ABSTRACT
In order to guarantee the predominance of one language ‘unique and indivisible’ in one Republic ‘unique and indivisible’, the French Revolution had proclaimed the need to abolish the patois. Grammarians from the seventeenth century onwards and schools from the nineteenth century onwards tried to impose observance of the rules of a single French language, with forms that had been fixed once and for all, forms that were often difficult to remember and which were the object of inexplicable admiration even in their wildest irregularities. All these attempts at unification culminated in the spread of French to the entire country and to the strict regulation of the written language.
