Rehabilitated with millions, the royal castle of Villers-Cotterêts (Aisne) will reopen its doors in June. It now becomes the Cité internationale de la langue française in reference to the ordinance...

Francophonie: in Villers-Cotterêts where the wedding of the French State and its language were forged

The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts signed by Francis I in August 1539. © National Archives

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

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A Palace rises from the ashes... There is something of Sleeping Beauty in the history of the rebirth of the castle of Villers-Cotterêts, torn from oblivion and certain ruin by the will of the prince, in this case that of President Emmanuel Macron.

It all began in March 2017, during the first electoral campaign of the man who two months later would become the youngest president of France and Navarre. The country road led the candidate to Villers-Cotterêts, the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas and also famous for its historic castle.

The castle of Villers-Cotterêts entered history in 1539 when King Francis I signed the ordinance named after the city, making the use of French mandatory in all legal and administrative documents of the country. Since then, the centuries have passed by there. This Renaissance palace has known several lives, becoming successively after the Revolution, a barracks of the Republican army, a begging depot, then a nursing home, before being abandoned.

The Château de Villers-Cotterets, future international city of the French language. © cite-langue-francaise.fr

According to his entourage, during his visit to Villers-Cotterêts, the candidate Macron would have been deeply shocked by the calamitous state in which the building, although listed as a national heritage, was located. Once elected, he put forward the idea of transforming it into an "international city of the French language", a showcase of the Francophonie. Carried at arm's length by the Élysée, this project, which links history and the future, has been unanimously welcomed by historians.

A stroke of genius ", says linguist Bernard Cerquiglini (1), for whom the decision of the Élysée to give new life to the Château de Villers-Cotterêts renews the founding myth of modern France. "Modern France was born from the wedding of the state and language, the first act of which was played out in this Renaissance palace five centuries ago," adds the specialist.

A royal castle in Picardy

The history of the castle of Villers-Cotterêts begins in 1528 when François I decided to erect a royal home in the heart of these Picardy lands, on the edge of the forest of Retz where he liked to come hunting. Built between 1530 and 1556, the building was built on the foundations of an old medieval fortress, and extends over 95,000 square meters, with sumptuous decorations in its central part reminiscent, it is said, Chambord and Fontainebleau.

After the death of Francis I, the ownership of the castle passed to his successors on the throne of France, including a certain Louis XIV who offered it to his brother Philippe d'Orléans, on the occasion of his marriage to Henriette of England. According to historians, the glory days of this royal residence date back to the time of the Sun King. It was in the gardens of this Renaissance residence that Molière presented in 1664 his satirical comedy Tartuffe before an audience composed of Louis XIV, his brother and the entire court that had moved for the occasion.

However, in the French collective imagination, Villers-Cotterêts and its castle remain less associated with royal splendour than with the famous ordinance of 1539, so closely linked to the rise and evolution of France and French. This ordinance is the oldest piece of legislation still in force in France, nearly five centuries after its promulgation. It has survived 12 successive regimes and its articles on the status of French are still regularly invoked by the courts of France.

"Faict de la justice et abbreviation des procès"

Francis I, King of France from 1515 to 1547. © Louvre Museum

Equivalent to a constitutional law today, but emanating from the king, the document in question is divided into 192 articles, only two of which deal with the question of language, although central. The general scope of the document is specified from its title: Royal Ordinances on the Faict of Justice and Abbreviation of Trials by the Kingdom of France, i.e. improving the functioning of justice and reducing the length of trials.

It is necessary to read the order between the lines to guess its real stakes: to strengthen and expand the prerogatives of the monarchy and to limit the powers of the Church to religious affairs. Hence in the first part of the text, the obligation for various parishes to keep birth, marriage or death registers, but by having the entries countersigned by a notary.

The tone is more direct and voluntary in the two articles relating to language, articles 110 and 111, which stipulate that henceforth acts of legal scope of the administration and justice of the kingdom will be drafted "in French mother tongue and not otherwise". This prohibition applies to Latin, the language of the Church, but considered difficult to understand for litigants. It cannot be denied that these articles were inspired by the desire for greater clarity in judicial proceedings, but it is not certain that "the françoys, the language of the king" prescribed in the text was more accessible to the litigants of the time, a large majority of whom had as their mother tongue not French, but their various dialects. Intelligibility was a pretext to give the force of law to the French around which the sovereign aspired to unify his country.

The approach was daring, even revolutionary, given the prestige enjoyed by the Church in the France of Francis I and also given the fact that Latin had hitherto been the traditional language of acts of justice. "It was not so much in reality, because the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts validates a de facto situation, with the Parliaments which had been issuing judgments in French or regional mother tongues for several decades already," moderates Bernard Cerquiglini.

Historians recall that Francis I was also not the first French sovereign to issue ordinances calling for the replacement of the use of Latin by French or other "intelligible" languages in the administrative and legal procedures of the kingdom. One of the first ordinances published in this sense dates from 1490 and it emanated from King Charles VIII. Other texts will follow before the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, whose main originality was to be universal, that is to say applicable to the whole kingdom.

A new France

The fact remains that what was played out in Villiers-Cotterêts in August 1539 was nothing less than a war of independence that did not say its name, but whose objective was to bring about a new France, endowed with its own idiom, its own literature. A lover of the arts, books and poetry, the sovereign Francis I, who had seen the Renaissance at work during his Italian wars, embodied this renewed France of which he signed the founding act in his beautiful Picard castle, making the language of the king, in this case French, the language of law, therefore of the State. It was visionary, even if the question of the status of minority languages remained unresolved.

General view of the castle of Villers-Cotterêts northeast of Paris, during the reconstruction of the building, May 21, 2021. AFP - MARTIN BUREAU

Bernard Cerquiglini recounts that during the signing ceremony of the ordinance, Chancellor Poyet, who had written the text, whispered in the sovereign's ear: "Sire, you have the future in your mind!" However, it is necessary to wonder if this future extends to the Cité internationale de la langue française, which will now be the new avatar of the Château de Villers-Cotterêts.

Nothing is less certain, but as Professor Cerquiglini confides, "this sovereign who worked for the influence of his language and his country, would perhaps not have been shocked to see a French language arrive in his renewed castle, certainly emancipated from France, but globalized.

(1) Bernard Cerquiglini is a linguist, professor of linguistics and former rector of the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie. He is the author of a dozen academic books devoted to the French language, including: Éloge de la variante (1989), La genèse de l'orthographe française (2004), Une langue orpheline (2007).

Francophonie: in Villers-Cotterêts where the wedding of the French State and its language were forged

Francophonie: in Villers-Cotterêts where the wedding of the French State and its language were forged

A royal castle in Picardy

"Faict de la justice et abbreviation des procès"

A new France

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