I bring your attention today to the most beautiful European language, that which was the first to unequivocally declare the rights of man and of the citizen³, that which is charged with giving the world the most sublime ideas about liberty, & the greatest speculations of politics.

For a long time the language was enslaved, used to flatter kings, corrupt courts & subjugate the people; for a long time, it was dishonored in schools, & misleading in public education texts; clever in courts, fanatical in temples, barbaric in diplomas, softened by poets, corruptor of theaters, it seemed to await, or rather desire, a finer destiny.

Finally refined, & softened by some playwrights, ennobled & brilliant in the discourse of some orators, it regained energy, reason & liberty under the pen of some philosophers who had the dubious distinction of being honored by persecution before the Revolution of 1789.

But it still seemed to belong only to certain classes of society; it had taken on the color of noble distinctions; & the sycophant, not happy with being recognized by his vices & depredations, still sought to distinguish himself, in the same country, by a different language. It appeared as though there were several nations in one.

It had to exist in a monarchical government, where one had to prove themselves worthy of entering an educational institution, in a country where a certain way of speaking was necessary to be considered good company, & where it was necessary to whistle the language in a particular manner to be a proper man.

These childish distinctions have disappeared along with the

3. Refers to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an important document in the Revolution passed by the National Constituent Assembly in 1789. -Trans.

grimaces of the ridiculous sycophant & the rattles of a perverted court. The very pride derived from an accent more or less pure or sonorous no longer exists ever since the citizens assembled from all parts of the Republic have expressed in the national assemblies their wishes for freedom, & their ideas for a common legislation. Formerly they were slaves emblazoned with their nuances; they fought one another over the superiority of trends & languages. Freemen are all alike, & the passionate emphasis on liberty & equality is the same, whether it comes from the mouth of someone from the Alps, the Vosges, the Pyrénées or the Cantal, or Mont-Blanc or Mont-Terrible; whether it becomes the expression of men in central regions, in coastal regions, or on the borders.

Four points of the territory of the Republic alone deserve the attention of a revolutionary legislature, in regard to the idioms that seem most contrary to the propagation of the public mind, & present obstacles to the knowledge of the laws of the Republic & to their execution.

Among the ancient idioms-- Welsh, Gascon, Celtic, Visigothic, Phocaean, or Oriental-- that bring some nuances to the communications of various citizens & of regions forming the territory of the Republic, we have observed (& the reports of representatives agree on this point along with those of the various agents sent out to the departments) that the language known as Bas-Breton⁴, the Basque language, the German & Italian languages perpetuated the reign of fanaticism & superstition, assured the dominance of priests, nobles & doctors, prevented the Revolution from spreading into nine major departments, & may help the enemies of France.

4. Bas-Breton: name of a Celtic language spoken in Brittany. -Trans.

Let me begin with Bas-Breton. It is spoken exclusively in almost all of the departments of Morbihan, Finistère, Côtes-du-Nord, parts of Ille-&-Vilaine, & in a large part of Loire-inférieure⁵. There, ignorance perpetuates the enslavement imposed by priests & nobles; there, citizens live & die in error: they are unaware of the existence of new laws.

The inhabitants of the countryside only understand the language of Bas-Breton; it is with this barbaric instrument of their superstitious thoughts that priests & schemers hold them under their control, guiding their consciences & preventing the citizens from knowing the laws & loving the Republic. Your works are unknown to them, your efforts for their emancipation are ignored.

Public education cannot be established there, national regeneration is impossible there. It is an indestructible federalism, that which is founded upon the lack of communication of thoughts; & if the various departments, only in the countryside, spoke various idioms, such federalists could only be corrected with schoolmasters, and only several years from now.

The consequences of this idiom, perpetuated for too long & too generally spoken in the five departments of Western France, are so important that peasants (according to the people who have been sent there) confuse the word law with that of religion to such an extent, that, when civil servants speak to them about the laws of the Republic & the decrees of the Convention, they exclaim in their vulgar language : Do they want us to constantly change religions?

How Machiavellistic of the priests to have confused law & religion in the thoughts of the good people of the countryside! Judge, by this particular feature, whether it is time to deal with this issue. You

5. Some of the departments of France among the 83 that were created in 1790. -Trans.

have deprived these misguided fanatics of the empire of saints, with the calendar of the Republic; remove them from the empire of priests by teaching them the French language.

