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Louis-Sebastien Mercier opposed the language politics of both Right and Left during the French Revolution. His 1801 La Neologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, a renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles is a kind of antidictionary, promoting linguistic innovation rather than standardization or reform. In this work, as in others, Mercier vindicates the creativity of speakers and writers against the "caprice" of institutions. "The life of a language," he writes, "is that of the people to whom it belongs."
What has the academician done? He has seen the immense edifice of human languages only in the light of his own fantasies; for words he has had both love and hatred, animosity and blind affection, and his caprices have become rules.
Louis-Sebastien Mercier, La Neologie1
The history of the Enlightenment is the history of words. It is the history of words with great careers, such as nature, reason, and progress. But it is no less the history of words in general. From the Grammar of Port-Royal to Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Diderot's Encyclopedie, language lies at the center of the philosophy and culture of the Enlightenment. But this very centrality is the ground of complication. For the Enlightenment, language was an unstable entity: it represented at once the physicality of speech and the immateriality of the idea. In an age as fascinated by nature as it was by reason, it was a site of powerful conflict. Nowhere is this clearer than in the investigations of neology that took place before and during the French Revolution, investigations that attempted to understand the sources of change in both language and ideas. These studies are not only excellent resources for understanding cultural and social developments, they are also sensitive instruments for gauging the consciousness of change so crucial to the period.2
Of the neological works of the period, Louis-Sebastien Mercier's 1801 La Neologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, a renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles is among the most important. A testament to the linguistic genius of the past and a manifesto for the future, La Neologie was among the first French dictionaries explicitly to sanction and promote linguistic innovation. Simultaneously far-reaching and idiosyncratic, it was also a faithful reflection of its author, a writer who...