In Occitan, vergonha (, ) refers to the effects of various language discriminatory policies of the government of France on its minority or regional languages (including Romance languages such as Occitan and Catalan, as well as non-Romance languages such as Alsatian and Basque) deemed patois, as opposed to standard French. Vergonha is imagined as a process of "being made to reject and feel ashamed of one's (or one's parents') mother tongue through official exclusion, humiliation at school and rejection from the media", as organized and sanctioned by French political leaders from Henri Grégoire onward.
Vergonha is still a controversial topic in modern French public discourse, where some successive French governments have denied discrimination ever existed or downplayed its effects; all the same, it is a commonly cited example of sanctioned systematic linguicide and cultural genocide.Llengua Nacional, Catalan linguistic review , spring of 2002. Text available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110711020813/http://fpl.forumactif.com/t2644-le-patois-des-vieux-el-patues-dels-vells#11914 In 1860, before French schooling was made compulsory, native Occitan speakers represented more than 39%Louis de Baecker, Grammaire comparée des langues de la France, 1860, p. 52: parlée dans le Midi de la France par quatorze millions d'habitants ("spoken in the South of France by fourteen million inhabitants"). + of the whole French population, as opposed to 52% for francophones proper; their share of the population declined to 2636% by the late 1920s.Yann Gaussen, Du fédéralisme de Proudhon au Félibrige de Mistral, 1927, p. 4: [...] défendre une langue, qui est aujourd'hui la mère de la nôtre, parlée encore par plus de dix millions d'individus [...] ("protect a language, which is today the mother of ours, still spoken by more than ten million individuals"). Since the end of World War II, it experienced another sharp decline, to less than 7% by 1993.Stephen Barbour & Cathie Carmichael, Language and nationalism in Europe, 2000, p. 62: Occitan is spoken in 31 départements, but even the EBLUL (1993: 15–16) is wary of statistics: 'There are no official data on the number of speakers. Of some 12 to 13 million inhabitants in the area, it is estimated that 48 per cent understand Occitan, 28 per cent can speak it, about 9 per cent of the population use it on a daily basis, 13 per cent can read and 6 per cent can write the language.'
France has also continuously refused to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and native non-French languages in France continue to be denied official recognition, with Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, Savoyards and other langues d'oïl speakers still having no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands.
Overview
16th to 18th century Beginning in 1539 with Art. 111 of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts,Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêt non-French languages in France were reduced in stature when it became compulsory "to deliver and execute all [legal] acts in the French language" (de prononcer et expedier tous actes en langaige françoys). Originally meant as a way to eliminate Latin in official documentsfew 16th-century French subjects were educated and familiar with Latinit also stated that French and only French was legal in the kingdom (en langage maternel françoys et non aultrement).
Late 18th to late 19th century Abbé Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois" The deliberate process of eradicating non-French vernaculars in modern France and disparaging them as mere local and often strictly oral dialects was formalized with Henri Grégoire's Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language, which he presented on 4 June 1794 to the National Convention; thereafter, all languages other than French were officially banned in the administration and schools for the sake of linguistically uniting post-Bastille Day France. At the time, only one tenth of the population were fluent in French. In reference to "patois", Jean Jaurès famously claimed that "one names patois the language of a defeated nation".A new "Common Vector", Robert L.E. Billon, April 2000, rleb07.free.fr According to the Chambers Dictionary, the origin of the term is disputed but could be a "corruption of patrois, from LL , a local inhabitant".
Four months earlier (27 January), Bertrand Barère, although an Occitan from Tarbes himself, claimed before this same Convention:
The end of traditional provinces This policy can be noted by the way France's internal borders were redrawn, creating 83 départements. The law was passed on 22 December 1789 and took effect the following year, on 4 March 1790. As a result, the centuries-old singularities of the various Occitan-speaking parts were overlooked and shaken in a deliberate effort by the newly formed government to weaken and parcel out long-established feudal domains so that republican France would subdue traditional allegiances, as Antonin Perbòsc reveals in the foreword to his Anthologie:
In the 20th century, the départements were grouped into régions, to create a level of government between the departmental and national. While the régions were intended to replace the old provinces, they were not necessarily formed along the same boundaries. As the map shows, there were eleven Occitan-speaking enclaves in the pre-1789 state, such as the powerful lands of Languedoc and Gascony, but they were divided into seven régions with no regard whatsoever for cultural and linguistic identities. This is how Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur was created out of portions of five Occitan provinces and three capitals were scrapped in favour of Marseille; and Auvergne came to comprise both native and langues d'oïl entities. Meanwhile, the city of Nantes was administratively removed from Brittany, of which it had been one of two traditional capitals (along with Rennes), and the city of Toulouse was not included in the région of Languedoc-Roussillon, though it had historically been located in that province.
