The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow

stroke of the meeting hour would be paid. That led to members spending the first half-hour of meetings debating whether the clock was right. Perrault tried to solve that problem by supplying the Academy with a state-of-the-art clock, but the prolonged, sometimes senseless debates persisted and became a staple of Academy folklore. As an example, early Academy member Antoine Furetière recounted an occasion when two members threw books at each other because they couldn’t agree about who should belong to a particular committee.
     
    The task of defining a language in a rational way and setting its standards is enormous. It involves choosing words and deciding on their spelling. In some cases words had competing spellings that reflected different pronunciations. The Academy decided that the proper spelling for “asparagus” would be asperge, as some people said, rather than asparge, as others did; “to heal” would be guérir rather than guarir ; and “cheese” became fromage rather than formage. However, in other cases, spelling didn’t match pronunciation at all. For instance, the S in beste (beast) and teste (head)—later to be spelled bête and tête —was not even pronounced.
    The Academy’s choices tended to be conservative on the whole; it generally opted for etymology over pronunciation. Why? According to historian Ferdinand Brunot, members of the Academy steered away from phonetic spellings because they were afraid of looking ignorant of the historical roots of a word. But this orientation was also the expression of a class struggle. The lettered class promoted complicated spellings as a way of holding on to power; by making it hard to learn French, they made it harder for anyone outside their class to enter the circles of power.
    Delays in the Academy’s dictionary project were such that, in 1674, the Academy was given a monopoly from the King for producing a dictionary of bon usage, for they feared that more enterprising lexicographers (dictionary makers) might be working behind their backs. And they were right. In 1680 César-Pierre Richelet managed to publish his Dictionnaire françoys contenant les mots et les choses ( French Dictionary of Words and Things ). Le Richelet, as it came to be known, was the first monolingual French dictionary without references in Latin. A previous landmark in the field, Jean Nicot’s Trésor de la langue française, published in 1606, still defined one word in ten by using Latin. With twenty-five thousand entries, Richelet’s dictionary stands as the prototype of the general dictionary. It included the Court’s best language, but also the language spoken by common people, as well as terms taken from science, the trades and technology, and quotations from authors. Le Richelet was a great success and became the standard French dictionary of its time—six editions had appeared by 1735. Strangely, the Academy didn’t protest Richelet’s stepping onto their turf; he had an excellent reputation, since he had created the first dictionary of French rhymes in 1667. And Richelet was sly enough to print his dictionary in Geneva, out of the King’s reach.
    Another competitor was less fortunate. Antoine Furetière probably began working on his Dictionnaire universel in the 1660s, behind the Academy’s back, while attending its dictionary meetings the whole time. Furetière disagreed with the Academy’s overall approach for a prescriptive dictionary. In his opinion, the French needed a good general descriptive dictionary of French as it was used, not a dictionary of ideal French. But instead of trying to change his colleagues’ approach, Furetière went underground. Word got out only because he went to the King to get a monopoly to write a dictionary of scientific and technical terms, with a promise that it would exclude bon usage, the Academy’s turf. This provoked a rift, especially when it was discovered that Furetière planned to include definitions of bon usage after all.