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

[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.