In the departments of Haut & of Bas-Rhin, who called, in conjunction with the traitors, the Prussians and Austrians to our overrun borders? Is it not the resident of the countryside who speaks the same language as our enemies, & who thinks of himself much more as their brother & fellow citizen, than as the brother & fellow citizen of the French who speak a different language & who have other customs?

The power of the identity of language was so great that in the retreat of Germany, more than 20 thousand men from the Bas-Rhin countryside emigrated. The empire of language and intelligence that reigned between our German enemies & our fellow citizens of the Bas-Rhin department is so undeniable that they were not stopped in their emigration by any of those things which men hold most dear: the soil that was witness to their birth, their home gods & the ground they had fertilized. Differences in conditions and pride produced the first emigration which gave France billions; the difference in language, lack of education, and ignorance produced a second emigration that is leaving nearly an entire department without farmers. Thus the counter-revolution has been established on some borders by taking refuge in the strange or barbaric idioms that should have been eradicated.

In another corner of the Republic there is a new but antique people, shepherds & navigators, who never were either slaves or masters, whom Caesar could not conquer in the middle of his triumphant pursuit through the Gaul⁶, whom Spain could not hurt in the midst of its revolutions, & that the despotism of our tyrants

6. Gaul was a Celtic territory in the Iron Age that encompassed modern-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and parts of the Netherlands and Germany. -Trans.

could not subject to the yoke of intendants⁷, I refer to the Basque people. The Basque people occupy the far corner of the Western Pyrénées which flows into the ocean. A spoken language full of images is seen as the seal of their origin and the heritage transmitted to them by their ancestors. But they have priests, & priests use their dialect to fanaticize them; they ignore the French language & the language of the Republic’s laws. They must then learn it, because, in spite of the difference in language & in spite of the priests, they are devoted to the Republic which they have defended with honor along the Bidassoa river & in our squadrons.

Another department that deserves attracting your attention is the department of Corsica. Fierce friends of liberty, when the treacherous Paoli⁸ & the federal administrators associated with priests do not mislead them, the Corsicans are French citizens; but for the four years that the Revolution has lasted, they do not know our laws, they do not know the events & the crises of our liberty.

Too close to Italy, what could they have received from it? Priests, indulgences, seditious addresses, fanatical movements. Pascal Paoli, English by recognition, disguised by his habits, weakened by his age, Italian by principle, priestly as needed, powerfully uses the Italian language to pervert the public mind, to mislead the public, to grow his party; above all he uses the ignorance of the Corsicans who do not even know about the existence of French laws because the laws are in a language they do not understand.

It is true that we have been translating our legislation into Italian for a few months now; but would it not be better to establish teachers of our language there, rather than translators of a foreign language?

7. A title given to a high-ranking official. -Trans.
8. Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807) was a politician and military general in Corsica. He was influential during the Corsican War of Independence from France and the creation of the constitution of Corsica. -Trans.

Citizens, this is how Vendée⁹was born, its cradle was the ignorance of laws, its growth was caused by the methods set in place to prevent the Revolution from infiltrating; & so the gods of ignorance, the defiant priests, the conspiring nobles, the greedy craftsmen & the weak administrators or accomplices opened this hideous wound in the heart of France: we must therefore crush ignorance, & establish teachers of the French language in the countryside.

For three years the national assemblies have been speaking about and discussing public education; for a long time the need for primary schools has been felt: these are moral subsistences of the first necessity that the countryside asks of you; but perhaps we are still too academic & too far removed from the people to give them the institutions most adapted to their most pressing needs.

The laws of education prepare a person to be an artisan, an artist, a scholar, a writer, a legislator & a public official; but the first laws of education must prepare a person to be a citizen: to be a citizen, however, one must obey the laws, & to obey the laws, one must know them. You owe the people this primary education, which will have them understanding the voice of the legislator. What contradiction brings to our mind the departments of the Haut & Bas Rhine, those of Morhiban, Finistère, Ille-&-Villaine, Loire-Inférieuere, Côtes-du-Nord, Lower Pyrenees and Corsica? The legislator speaks a language which those who must execute and obey do not understand. The ancients never knew such striking and dangerous contrasts.

