It is one thing to think of decisions being made at the center that affect French banking, or agriculture, or the railroad system but when the matter is a linguistic one, one must ask oneself whether any government can realistically expect to control the linguistic habits of its citizenry in any meaningful way. Though the term dirigisme is used by no-one in France to refer to its linguistic policies, the parallels between economic dirigisme and what I will call linguistic dirigisme (or dirigisme linguistique) are striking. Using his own system of analysis that looks at most social interaction as a set of economic exchanges, Bourdieu (1982) has placed the economic language model at center stage, so my plan here is to examine both historical attempts to control language overtly from the center in France, and the more subtle system of controls that Bourdieu delineates.
My own goal is to show how my own notion (Schiffman 1996), namely, that language policy is embedded in and proceeds from what I call linguistic culture (I have defined this as ``the sum total of behaviors, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief sytems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language, and religion-historical circumstances associated with a particular language." (Schiffman 1996:5),) is a larger framework through which to view the role of dirigisme linguistique, which I see as an unquestioned assumptionSome would call it ideology, e.g. Flaitz 1988. of French language policy and the culture in which that policy is embedded.