Abstract

Dictionary wars were a hallmark of French literary culture from the apogee of the monarchy under Louis XIV through its downfall in the French Revolution. Quarrels involving the Académie française and renegade Academician Antoine Furetière, Catholics and Protestants over the Dictionnaire universel, Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Jesuits’ Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique and its various anti-philosophical epigones, are well known. Less known, perhaps because they were never finished, perhaps because they issued from lesser lights, are the projects elaborated by the Jacobin François-Urbain Domergue and the royalist François de Rivarol during the French Revolution, challenging the authority of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. When the latter was suppressed in 1793, publication of its dictionary appeared unlikely, as well; cleared for publication in 1798, it was patently incomplete. My paper examines competing unfinished dictionaries during a tumultuous and crucial period in France’s political and linguistic history.