Elke Brems, Mathijs Sanders en Liselotte Vandenbussche
Guy Rooryck
Abstract (EN)
A lingua franca’s lost victory. The French language at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
The privileged position of French in the nineteenth century is the result of a long
process. An early administrative centralization, the tight norms and standardization
of the language, which gradually assumes the position formerly held by
Latin, the use of French in diplomacy, at European courts, but also the oppression
and expulsion of Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(1685) and the impact of the French Revolution are all elements that were partly
responsible for the acceptance of French as the European lingua franca. By
discussing the particular case of two well-known works of the Enlightenment,
this contribution will explore how French could only achieve its status of transnational
language of culture thanks to the dynamic interaction between cultures.
The publication history of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding and
La Mettrie’s L’homme machine reveals how the Netherlands played a pivotal role
in the cultural and historical exchange between England and France. Both works
emerge from the dynamics yielded by a collective European cultural model,
which went through a profound metamorphosis on the eve of the nineteenth
century. In that respect, the lingua franca status of French is undoubtedly a case
of “histoire croisée”: it reflected and expressed a context of ideas that was itself
created by the intersection of European tongues and cultures. Shaping and communicating
secularized patterns of thought and universalist values thanks to this
dense European network, French retained its position of cultural idiom until the
first decades of the twentieth century. Then new norms and values steadily gain
the upper hand, echoing other models of civilization.
Pieter Boulogne
Abstract (EN)
The Russian from Paris. Dostoevsky and the borders of the Dutch and Flemish literary systems.
Central to this article lies the question what a recent study on the Dutch reception
of Dostoevsky in the period from 1881 until the outbreak of the Great War can
tell us about the borders of the Dutch and Flemish literary polysystem(s). An
overview is provided of the observed intersystemic transfers, in the critical texts
dealing with Dostoevsky, as well as in his early Dutch translations. It turns out
that the writer’s early Dutch reception bears a heavy French stamp both in its
critical and in its translational aspect. Nevertheless, it is argued that the observed
dependency should not be attributed to the Dutch literature as a whole.
Fieke de Hartog en Rob van de Schoor
Abstract (EN)
Exchanging liberal and petty bourgeois views in French and Dutch nineteenth-century literature.
A reference to a novel by Émile Souvestre, Un philosophe sous les toits (1851),
by Dutch critic Conrad Busken Huet is the starting point of a quest for Dutch
translations and adaptations of episodes from Souvestre’s novel. By means of
pragmatic induction, the method advocated by the histoire croisée, this investigation
opens up perspectives on the interaction between France and the liberal
avant-garde in the Netherlands, more specifically on the topical significance of
Blaise Pascal. Huet, minister of the Dutch église wallonne, propagated the use of
Pascal’s method, as demonstrated in his Lettres provinciales, to influence public
opinion. He did so in theory, in his periodical La seule chose nécessaire, and put
it into practice, in his ‘Brieven van een kleinstedeling’ (‘Lettres by a small town
citizen’) in the Dutch weekly Nederlandsche Spectator. There he fought the opinions
of orthodox calvinists, who had opposed to Huet’s adaptation of one of the
episodes from Souvestre’s novel.
Piet Couttenier
Abstract (EN)
‘Il parle tout simplement le français’. Guido Gezelle’s remarkable plea in favour of the French language.
The case study deals with an article of 1885 by the well-known Flemish poet and
philologist Guido Gezelle in Le Muséon, a scientific review for oriental studies of
the University of Louvain edited by Charles de Harlez. The article by Gezelle functions
as an introduction to the activities of a group of Flemish philologists around
the journal Loquela which was published from 1880 on. Gezelle however takes a
particular position as he argues that the linguistic situation of the Flemish is rather
favourable: in informal contacts he can rely on his dialect idiom. For formal social
situations and higher cultural or intellectual communication Gezelle rejects the
Dutch standard language and prefers the French language. This much debated standpoint
reveals surprisingly the real high status of French as lingua franca in the intellectual
and scientific world in Belgium and Flanders during the long 19th century.
Liselotte Vandenbussche
Abstract (EN)
French acculturations of a Flemish past. Georges Eekhoud adapts Hendrik Conscience.
In this article, two adaptations by Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927), a francophone
author living in Flanders, are compared to the original stories by the Dutchspeaking
Flemish novelist Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883). Following the
method of histoire croisée, this article studies the acculturation of Conscience’s
stories by Eekhoud and the image he thus creates of the author and his work.
Eekhoud either stresses the importance of diverging from the source literature to
reveal its essence or masks his intervention completely, while he simultaneously
stimulates close translations of his own publications by Dutch-speaking Flemish
authors. By integrating two ‘back-translations’ in Dutch of Eekhoud’s French
Conscience translations, this study reveals an entangled network of influences
and ideologies.