Many of the régions contain hyphenated names, reflecting the merging of multiple historically distinct areas. This is true for four of the seven régions of Occitania: Languedoc-Roussillon, Midi-Pyrénées, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and Rhône-Alpes. Traditional Occitan provinces: 1. Béarn (Pau) – 6,800 km2 (est.) 2. Guyenne & Gascony (Bordeaux) – 69,400 km2 (est.) 3. Limousin (Limoges) – 9,700 km2 (est.) 4. County of La Marche (Guéret) – 7,600 km2 (est.) 5. Auvergne (Riom) – 19,300 km2 (est.) 6. Languedoc (Toulouse) – 45,300 km2 (est.) 7. Dauphiné (Grenoble) – 8,500 km2 (est.) 8. County of Nice – 3,600 km2 (est.) 9. Provence (Aix-en-Provence) – 22,700 km2 (est.) 10. Comtat Venaissin (Carpentras) – 3,600 km2 (est.) 11. County of Foix (Foix) – 3,300 km2 (est.)
Régions of France: A. Aquitaine (Bordeaux) – 41,308 km2 B. Limousin (Limoges) – 16,942 km2 C. Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand) – 26,013 km2 D. Rhône-Alpes (Lyon) – 43,698 km2 E. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (Marseille) – 31,400 km2 F. Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier) – 27,376 km2 G. Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse) – 45,348 km2
– - -: Occitan / Franco-Provençal linguistic limit Toulouse lost 76% of its territory of Languedoc Bordeaux lost a little more than half its territory of Gascony and Guyenne Limoges increased its administrative area by 43% Guéret, Pau, Foix, Riom, Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Carpentras (1791) and Nice (1860) lost their status as capitals Clermont-Ferrand, Montpellier and Marseille became capitals of Auvergne, Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, respectively Languedoc was divided into five unequal parts, the largest of which forming Languedoc-Roussillon with the Catalan-speaking province of Roussillon The County of Marche, Béarn, the County of Foix and subsequently Comtat Venaissin and the County of Nice lost their autonomy Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur is made up of Provence and the County of Nice and bits and pieces of three other provinces The north of Languedoc and Comtat Venaissin and the western half of Dauphiné became linguistic minorities in the new Rhône-Alpes region The Occitan provinces spread over a little less than 200,000 km2 Gascony and Guyenne, Languedoc, Provence and Auvergne accounted for 78.4% of Occitania in terms of land area, with Gascony and Guyenne making up for over a third of the total surface and Languedoc almost a quarter
Late 19th century – Policies and legacy of Jules Ferry School discipline 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 report to Lionel Jospin.LANGUES ET CULTURES REGIONALES – Rapport de Monsieur Bernard Poignant – Maire de Quimper A Monsieur Lionel Jospin – Premier Ministre Le 1er juillet 1998, chez.com These included children being given punishments by their teachers for speaking Occitan in a Toulouse school or Breton in Brittany. Art. 30 of (French Teaching Law, 1851) stated that: "It is strictly forbidden to speak patois during classes 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 have 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 all 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 a sign that read: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak Breton".An example sign at bretagne.lalibreblogs.be . The sign reads (in French): "To all school pupils: It is forbidden 1. to speak Breton and spit on the ground; 2. to wet your fingers with your mouth to turn the pages of books and notebooks; 3. to insert the tip of a pen or penholder into your ear; 4. to clean your slates with your spit or directly with your tongue; 5. to hold pens, penholders, coins etc between your lips. Now do you want to know why these things are forbidden? Ask your teachers: they will give you the necessary explanations. And remember your duty is not just to obey these rules but to make sure everyone else applies them." That's the reason why some older folks won't transmit the language 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 following are official instructions from a Finistère sub-prefect to teachers in 1845: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language."Georges Labouysse in Histoire de France: L'Imposture. Mensonges et manipulations de l'Histoire officielle pp. 90–92. IEO Edicions 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:La neutralité politique, philosophique et religieuse et l’école, Autonomes de Solidarité Laïques website School has had a unifying role inasmuch as speaking the "noble" language [French] reduced the use of regional dialects and patois. Let us mention the humiliation of children made to wear a clog around their necks for inadvertently speaking a word in the language of the people.