Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language

Abstract

Claude Favre de Vaugelas, born in Savoy in 1585 and one of the founder members of the French Academy, is best known for his Remarques sur la langue française (1647) in which he sets out good usage of French. In this study, Wendy Ayres-Bennett analyses the development of Vaugelas's thinking on French from the only early extant manuscript of the Remarques to the final text, and compares this with Vaugelas's own usage in his translations of Fonseca's Lenten Sermons (1615) and Quintus Curtius Rufus's Life of Alexander, published in two different posthumous versions (1653, 1659). Finally, the impact of the Remarques on the subsequent history of French and on its codification is explored, and the popularity of the work is explained by situating it within its historical and socio-cultural context. This book, originally published in paperback in 1987 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-13-5, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.