Contre Vaugelas: Antoine Arnauld on good usage, reason and the perfection of French

Abstract

Antoine Arnauld was a polymath: a major theologian and leader of the seventeenth-century French Jansenists, he also contributed to linguistic theory as a co-author of the ‘Grammaire générale et raisonnée' (1660). Less is known about his role as a lexicographer and observer of linguistic usage. In the ‘Réflexions sur cette maxime Que l'usage est la Règle et le tyran des langues vivantes' (1707), Arnauld contributed to a discussion over good usage launched by Vaugelas with the ‘Remarques sur la langue françoise' (1647). This essay compares the positions of Arnauld and Vaugelas concerning sources of usage, the role of reason and the ways in which language changes and argues that Arnauld postulated the autonomy of the language from the political sphere. It shows that Arnauld challenged Vaugelas's definition of good usage while suggesting ways to preserve French in its perceived state of perfection.

Keywords:

• Jansenism
• Antoine Arnauld
• Port-Royal
• Vaugelas
• Bouhours
• translation
• good usage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Of Wendy Ayres-Bennett’s numerous studies on Vaugelas and seventeenth-century linguistic thought, see Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1997), and her edition of Vaugelas’ Remarques, C. F. de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue françoise (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). The quotations from Vaugelas’ Remarques will be given from this edition.

2 Scholars have analysed good usage in regards to the ‘civilising process’ as a skill that distinguishes the perfect courtier or honnête homme. See, for example, Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); L. C. Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

3 Richard Scholar, The ‘Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi’ in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 63–64.

4 Vaugelas, Remarques, p. 225.

5 A. Arnauld, Œuvres, 43 vols (Paris, Lausanne: S. d’Arnay, 1775–1783), VIII, p. 454.

6 Arnauld, p. 456.

7 Quoted in Ayres-Bennett, p. 57.

8 Arnauld, p. 456.

9 E. Auerbach, ‘La Cour et la Ville’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 137.

10 Arnauld, pp. 455–56.

11 Vaugelas, p. 226.

12 Vaugelas, p. 235.

13 Vaugelas, p. 247.

14 W. K. Percival, ‘The Notion of Usage in Vaugelas and in the Port-Royal Grammar’, in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. by Herman Parret (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 374–82.

15 Arnauld, p. 465.

16 M. Fumaroli, ‘Le génie de la langue française’, in Trois institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 211–314.

17 H. Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste ? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement (Paris: Seuil, 2003), pp. 169–78.

18 Vaugelas, p. 252.

19 D. Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, ed. by Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2003), p. 161.

20 Arnauld, p. 465. Arnauld is probably referring to the debates on the preferred form of the vernacular in sixteenth-century Italy; see J.-L. Fournel, ‘Rhétorique et langue vulgaire en Italie au XVI^e siècle: la guerre, l’amour et les mots’, in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne (1450–1950), ed. by Marc Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), pp. 313–41.

21 I am grateful to John Leigh for pointing this out to me. For Voltaire’s appreciation of seventeenth-century authors see J. Leigh, ‘Voltaire’s Little “Oraisons funèbres”? Catalogue and Canon in the “Siècle de Louis XIV”’, in Evocation of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in Early Modern France. Essays in Honour of Peter Bayley, ed. by Nicholas Hammond and Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 285–99.

22 Michael Moriarty covers the philosophical elements of these debates in an article: ‘Liberté, necessité, contrainte chez Jansénius, Arnauld et Nicole’, Archives de la philosophie, 1 (2015), 111–30.

23 Arnauld probably means his own translation of several works of Augustine, published in 1644–1648, but in the vein of Port-Royal’s rejection of self-love he avoids any self-attribution. J.-R. Armogathe, ‘Arnauld traducteur’, in Études sur Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018), pp. 197–221.

24 Arnauld, p. 460.

25 D. Bouhours, Remarques nouvelles sur la langue françoise (Paris: Cramoisy, 1692), pp. 523–24.

26 Vaugelas, Remarques, p. 282.

27 Vaugelas, Remarques, pp. 73–77 and pp. 178–79.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizaveta Al-Faradzh

Elizaveta Al-Faradzh completed her PhD under the supervision of Michael Moriarty at the University of Cambridge, where she studied the biblical translations of the theologians from Port-Royal. She is currently working on a monograph based on her thesis.