ABSTRACT
In Chapter Three we saw how, by the mid-sixteenth century, the French of Paris and the surrounding region had clearly emerged from the shadow of Latin, as the language of administration and of serious literary creation. Du Bellay, in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549), made a powerful case for the capacity of French to function in all the domains hitherto dominated by Latin. The question was not an academic one; in a century of increasing national consciousness, a national language was both an essential tool in the exercise of power within the now unified state, and a symbol of the state itself. Although by the end of the sixteenth century there was broad agreement on the role of French, the precise form that the language should take was still to be determined.
