The Relationship of Religious Practice to Linguistic Culture: Language, Religion, and Education in Alsace and the Roussillon, 1860–1890

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basqu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Byrnes, Joseph F. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 1999
In: Church history
Year: 1999, Volume: 68, Issue: 3, Pages: 598-626
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.
ISSN:1755-2613
Contains:Enthalten in: Church history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/3170040