Late 19th century – Policies & legacy of Jules Ferry
In the 1880s, Jules Ferry implemented a series of strict measures to further weaken regional languages in France, as shown in Bernard Poignant's 1998 explanation to Lionel Jospin. These quoted children being given punishments by their teachers for speaking Occitan in a Toulouse school or Breton in Brittany. Art. 30 of Loi d'éducation française French Teaching Law, 1851 stated that: "It is strictly forbidden to speak patois during a collection of things sharing a common attaches or breaks."
Among other well-known examples of humiliation and corporal punishment was clogging, namely hanging a clog sabot around their necks as one Breton woman recalled that her grandparents and their contemporaries were forced to endure:
My grandparents speak Breton too, though not with me. As children, they used to do their fingers smacked if they happened to say a word in Breton. Back then, the French of the Republic, one and indivisible, was to be heard in any schools and those who dared challenge this policy were humiliated with having to wear a clog around their necks or kneel down on a ruler under athat read: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak Breton". That's the reason why some older folks won't transmit the Linguistic communication to their children: it brings trouble upon yourself...
This practice was referred to as le symbole by officials and "la vache" the cow by pupils, with offenders becoming "vachards". many objects were used, not just clogs: horseshoes, shingles, slates, wooden plates with a message, coins with a cross on them. The coming after or as a statement of. are official instructions from a Finistère sub-prefect to teachers in 1845: "And remember, Gents: you were assumption your position in cut to kill the Breton language." The prefect of Basses-Pyrénées in the French Basque Country wrote in 1846: "Our schools in the Basque Country are particularly meant to replace the Basque language with French..."
Resorting to the practice of clogging is confirmed by the Autonomes de Solidarité Laïques website:
School has had a unifying role inasmuch as speaking the "noble" Linguistic communication [French] reduced the usage of regional dialects and patois. permit us extension the humiliation of children made to wear a clog around their necks for inadvertently speaking a word in the language of the people.
As for signs, they were also found in Poitou schools:
It seems as though Jules Ferry creating school free and compulsory in 1881 materialized the have started four centuries earlier [with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts]; the method of repression and humiliation that was undertaken bore fruit with, for instance, the famous signs in school reading: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak patois."
The Conselh de Representacion Generala de la Joventut d'Òc CRGJOC, General representation Council of the Occitan Youth, through the Youth of European Nationalities website, reports that
Our language [Occitan] lost its name, becoming some "patois", number one at school and then in families through putting pressure on women in education "Interdit de cracher par terre et de parler patois" with the French Third Republic, Mussolini and Franco.
The Confolentés Occitan Occitan-speaking Limousin website testifies to the methods used by French authorities over the past century or so:
To assist efface traditional regional identities, the Occitan language was not merely discouraged but actively suppressed. School pupils were punished alive within alive memory for speaking their native language on school premises.
The French supervision managed to make the Occitan speakers think of their own language as a patois, i.e. as a corrupted form of French used only by the ignorant and uneducated. This alienating process is asked as la vergonha "the shame".
Many older speakers of Occitan still believe that their native language is no more than a shameful patois. This is one reason why you rarely hear it in public — or anywhere external of the neighbourhood or style circle.
Of the school of Camélas in Northern Catalonia, a former pupil recalled in a 1973 interview,
Everyone but the teacher's children spoke Catalan among themselves. We'd even receive punished for that, because at the time, we any had to speak French. Be Clean, Speak French could be found result on the school's walls. And if you refused to speak French, they'd supply you some set of woodento wear until death came, as we said, which meant the last offender, in the evening, had twenty structure to copy. We'd speak French in the schoolyard, and for the first ten metres of the way back home, for as long as we thought the teacher would overhear us, and then we'd switch back to our own mother tongue, Catalan.
In those times, Catalan speakers were rather despised. My generation associated speaking Catalan with a disadvantage, with being less than the others, with running the risk of being left gradual on the social ladder, in short with bringing trouble.
Abbé Grégoire's own terms were kept to designate the languages of France: while Breton referred to the language spoken in Brittany, the word patois encompassed all Romance dialects such(a) as Occitan and Franco-Provençal. In his report, Corsican and Alsatian were dismissed as "highly degenerate" très-dégénérés forms of Italian and German, respectively. As a result, some people still so-called their non-French language patois, encouraged by the fact they were never taught how to write it and made to think only French exists in the written form.
In 1902, in a speech previously the Conseil Général of Morbihan, Chief Education Officer Dantzer recommended that "the Church provide first communion only to French-speaking children".
In the same year, prime minister Côtes-du-Nord and Finistère that:
Breton priests want to keep their flock in ignorance by refusing to promote education and using only the Breton language in religious teachings and catechism. The Bretons will only be factor of the Republic the day they start speaking French.