Stewart McCain
Language and Empire under Napoleon: Marc-Joseph de Gratet Dubouchage in the Alpes-Maritimes, 1803- 1814
In the summer of 1803 Marc-Joseph de Gratet Dubouchage arrived in Nice to take up his position as Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes. He found a department in uproar. Intrigue and discord plagued the administration, while armed bands in the mountainous and sparsely populated northern parts of the department made conscription almost impossible. In the midst of this chaos Dubouchage made the imposition of the French language a priority. This initial enthusiasm did not last, and by the later years of the Empire Dubouchage was tempering the ambitions of other administrators, urging caution the pursuit of what he saw as a desirable yet problematic goal. The efforts of the Prefect in the first part of his time in the Alpes-Maritimes tell us much about the character of the Imperial project and its relationship to the Revolution. In the previous decade, figures such as Bertrand Barère and the Abbé Grégoire had expressed fear of linguistic federalism, and asserted that emancipation could be achieved only through the medium of French. Napoleon’s administrators continued to see spreading French both as part of a broader ‘civilizing mission’ and crucial in securing long term hegemony over newly conquered territory. The failure of such efforts reveal no only the limits of state power during the period, ultimately they also tell us something about the linguistic priorities of communities- which languages they had a use for and wanted to speak- and how such local communities related to, or indeed resisted, the broader post-revolutionary world.
Stewart McCain holds degrees in history from the Universities of Sussex and Oxford, where he is currently writing a doctoral thesis on linguistic imperialism during the first French Empire. He is also interested in early attempts to collect and describe the folk cultures of France.
