BRÉAL, A HIDDEN NEO-LAMARCKIST?
BRÉAL, A HIDDEN NEO-LAMARCKIST?
Lyell never said what the laws of invention and selection were that govern language- change. It was Bréal’s life-long ambition to discover them. In his search he became more
Change in language 46
and more influenced by psychological ideas. He eventually concluded that the laws of ‘invention’ must be intellectual ones, whereas the laws of selection are of a social character. The intellectual laws indicate the victory of spirit over matter, and they mark the progress of thought. They do not govern change in its purely external form, but change in meaning. Bréal’s intellectual transformationism is definitely not Schleicherian, where history is not conceived in form of progress but decay and where intellectual transformations are replaced by natural growth.
The purely empirical observation of linguistic forms would not only be flawed by giving us an incomplete and inexact idea of the developments of languages: it also would lead us to ignore the primary cause of the transformation of languages, which is not provided by the analysis of words, but which we have to seek in ourselves.
(FF: 69)
The laws that govern language and that manifest themselves in the transformations of speech, are similar to those that can be observed in the evolution of law, usages and beliefs (cf. LN: 618). And:
the history of Language, when referred to intellectual laws, is not only more true, but also more interesting: it cannot be a matter of indifference to us to note, above the seeming chance which governs the destiny of words and forms of Language, the appearance of laws corresponding in each case to an advance [progrès] in the mind.
(ES: 280251)
But is Bréal’s transformationism of Darwinian origin? Perhaps, but much more probably it was influenced by Lamarck. Bréal’s affiliation to the neo-Lamarckian camp was first proposed by Simone Delesalle (cf. 1987:312). If Bréal was a neo-Lamarckian then it was for two reasons: theoretical and historical. On theoretical grounds he was opposed not only to Schleicher and his conception of the decadence of language, but also, according to Delesalle, to Darmesteter who based his theory of the life of language on the theory of variation and selection, remaining neutral as to the question of progress or decay. Historically, one has to take into account France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war which stirred deep emotions in Bréal, paralleled by the awareness of a certain ‘cultural lag’ in linguistic matters. Bréal was working to repair national pride, first, by campaigning for better schools (cf. on this topic Delesalle and Chevalier 1986); second, by restructuring teaching and research in the field of linguistics and philology at the universities. Bréal was definitely a ‘progressist’—theoretically and ideologically—and one has to agree with Delesalle who puts forward the hypothesis that Bréal was more influenced by Lamarck than by Darwin (Bréal himself kept silent on this subject):
Neo-Lamarckism, which had developed in England and France after 1860, has had a great influence in France between the wars of 1870 and 1914, on a theoretical and an ideological level. As notes Jacques Rogers ‘the neo-Lamarckian ideology was used to fight for the republic, against the
Evolution, transformation, or 'the life and Growth of language'? 47
clergy and the monarchists’. This ideology is based on the refusal to accept natural selection alone as the principle underlying the variability of species, and the concern to find the causes of evolution: in the eyes of the neo-Lamarckians, there can be no random variations.
The processes of transformation must have a goal, consciousness plays
a role, more or less precise or diffuse, and the global movement is one of progress.