François-Urbain Domergue

Biography

Born from a father apothecary, it makes his studies with Aubagne, then with the college of the oratorien S of Marseilles. Become teacher with Lyon, he marries the girl of a surgeon and makes appear the first edition of his Grammaire Francoise simplified in 1778. In 1784, it founds the Journal of the Language Francoise of which one of the objectives is “to fight, by the precepts and the example, the Néologisme which was introduced already into the letters. ” The hardly being sold newspaper, Domergue is established in 1790 in Paris, where it founds a Company of the amateurs of the French language. It makes republish its simplified Grammaire , collaborates in the general Journal of the evening, policy and literature and starts again its Journal of the Language Francoise . Appointed professor of general grammar at the central School of the Four-Nations, it obtains then the pulpit of humanities to the Lycée Charlemagne. He is elected member of the French Academy in 1803 and takes part in the commission of the Dictionnaire of the Academy.

The combat for the linguistic unit

Called “the patriotic grammairien”, François-Urbain Domergue married the ideal Jacobin consisting in working by all the means for the linguistic unit, condition according to him of the national unit. He thus announces his program in the first number of the Journal of the Language Francoise :

To absolutely base on a clear metaphysics a system of grammar nine, without claiming to give exclusion to any other; to answer the various questions about the written or spoken language; to exert a justified, instructive censure; to give a theory succinte & luminous of all the works of taste, either in prose, or in worms; not to announce, not analyze, collect only those which carry the print of the talent; to devote in the language of the gods all événemens moral, physical & political, worthy of the attention of the men: such is the plan of the Newspaper of the Francoise Language. Can the amateurs of the first language Europe honor it with their vote a newspaper that all the men of letters are begged to embellish their productions!

At the time of its second Parisian incarnation, its Journal allured many patriotic spirits and gained a certain success. Its method of grammatical training, included and refined in several successive works, testifies to an exemplary preoccupation with a clearness. Its ideas on the reform and the purification of the language knew however only one transitory vogue.

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