The right to write badly - Three Swiss cases (18th-20th centuries)

Using Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846) and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947), all three shaped in the French linguistic space of Switzerland, this article looks at the welcome Paris reserves for deviations from standard written practice, a point of pride or shame that announces national differences. Attenuated or accentuated, depending on the historical moment, these deviations may be the object of a violent bringing into line. But at the cost of a labor of legitimation undertaken by the critics (e.g. Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Topffer, Claudel's defense of Ramuz); they can also be perceived as effects of style. More is at stake than simply esthetics, however. Ramuz' highly personal style, for instance, appears both as an individual production and a polemical response to the unspoken rules of the French literary field. Deploring the chasm between regional variants of spoken French and the standard written version, many authors around the French-speaking periphery refuse to align their style on the French ''of Paris''. A literary issue may thus emerge from a gee-historical gap between fields: many cases in French-speaking Switzerland, Quebec, Belgium or the West Indies present striking similarities in their enthusiastic debauching of the French ''of Paris'' the better to construct their own identity.