We must popularize the language, we must destroy that aristocracy of language that seems to establish a polished nation in the midst of a barbarous nation.

9. The 1793 conflict in Vendée was a counter-revolutionary, Royalist uprising. -Trans.

We have revolutionized the government, laws, habits, mores, commerce, & thought itself; therefore, let us also revolutionize that which is their daily instrument: language.

You have ordered the delivery of laws to all the municipalities of the Republic; but this good deed is lost for those departments that I have just indicated. At such high cost this knowledge is brought to the extremities of France yet it is extinguished upon arrival, for laws there are not understood.

Federalism & superstition speak Bas-Breton; emigration & hatred towards the Republic speak German; counterrevolution speaks Italian, & fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us destroy these harmful & erroneous instruments.

The Comité believed it should propose, as an urgent & revolutionary measure, to provide each designated rural municipality of said departments, a French-speaking instructor. He would be charged with educating young people of both sexes, as well as every ten days, reading the laws, decrees, & instructions sent by the Convention, to all the other citizens of the municipality. It shall be the duty of these instructors to translate these laws aloud, so that they be understood more easily at first. Rome educated their youth by teaching them to read the Twelve Tables.¹⁰ France will teach the French language to a group of citizens via the Declaration of Rights.

It is not that there do not exist other idioms more or less refined in other departments; but they are not exclusive, these idioms have not impeded the learning of the national language. If French is not equally well spoken everywhere, it is at least easily understood. Associations & patriotic organizations establish

10. The Laws of the Twelve Tables was a code of law created by the Romans circa 450 B.C.E. They were considered the foundation of Roman law.

primary schools for the language & for liberty; they will suffice to make the language known in the departments where there remain too many vestiges of this patois, of this gabble, maintained by habit & disseminated by negligent education or lack thereof. The legislator should view things from above, & should not just recognize the clearly pronounced nuances, the enormous differences; he only owes language instructors to regions accustomed to a single idiom, isolated & separated from the great family.

These instructors will not belong to any group of worship: there will be no teaching of priesthood in public education; good patriots, enlightened men, these are the necessary qualities needed to be an educator.

Local organizations will choose their candidates: they will come from amongst themselves, these instructors must be from those towns. It shall be by the people’s representatives sent to establish the revolutionary government, that these instructors will be chosen.

Their salary will be paid for by the Public Treasury. The Republic has an obligation to provide an elementary education to all citizens; their salary will not arouse greed; it will satisfy the needs of a man living in the countryside, established at fifteen hundred francs each year. Their diligence, recorded by the constituent authorities, will be the Republic’s guarantee for the payment of these instructors who will be fulfilling a mission more important than it seems at first glance. They will educate men about liberty, connect citizens to their country, & ensure the execution of laws by making them known.

The Comité’s proposition may seem frivolous in the eyes of ordinary men, but I am addressing the legislators of the people, those charged with

presiding over the most beautiful revolution that politics & the human spirit have ever experienced.

If I were speaking to a despot, he would blame me; within monarchy itself, each house, municipality, & province, was in one way or form, a separate empire with its own mores, customs, laws, traditions & language. The despot needed to isolate peoples, separate regions, divide interests, impede communication, & halt the simultaneity of ideas & the identity of movements. Despotism maintained the diversity of idioms; a monarchy must resemble the Tower of Babel. There is but one universal language for a tyrant: that of force, to maintain obedience; & that of taxes, to accrue money.

On the contrary, within a democracy, the surveillance of government is conferred to each citizen. In order to surveil it one must be familiar with it, above all in terms of language.

A Republic’s laws imply that all citizens must keep an eye on each other, as well as keep under constant surveillance the observance of laws & the conduct of public officials. Can we keep this promise to one another if we maintain this confusion of languages, the lack of primary education for the people, & the ignorance of citizens?

For that matter, how much have we not spent translating the laws of the first two National Assemblies in the different idioms spoken in France, as if it were our duty to maintain these barbarous jargons & crude idioms, useful only to fanatics & counterrevolutionaries.

To allow citizens to remain ignorant of the national language, is to commit treason against the country; it is to allow the torrent
 

of knowledge to be poisoned or obstructed in its course; it is to be ignorant of the benefits of the printing press, for each printmaker himself is a public instructor of language & legislation.

