Though the French do not use the term dirigisme for all examples of the central controlling of much of French material life, they do have a term for this tendency, namely, Jacobinisme. This term has its origin in one of the revolutionary factions that had various names ( Friends of the Constitution,' or Friends of Liberty and Equality',) that met in a former Dominican convent in Paris, the Dominicans being known locally as Jacobins. The popular term Club des jacobins was then applied to this faction, which, though not originally pro-republican, gradually became more and more radically revolutionary, losing its more conservative or moderate members after 1792 and the elimination of the monarchy, and in fact becoming, through its dominance of the Committee of Public Safety, and its association with Maximilien de Robespierre, chief architect of the Reign of Terror', emblematic of revolutionary excess and of arrogation of central control through state-sponsored violence and terrorism. After the fall of Robespierre (9 Thermidor, an II, or July 27, 1794), the Jacobins were temporarily and then eventually permanently banned. Jacobinism, however, whatever its name, still seems to remain a feature of French political life, and some features of it, such as attempts to control language (an enduring project of the French Revolution), persist to this day.
As I have tried to show (Schiffman 1996), the French Revolution adopted a policy on language that was very different from the kind of policy that other democratic nations see as appropriate. I am not the first to notice that the outcome of the American and the Soviet revolutions were to either disinvolve government from control of language (i.e. establish in the US a kind of laissez-faire language policy), or to empower previously unempowered linguistic groups (such as in the Soviet Union), whereas in the French revolution, as is well known, languages other than French were disenfranchised, and were treated as counterrevolutionary activities. (See the words of Barère or Grégroire, e.g. in Schiffman 1996:99; 111.) In fact, Brunot, in his monumental history of the French language, declares the chief linguistic accomplishment of the French Revolution to be the firm establishment of the Monarchic language policy, rather than the elimination of it, as everything else associated with the monarchy was eliminated. [Gordon (1978) echoes this view.] That monarchic policy was dirigiste, centrist, authoritarian, controlling, and after the fall of the monarchy, more inflexible than before. As in other things, it involved the notion of divine right [Miller (1982) shows how in Japan, as certain state-sponsored myths have crumbled, language myths have become stronger.], and as we can see from almost any discussion of French language policy, a similar notion pervades the topic to this day. The revolution in Turkey in the 1920's however seems to have emulated the French Revolution in linguistic matters, using a purified' Turkish as a symbol of nationalism, and banning the use of other languages such as Armenian, etc.