A Philology of Fish Mongers
and Other Street People in Old Paris
Marcel Schwob and Georges Guieysse wrote a joint study of François
Villon and his place in the vibrant argot poetry of the early fifteenth century
Etude sur l’argot français (1889). Though
Guieysse died soon after publication of this book, Schwob spent the rest of his
own short life (he died in 1905) studying this topic. It was what the two young scholars said about
street slang and its influence on the development of modern French that
interests us here.[1]
The passage begins by comparing the growth and development of this
non-literary language —the dialect of uneducated people, hard-working folk,
criminals, idle layabouts and others who swarm in the early modern alleys and
lanes of Paris—to a chemical process,
Here the substance of the local dialects that mix among the many men and
women who come to the capital at the end of the Middle Ages starts to break
apart and then come together in new and exciting ways: for there is a need to
express new ideas and feelings about new kinds of experiences, a creation that
occurs outside the institutions of the monarchy, the church and the bourgeois
and professional elites:
This language has been decomposed and recomposed like
a chemical substance, but it is not inanimate like salts and metals. It is constrained to live under special laws,
and the phenomena which we note are the result of this constraint.
The main constraint imposed on this emergent argot is the need for the
people using it to understand one another and thus to communicate their own
feelings and fears. The spoken language
also must be both flexible enough to change as circumstances change but fixed
enough to maintain some constancy of meaning as individuals and groups need to
recall their experiences. The argot has
to be independent and autonomous as well: it will define the group, exclude
outsiders from learning things about the inner group that would be dangerous
for them to know. The roots of this
street dialect can be found not only in the popular Latin that was effectively
the common language before this urban speech dev eloped but also in the archaic
dialects of the region and those areas of what would be known as France where
other languages prevailed, such as Gallic, Celtic and Frankish.
Then Schwob and Guieysse compare what they see as the dynamic and almost
spontaneous evolutionary forces driving this development to the very kind of
organic processes we have mentioned in the earlier parts of this long essay.
The animals of the great oceanic depths collected by
the expeditions of the Travailleur and the Talisman are eyeless, but on their
bodies they have developed pigmented and phosphorescent spots.
The scientific
expeditions undertaken on the two steam ships mentioned were sponsored by the French
Ministry of Public Education and were carried out between 1880 and 1883. The leaders of these investigations were Alphonse
Milne-Edward (1835-1900), Edmond Perrier (1844-1921), E.-L. Bouvier (1856-1944)
and Charles Gravier (1865-1937). They discovered
new species of marine life living deep under the oceans where, in almost
perpetual darkness, the creature lost the ability to see but in compensation evolved
chemically-glowing organs, allowing other living things that feed off them to
locate this prey.
Then the two young
linguists draw the evocative analogy between the evolution of the sea creatures
and the development of Villon’s argotic dialect.
Likewise the argot, in the shallows where it moves,
has lost certain linguistic faculties, and has developed others that take their
place; deprived of the light of day, it has produced under the influence of the
place that oppresses it a phosphoresce by which glow it lives and reproduced:
synonymic derivation.
By “shallows,” they mean the racy, lively and dangerous environment of
the early modern city, unprotected by feudal powers and unguided academic
monitors. Hence many formal features of
the old regional dialects and popular Latin could not survive the rapid changes
and quick-thinking needed to survive a harsh life of catch-as-catch-can. Instead of such polished and sophisticated traditions
of rhetoric, logic and poetic conventions, the street people—peddlers, whores, tradesmen,
carriers, card-sharks, thieves, bullies, washer-women and so on—evolve their
own short-cuts and secret locutions, slang expressions, terms of endearment and
abuse, ways of measuring and evaluating the things in their lives.
Not a
simplistic or superficial language by any means, this new Parisian argot has a
richness and diversity that a poet like François Villon could manipulate into
his verse: not just many variations in synonyms, but a range of emotional tonalities
and subtle allusions to the hostile forces arrayed against ordinary people
every day of their lives.
[1] I am citing the translation made by Dylan Kenny in “Marcel Schwob and
Moody History” JHI Blog (23 February 2015) online at http:jhblog.org/2015/02/23/marcel-schwob-and-moody-history