Will you leave without benefit, somewhere in this territory, this wonderful invention that proliferates ideas & disperses knowledge, reproducing laws & decrees so quickly that within eight days, it reaches every corner of the Republic? It is an invention that allows the National Convention to be present in all municipalities, & the only method of ensuring that this great nation possesses enlightened thinking, education, a public mind, & a democratic government.

Citizens, the language of a people must be one & the same for all.

From the moment that men think, from the moment they are able to coalesce their thoughts, the empire of priests, despots, & schemers approaches destruction.

Let us therefore give citizens the instrument of public thought, the most secure agent of the revolution, the same language.

So what? While foreigners all around the globe learn the French language, while our public papers circulate in all regions; while the Journal Universel & the Journal des Hommes Libres¹¹are read in every nation from one pole to the other, how can we say that in France alone there are six hundred thousand Frenchmen who do not speak the language of their nation, & who are neither familiar with the laws nor the revolution taking place amongst them?

Let us be prideful of the preeminence given by the French language since it became republicanized, & let us fulfill a duty.

Let us leave the Italian language to the pleasures of

11. The Journal des Hommes Libres, also known as Le Républicain, was a newspaper published between 1792-1800 in Paris, France.

harmony & the expressions of a weak & corrupted poetry.

Let us leave the German language, scarcely made for free people, until the feudal & militarized government, to which German is the worthiest organ, is annihilated.

Let us leave the Spanish language for its inquisition & its universities, until it expresses the expulsion of the House of Bourbon, dethroner all of the peoples of Spain.

As for the English language, made great & free the day it became enriched from these words: the majesty of people, it is no more than the idiom of a tyrannical & detestable government of banks & promissory notes

Our enemies had made the French language the language of the courts: they had degraded it. It is up to us to make of it the language of the people, & it shall be honored.

It is up to one language, one that has lent its accents to liberty; a language that has a legislative forum & two thousand popular forums with large walls to incite large assemblies, & theaters to celebrate patriotism; it is up to one language, one that after four years, has been read by all the people on Earth; describes the worth of fourteen armies to all of Europe; serves as the instrument of glory for the recovery of Toulon, of Landau, of Fort-Vauban, & to the annihilation of the royal armies, it is up to it alone to become the universal language.

But this ambition is that of the genius of the liberty: it will fulfill it. For us, we owe it to our fellow citizens, we owe it to the strengthening of the Republic, to make spoken throughout its territory the language in which the Declaration of Rights of Man is written.

Here is the draft of the decree.

DRAFT OF DECREE.

The National Convention, after having heard the report of the Comité du Salut Public, decrees:

ARTICLE ONE.There will be established in ten days, from the day of the publication of this decree, a French language teacher in each municipality of the countryside in the departments of Morbihan, of Finistère, of the Côtes du Nord & in the part of the Loire Inférieure, in which inhabitants speak the idiom known as Bas-Breton.
 II. Similarly, a French language instructor will be nominated in each municipality of the countryside in the departments of Haut & Bas-Rhin, the departments of Corsica, in the parts of the department of Moselle, the department of the North, of Mont-Terrible, of the maritime Alps & of Basses-Pyrénées, in which inhabitants speak a foreign idiom.
 III. No instructor will be chosen from among the ministers of any religion, nor from among those who belonged to castes that were previously privileged; they will be named by the representatives of the people, following the recommendations of local organizations.

IV.The instructors will have to teach the French language & the Declaration of Rights of Man daily, in alternation, to the young citizens of both sexes, whom the mother & father & guardians must send to public schools.

Every ten days , they will give a lecture to the people, & verbally translate the laws of the Republic, giving precedence to those relating to agriculture & the rights of citizens.
 V. The instructors will receive from the Public Treasury a salary of 1500 francs per year, paid at the end of each month to the district treasury, based on the certificate of residency given by the municipalities, & with the diligence & zeal to their duty, by the national agent closest to each municipality.

Local organizations are invited to spread the establishment of clubs for the oral translation of the decrees & laws of the Republic, & to multiply the means of making the French language known in most remote areas of the countryside.

The Comité du Salut Public is charged with taking all the measures it deems necessary concerning this issue.

This decree is henceforth adopted.
 FROM THE NATIONAL PRINTER.

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