INTRODUCTION (ENGLISH VERSION)

If multilingualism has been a European reality since the Middle Ages, it has generated different practices both oral and written according to the period. The use of several languages by the same person assumed different forms according to the user, the listener/recipient, the object of the communication, the social and geographical context, and finally, the period. The spread of the French language is a fact in pre-modern Europe: Latin functioned as a lingua franca for learned communication, the language of reference for culture and science saw its role gradually become more limited and overtaken by French. French co-existed with Germanic dialects in Northern Europe, with English in Medieval England, with Russian in Eastern Europe, with Italian and Spanish in Southern Europe. Willem Frijhoff has talked of Francization in the context of the Netherlands, and Marc Fumaroli's choice of title, Quand l’Europe parlait français to describe the impact and spread of the French language during the Enlightenment is equally eloquent. In recent years the concept of Francophonie européenne has appeared in order to designate a phenomenon that was studied as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Most studies of the practice of French, in zones where it was neither the official nor the vernacular language and by people with different mother tongues, concern the teaching and public use of French, its social functions and its cultural dimension.

The works of Catherine Viollet and her research team on personal diaries have convinced us of the wealth of personal documents, diaries, and also letters, alba amicorum, and autobiographical texts written in French, often unpublished and kept in private and/or public archives in many European countries. It is documents of this type, produced within an autobiographical framework and concerning private or semi-private use, that make up the greater part of the corpus of texts studied in the contributions to this volume.

We will be asking questions about the use of French, as second language or foreign language, for written communication between friends/family, for writing in the first person, and favouring the appearance of personal, confidential writing. To what extent can we talk of the language of private life?