Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 6)

Photo: Imageshack.us

The revolutionary government hired the poet Fabre d’Églantine–better known for his bedtime song “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère” (“It’s raining, it’s raining, shepherdess”)–to come up with new names for the days and months. D’Églantine was inspired by the weather and natural cycles, so he used different suffixes for each season, attached to Latin words that corresponded to the typical weather for each month. The fall months were Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire; the winter months were Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse; the spring months were Germinal, Floréal and Prairial; and the summer months were Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. D’Églantine wanted to rename the days after vegetables, animals and farm tools, but the National Assembly probably realized that they were already pushing their luck by trying to name the days after Latin numbers (primedi, duodi, tridi and so on). Read more »

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French ( Ch. 8 )

Photo: http://www.notredamedeparis.fr

The son of a general in Napoleon’s army, Hugo was only fourteen when he wrote in his schoolbook that he would be “Chateaubriand or nothing.” He started his first literary journal at age seventeen and soon made his mark with poems and a series of popular novels. He wrote with an ease and freedom untypical of his predecessors. At twenty-one Hugo earned himself a royal pension. His first play, Cromwell, turned him into a celebrity. Its preface—in which Hugo made a plea for what he called le grotesque (popular reality) and against the classical canon of unity of time, place and action—was considered the manifesto of French Romanticism. “All too often, the cage of unity contains a mere skeleton,” he wrote. As to the play itself, it was anything but classical, with hundreds of characters and dozens of locations. Read more »

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French ( Ch. 8 )

Photo: Veronica Louis

Between 1800 and 1860 no fewer than a thousand French grammars were published. The most influential was La nouvelle grammaire française, by François Noël and Charles Pierre Chapsal, published in 1823. It was followed by an abridged version, and the book went through more than eighty editions, including two translated American versions, one abridged and the other full-length.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century the flurry of activity in language instruction materials was phenomenal. In 1834 the Bescherelle brothers came out with another grammar, La grammaire nationale. Although Le Bescherelle now specializes in verb conjugations, today it is still one of the most important names in French grammar. Read more »