. Brussels, Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1989 ; one vol. in-8°, u-164 p. (Études sur le xvme siècle, XVI). — The Groupe d'études sur le xviue siècle has edited a volume of papers on Belgian reactions to the linguistic and religious decrees and practices of the French revolutionaries. The organizers of the seminar commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution focused on the regional contrasts between counter-revolutionaries in Flanders and Wallonia as well as the divergence of Belgian ideas from the policies decreed in Paris.
The first four papers deal with the revolutionary attempt to impose the French language on the Flemish, German, and Walloon speaking inhabitants of the newly annexed departments. In the first chapter, the French historian René Balibar traces the roots of the French linguistic policy that he calls colingualism. He explores the goals of the linguistic politics enunciated in the Questionnaire Grégoire, the 1790 French survey of language and culture. As Daniel Droixhe explains in the second chapter, the French agents dispatched to northern Belgium continued to allow if not actually to encourage the translation of the French revolutionary decrees into Flemish. For them Flemish was an idiom, something positive. At the same time, they dismissed Walloon as mere patois. Herman Van Goethem suggests that the French revolutionaries acknowledging that any attempt to enforce linguistic decrees from the center was doomed to failure, realized that they could effectively encourage the adoption of French by instituting changes in local institutions. In Alsace, French gradually and naturally replaced German in the courts as more and more of the newly nominated judges were French-speaking. In Flanders, local officials who supported the French consciously adopted French as the language of revolution. In the final chapter of this section, Hervé Hasquin argues against the popular perception that as a result of revolutionary policies, Flemish disappeared from Brussels at the end of the eighteenth century. Although French came to prevail in the cultural and administrative life of Brussels, he explains that there is no evidence to prove that Flemish was eliminated from private life. Twenty years of French occupation did not uproot the basic Flemish character of the residents of Brussels, he concludes.
As the four authors move from theory to practice to result, a set of common questions emerges to link together these investigations of French linguistic legislation. The Abbé Grégoire who dominates the first chapter appears repeatedly. Indeed, the reader is tempted to pose Grégoire's question — "Pour quels genres de choses, d'occupations, de passions, ce patois est-il plus abondant ?" — of the nineteenth century Brussels residents studied by Professor Hasquin (p. 16). That is true as well of a number of significant questions posed by each of the four authors, for example concerning the
