Occitan, a widely-practiced administrative tongue well into the sixteenth century in many parts of the south), and the world of spoken discourse, cast in colloquial French or regional languages.  On a practical level, they insured that judicial institutions embedded within a society in which languages were unequally distributed functioned smoothly.  For the legal system to operate, it was essential that information flow back and forth between the written page and the spoken word, between Latin, learned French and scribal Occitan on the one hand, and spoken vernaculars on the other, between the king’s officials and his subjects.  Mindful of this reality, the crown, local governments and a range of institutions developed a wide range of formal procedures and informal strategies to accommodate linguistic difference.  The fact that such attempts only intensified during this period suggests that the crown had no project to linguistically unify France before 1789.