In the sense of thieves' slang, ‘argot’ has a presence in French literature that famously reaches back to the poems of Villon, and it is still to be found in contemporary writing, although there is no unbroken strand of continuity. However, it is necessary, in order to understand the phenomenon properly, to extend the sense of the term to cover not only the language of the criminal classes but also that of the working class and all forms of popular French. These strands need to be treated together since they have become a rich source of invention and change in the politer forms of spoken language and one of the most powerful modifying factors in the evolution of written or literary French, particularly during the last hundred years. Just as in the 18th c. writers like Restif de la Bretonne became aware of the inadequacy of the ‘style noble’ faced with the evocation of the daily—or nightly—life of the streets of the capital, so a strand of what was often only Romantic local colour has become an increasingly important presence in modern written French, as many writers have perceived the impossibility of confronting the modern (particularly urban) world through the medium of a literary language essentially fixed since the 17th or 18th c.
The 20th c. has seen an expansion of the uses of forms deriving from the oral language, from their provision of colour or realism in dialogues of Balzac to the assumption of their adequacy to any task which the novel, in particular, might undertake. In the works of Céline the violence done to every aspect of classical French prose is both an aspect of the narrator's denunciation of the cultures, states, and societies which created World War I, the colonial empires, and the dehumanized world of 1920s capitalism, and a vehicle for his own feverish, nightmare vision of existence without hope. The hallucinatory quality of these novels begins with the destruction of formal syntax; this is interwoven with a strand of realism in so far as the text is a record of contemporary Parisian usage. In both vocabulary and syntax, it is the language of the capital and of specific sectors of its population which is the source of this new language, which, going far beyond realistic notation of spoken French, is at the heart of Céline's artistic project.
At the same time as Céline published Voyage au bout de la nuit, Queneau, afraid that the French language was on the brink of a schism as radical as that which separated Greek into its purely literary and demotic forms, was attempting to make spoken French—in his terms ‘le troisième ou le néo-français’—into a literary instrument capable of anything. He claimed that an attempt to translate Descarte's Discours de la méthode into the demotic was the origin of his first novel Le Chiendent, which made apparent the rich comic possibilities opened up by the attempt to transcribe the spoken tongue (this vein was most notably exploited in his Zazie dans le métro). However, from the beginning, his works also embraced the most learned and literary forms of French and none is entirely composed in ‘néo-français’. Queneau also made the popular language of Paris the vehicle for his verse and songs, carrying on a tradition which Prévert had kept alive after the poems of Jehan Rictus and the chansonniers of the post-Commune period. The contribution of Jacques Prévert—and that of his brother Pierre—extends beyond his poetry, which did much to spread the influence of ordinary speech in poetic language; he had an even greater impact through his work as a script-writer. The influence of the great French films of the 1930s, for instance those of Renoir, Duvivier, and Carné, is contemporary with and perhaps equal to that of Queneau and Céline in this area.
While these ambitious attempts to change the nature of written French were going on, detective fiction, which in France can be seen to reach back through Balzac to join with many of the phenomena mentioned above, continued to be written and read in vast quantity, and the use of argot as the sign of authenticity of observation of the criminal milieu continued to develop in its own right as well as to feed the vocabulary of everyday French. Moreover, the extent to which the informal registers have become more or less dominant in many forms of written French, up to and including essays such as Au coin de la rue, l'aventure by Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, is in part due to the emergence of generations which were able to read a language other than that taught in school.
While the ‘polar’ (thriller) is now the meeting-ground for the language of all who feel themselves to be in any way marginalized by conventional society, the autobiographical writers (e.g. Boudard) from the poor working classes or the world of crime are able to use their linguistic inheritance to enrich a French prose which would otherwise be inadequate to their experience. Here, and in the works of Cavanna, the humour endemic in popular language is a dominant characteristic. In this respect, it would be unthinkable not to mention the influence of Dard, whose San-Antonio crime novels are, at their best, an irrepressible fountain of humour and verbal invention.
On a more discursive level the works of Claude Duneton deal with what is a major post-war problem for many writers—which French to use, given that the language of the bourgeoisie is an alienating factor. Others, such as Jacques Cellier in his journalism and more extensive studies, have ensured that popular language is as well recorded and disseminated among the intelligentsia now as at any time in French history. The extensive imagery and poetry of popular speech in the hands of various writers has far outstripped the merely naturalistic usage that a criminal argot finds in many crime novels; and the existence of other genres, often grouped as ‘paralittérature’, such as bande dessinée, together with the work of novelists such as Jean-Luc Bénoziglio, shows the enormous range of endeavour for which an ‘unofficial’ French is the medium.
[Ian Revie]
Bibliography
- A. le Breton, L'Argot chez les vrais de vrai (1975)
- C. Duneton and J.-P. Pagliano, Anti-manuel de français (1978)
