Latin as Symbol for the Mysteries of French

Abstract

When Montaigne’s father had him learn Latin before learning French, he was combining two standard pedagogical principles that had been widely accredited: the use of Latin in order to teach reading in primary education, and then to teach elocution in secondary education. As Françoise Waquet shows in her study of the history of Latin in modern times (Latin or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries 1998, trans. 2001), during the ancien régime students learned to read by learning to read Latin. Although its grammar is far more complex than the French one, the fact that Latin had a more rational system of spelling and pronunciation was an argument for using it as a basis for the subsequent assimilation of French texts. As mentioned in the Introduction, it is also relevant that the Latin texts in the syllabaires with which children practiced their skills were not classical but Catholic: prayers, psalms, parts of the liturgy, and so on. The pedagogy of French that I discussed in chapter 6 was therefore the product of a relatively recent occurrence: the gradual substitution of French for Latin as the means to acquire literacy.