Review of the Literature

French language policy, broadly speaking, has been studied by Ager 1990; Bédard and Maurais 1983; Catach 1991; de Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1975; Flaitz 1988; Gordon 1978; Guilhaumou 1989; Hell 1986; Lévy 1929; Philipps 1975, 1978, 1982; Schiffman 1996; Tabouret-Keller and Luckel, 1981; and Vermes and Boutet 1987. It seems clear to me that many writers about French language policy impute results and outcomes of the policy to the strong overt language policy direction that the French state supposedly exerts; as I and others have shown, however, until recently, France actually lacked the explicit directives on language that many thought it possessed, but because they and the French public at large (Catach 1991) believe a myth about these directives and their explicitness, the French tend to submit to policies they believe to be in effect, when they were not in fact part of French law.

As for Bourdieu's thinking about language and language policy, we can discern also a dirigiste view, but with different effects. His ideas on this topic, expressed most cogently in his 1982 work (Ce que parler veut dire) throw a different light on this issue; but though he takes a `marketplace' approach and sees language as a commodity with symbolic value that is exchanged for value in a larger marketplace of symbolic values, I will try to show that there are aspects of his analysis that could only be true for a polity like France, where the centralized control of cultural products' (as he puts it) and the creation of a unified market' in `linguistic products' have, in his view, made the explicit language policy work. That is, because of economic determinism and the desire to participate and attain upward mobility in this marketplace, French citizens accept standard language as part of the cultural capital that increases their personal capital, resulting in behavior that appears to be controlled by the central authority. He specifically abjures the power of the state to make people speak a certain way, however, imputing the power of this poliicy to much more subtle pressures of social structure.

We will examine his ideas in more detail below; first, I would like to look at the historical background of dirigisme linguistique.