The opposition: losers in the history of language standardisation in seventeenth-century France

Understanding the history of linguistics requires recognition of the full range of the debates in any given period. The first half of the seventeenth century is pivotal in the history of standard French. The court poet Malherbe, in his commentaries on the poetry of Philippe Desportes and then in mentoring younger literati, excised what he considered the excesses of language of his immediate predecessors. His approach was furthered by a circle of writers who then were formally constituted as the Académie Française (1635). One of the first tasks of the Académie was to critique the language of the playwright Pierre Corneille (1637). That same year, a founding member of the Académie, Claude Favre de Vaugelas, presented commentaries on French to the Académie in manuscript form, revised for publication in 1647. Those linguistic judgements remain the foundation of many linguistic debates continuing to our day. Malherbe, the Académie, and Vaugelas were the victors in the early history of French grammatical thought. Less well-known are the ‘losers’, commentators mostly forgotten or relegated to footnotes: Jean-Pierre Camus, Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Jean de Wapy, François de la Mothe Le Vayer, and Scipion Dupleix.