Night Thoughts

[amie-de-rimbaud.livejournal.com]

 Has anyone ever read Young's Night Thoughts, which Camille supposedly took with him into prison? I just bought myself a mid 19th c. edition on Ebay for $10 and my feelings about reading it are difficult to put into words.

Do you know if he possessed a copy in the original English, or if it was a French edition?

(I know I already posted about my man tonight--don't you know it's a Camille attack rrrrrarrggggh!)

Comments

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

Umm...as he was french, in a french speaking country, I'm going to logically guess that the book was in french?

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

First: was there a French translation edited at the latest in 1793? Or, is there an evidence that Camille knew English?

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Answereing myself: there already was a French translation (in prose) so he quite possbibly might have this one. Now, for the other option, one has to check Camille's knowledge of modern languages.

[amie-de-rimbaud.livejournal.com]

Oh, besides his immaculate Latin, I don't know what other languages he knew other than French, if any. I know that Marat's English was excellent (misatheredpanda posted a bit of his English writing), so I guess that I just assumed that it wasn't out of the question for a well-educated (ahem, brilliant) 18th c. Frenchman to know English. But then, I really don't know. You're probably right, though--and it was probably more appropriate (and natural) that the final piece of literature for him to read would be in his own language.

Sorry for being stupid--I should have thought a little more about it.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

It's not stupid - personally, even with translation available, I sometimes like to give the original version a try. You made me now think whether modern languages were taught at Lycée Louis-le-Grand at the time Camille was a student there. Not out of question, as it is the time when modern languages were being introduced to school. We'd have to check how "conservative" they were at the time, but in my opinion it might be a trace worth following for itself.

[(Anonymous)]

I find it highly improbable that English was taught in the Louis-le-Grand. Marat and Danton (who also spoke English) were exiled in England for a time.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Mhm, too early for me. But theoretically not entirely impossible, which means it'd have to be checked. And it's an interesting task - *how* to prove whether Camille Desmoulins knew English, or any modern foreign language, well enough to read literature in original.

[nirejseki.livejournal.com]

Well, Marat was a Swiss whose father was a teacher of languages, then proceeded to live in England for quite a few years even before the Revolution, so no matter how bright Camille is, the comparison isn't really apt. I think it's more likely that Camille had it in French, simply because there's a difference between having some knowledge of a language and reading a book in one! My parents have been in the US for over twenty years and spoke English almost fluently even before that - and they still prefer to read English book translations rather than the book itself.

(Besides, I would imagine you'd take something comforting to prison - not something you'd have to struggle with, or to curse about the fact that you don't have a dictionary for a difficult word...^^)

[amie-de-rimbaud.livejournal.com]

Touché. What you said makes perfect sense. I'm in the middle of a 700 pp. Camille biography, and I've already been through the detailed sections on his education--no mention of English studies. *Palm face* I think that maybe I drew the conclusion because I was secretly pleased at the idea for some reason.

[amie-de-rimbaud.livejournal.com]

"Young's Night Thoughts was particularly embraced after excerpts were translated and published in 1760," according to a book called 'Romanticism and the Human Sciences,' which cites another source as that says: "Robespierre had a copy in his pocket during his days in power, and his victim Camille Desmoulins read a page on the way to the guillotine - Tu veux mourir donc deux fois?"

I think we can safely imagine that Camille's book was one of the popular French translations.

[loremaula.livejournal.com]

In that time it wasn't very usual to learn English if you weren't living in England. French was the universal language, overall among people from a certain social status.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Interesting thread. I would imagine they'd be reading in translation. French was the European language of the upper classes (the English upper classes learned French, and French was the main language of the Russian aristocracy, falling out of fashion after Napoleon invaded). Tom Paine was from the artisan (equivalent of sansculotte) class in England, so he wasn't taught French, even though he went to grammar school (a better school than many of his social class), which was a disadvantage when he got elected to the Convention. He could and did communicate in English with Danton and Marat, and I presume he fell in with Brissot and co. because Brissot had spent time in England, too. I think I remember Barere (or someone like that)could read Paine's written English, but couldn't speak it to communicate with him verbally, though I don't know how typical that is. Danton is supposed to have had a library stocked with books in English (Shakespeare etc.), though I'm pretty certain the Shakespeare plays staged in Paris during the Revolution period were in French.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

On a related note, I recently heard the bizarre-sounding statistic that in early 19thc France, 80% of the population didn't speak 'French'! I doubt it would be that high, but the rural/peasant populations of the 18thc probably didn't speak a version of the language that the educated/Parisian upper/middle classes could understand! I suppose they would be speaking dialect, Occitan, patois, etc. as a first language, much as large areas of Britain in the same period spoke Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, rather than the South-East middle-class English which is now the 'standard' language.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, Occitan is definitely a historical language with a rich literature, not a dialect, though brain-washed centralists may deny it :-)
Plus, in Bretagne "la langue breton", a celtic indo-european language was widely spoken.

[(Anonymous)]

France was much more linguistically diverse than England I think, especially by the late 18th century, most English people spoke English.

The statistics on French lnaguages are based on the study by Abbé Gregoire, which I always quote in essays yet I always lose after I've finished... I didn't think it was as high as 80% either. But there was an extraordinarly high number of people who couldn't even understand French.

One of the sad things about this revolution though is the way it treated minority languages... It's one of the reasons why Breton is so neglected now, and will soon be forgotten, is a remnant of this republique une et indivisible which recognises no language but French.

[(Anonymous)]

I meant to say, in fact, that perhaps 80% people had a different language/dialect as their mother tongue but they may be able to speak French as well, but many peasants couldn't even speak it. Sorry to be unclear.