(Im)moral Grammars: The Politics of Affects in French Ladies’ Grammar Books (1785 - 1808)

Anaïs Michel

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, PhD

In 1785, a French abbé living in Geneva, Louis Barthélémy, decided to publish a Grammaire des dames (Ladies' Grammar). In 1788, he revisited his grammatical project aimed at ladies by publishing La Cantatrice grammairienne (The Singer Grammarian). In his Grammaire, he claimed to facilitate learning through light poetry. It was a great success, going through six editions up to 1808. As for La Cantatrice, to my knowledge, it appeared to be a relative editorial failure, without any reprint. The recipe seems similar nonetheless: grammar and poems to teach it to an audience of "ladies". Broadly speaking, the same cake, but with altered proportions: in La Cantatrice, the songs take up entire pages while the grammar is sometimes found, at best, in footnotes; whereas the Ladies' Grammar is a genuine grammar, sprinkled with examples in playful verse. The preface of La Cantatrice addresses not only "ladies" but women as singing beings; whereas the Grammar, respectfully, offers an apology for grammatical knowledge and the discursive and written skills of the "ladies" and "young women of quality" who must be taught a more technical body of knowledge.

The ideological structure seems similar at first glance, but the results are completely different. How can we explain the success and failure of these two works? Why did the Grammaire des dames succeed? It was situated in an unstable France, which experienced four different regimes between 1785 and 1808, from the monarchy to the Napoleonic Empire by way of two revolutionary regimes. How to explain the longevity of the Grammar across deeply unstable political situations? La Cantatrice can be considered an exaggerated version of La Grammaire in terms of gendering grammatical knowledge transmission. What accounts for these different patterns of circulation? In this period of linguistic standardization, when language was a particular political object, what social forces were at work in the production and circulation of these overtly gendered works? I suggest answering these questions through a reflection on the affective production of moralization, as it is gendered and co-articulated with grammars as practices of French standardization.

My primary focus is on the works themselves, La Cantatrice Grammairienne and La Grammaire des dames, in the editions I was able to obtain (mainly those held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), as well as traces of their circulation, particularly in the literary journals of the period. In a much more secondary way, I also look at similar gendered discourses circulating at the same time: conduct manuals for young girls, Panckoucke's Cours Convenables aux Demoiselles and Madame de Miremont's Essai sur l'éducation des femmes et cours complet, in order to understand the intertextuality, similarity, differences, and circulation of these discourses and objects. 

Bio: Anaïs Michel is a third-year PhD student at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She works on French ladies' grammars from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and her research lies at the intersection of the history of linguistic ideas, linguistic anthropology and gender studies.