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Revue De Géographie Historique, 13 | 2018 a Gaze on the Linguistic Geography of the Napoleonic Italy Through the Letter

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Revue De Géographie Historique, 13 | 2018 a Gaze on the Linguistic Geography of the Napoleonic Italy Through the Letter Revue de géographie historique 13 | 2018 La géographie d'un événement aux répercussions mondiales : la Révolution française A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letters of Jacques Boucher de Perthes Elisa Baccini Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/geohist/1277 DOI: 10.4000/geohist.1277 ISSN: 2264-2617 Publisher Association française de la Revue de géographie historique Electronic reference Elisa Baccini, “A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letters of Jacques Boucher de Perthes”, Revue de géographie historique [Online], 13 | 2018, Online since 20 November 2018, connection on 12 June 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/geohist/1277 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/geohist.1277 This text was automatically generated on 12 June 2021. Ce(tte) œuvre est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letter... 1 A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letters of Jacques Boucher de Perthes Elisa Baccini 1 The territorial expansion of the First Napoleonic Empire and the consequent relocation of Napoleonic soldiers and administrators had created a new conception of the geography of European space. This new geography brought together people of different nationalities and languages, all of them under imperial rule. Napoleon tried to impose his domination and eliminate these language differences by implementing a series of policies which had the goal to spread the French language and standardize language practices. Also in the Italian départements réunis were introduced these policies. In fact, there were the mandatory introduction of French in the exercise of administrative and judicial functions, the institution of the teaching of French language throughout the school system and the establishment of plays performed in French on the Italian main theatres. The hegemonic design on the French language, put into practice with these initiatives, had to clash with the local Italian realities in which dialects often prevailed over the national language. The French in service of the Emperor, once arrived in Italy, realized that regional dialects and languages were spoken in large sections of the population. In addition to this phenomenon, we must add the fact that frequently the French administrative division did not always coincide with the ancient territorial subdivisions (Broers, 2003), so for example in some Ligurian departments were amalgamated territories that belonged to ancient Piedmont, or even in some Piedmontese departments were present cantons of Aosta Valley, or finally in the two departments created by the former Roman states, regional territories with very different traditions were brought together. This arbitrary subdivision, not linked to territorial realities, led to departments in which there were more than one regional language or dialect. Revue de géographie historique, 13 | 2018 A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letter... 2 2 It was precisely this linguistic diversity that led the Napoleonic government to carry out an official investigation : the Bureau de statistique, in fact, undertook the project of reconstructing the linguistic geography of France, Italian departments included (Galimard, 1992; Ködel, 2012; McCain, 2018). It seems that the original idea came from the then Minister of the Interior, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, who in 1806 entrusted the director of the Bureau de statistique, Charles Étienne Coquebert de Montbret, with this investigation on the spread of the French language in the Empire. The research was undertaken by Charles Étienne with his son Eugène, also employed in the same office, from 1806 to 1810, the year in which Eugène alone continued the work begun with his father until the closure of the Bureau de Statistique in 1812[i]. 3 The purpose of the investigation was to trace the boundaries of the territories where French language was spoken, but also the geographical limits of those parts of the Empire where the mother tongue was not French, but German, Italian, Flemish, Breton and Basque. It is immediately obvious how much this effort to locate linguistic diversity in geographical space could have been useful for administrative purposes. However, what was a long and complex project did not have the desired effect on the imperial government, which decided to close the investigation in subject, but also on the Bureau de Statistique itself. Nevertheless, the documentation and data that emerged from this enquiry were numerous and advantageous in the sense of a first real effort to quantify the linguistic diversity of France. 4 The Coqueberts de Montbret had in addition the objective of identifying the « principaux points qui circonscrivent à peu près le territoire qu’occupe chaque dialecte secondaire de ces divers langages principaux»[ii]. In general, the picture that emerged, even in some areas of ancient France, was that a certain territory corresponded to an official mother tongue (which could be for example French, Italian or German), but that in reality the dialects had the widest spread. However, there is a fundamental difference between the data concerning the old French departments and the new Italian departments: in the latter case, in fact the main interest was to know the number of those who speak a specific language in a given territory and not only the dialectal geography of a region, as in the case of the French regions (Ködel, 2012). 5 The attention to the quantitative data, in the territories au de-là des Alpes, is very significant and can lead us to suppose that the government wanted to know some statistical data to undertake concrete political initiatives on the italian conquered territories. Besides the different search criteria between the imperial departments in France and the territories conquered outside it, the testimonies describing the linguistic habits in the departments are very significant. In many cases the prefects of the departments involved in the survey affirmed to a Coquebert who wondered whether or not dialects were spoken, that in reality the dialects were the real "languages" in use, in spite of Italian/Tuscan, which was also denied by people "bièn élevées", who despite reading it regularly, did not speak it except with pain and incorrectly[iii]. The ignorance of the Coqueberts de Montbret about the presence of dialects in the Italian departments coincided with that of the French officials who, sent to the new Italian territories, were faced with unexpected linguistic habits. Therefore, it is possible to assume that for these officials the real linguistic competitor of the French was not so much the Italian, as the local dialect of the department in which they had taken service. Revue de géographie historique, 13 | 2018 A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letter... 3 I. The path of Jacques Boucher de Perthes and the letters from Italy 6 Unfortunately, it is difficult to access documents that record oral practices, which is why the investigation of the Coqueberts is a valuable source for the time. In such a context of lack of sources, the epistolary of Jacques Boucher de Perthes can be precious, because his descriptions of the customs offices, but also of the Italian society of that time, are useful to reconstruct a small but fundamental part of the oral habits of Italy of the first years of the nineteenth century. Jacques Boucher de Perthes is considered one of the founders of the prehistoric sciences on which he carried researches in parallel to his career of literate and employee in the French customs[iv]. It is interesting that the beginning of his career in customs coincided with the foundation of the First Napoleonic Empire and it was in those years (precisely 1805) that he was sent to Italy, when he was only 17 years old, to serve in the customs of the city of Genoa, which had been that year annexed to France. Boucher de Perthes was in Genoa from 1805 to 1808, then in Livorno from 1808 to 1810 and finally in Foligno from 1810 to 1811. During his Italian stay he sent several letters to his family and other acquaintances, many of which narrated the linguistic practices of the populations of the territories where he worked. These letters were collected by him and published, with the correspondence of his entire life, in a work called Sous dix rois[v]. 7 It is important, however, to make a observation on these letters. Boucher's correspondence was published in eight volumes from 1863 to 1868, therefore about sixty years after the employment in the imperial customs in Italy. They were surely the result of a hard revision for which there could be some problems of reliability. Regarding, however, the experiences described by Boucher about the linguistic geography of the departments visited by him, we cannot consider them not corresponding to the truth, or at least to corresponding to the impression that Boucher actually had when he lived in those territories. For what reason, in fact, the elderly Boucher would have altered the letters of the youth in those parts where he narrated the perception of the linguistic practices of the visited cities? There would be no valid explanations to these alterations, for which, with the due precautions regarding this source, I consider these letters valid for my investigation[vi]. Revue de géographie historique, 13 | 2018 A gaze on the linguistic geography of the Napoleonic Italy through the letter... 4 Document 1 : Northern and Central Italy in 1799 A. Ligurian dialects and Italian language 8 Many sources of the time, as in the exchanges of letters of Coquebert de Montbret, report the consideration that the French administrators were not aware of the real spread of dialects in Italy.
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