Introduction

In this chapter I intend to examine, on the one hand, evidence for variation in the French language in the seventeenth century according to the socio-economic status (SES) or social class of the speaker, and, on the other hand, that relating to register, niveau de langue, style or genre. In addition, we will consider the extent to which these two different parameters of variation are separated or are separable, both in seventeenth-century discussions of variation and in our textual sources. Labov has argued that linguistic facts which pattern significantly along the social class continuum will exhibit parallel behaviour along a stylistic continuum, so that if a feature is found to be more common in the lower than in the upper classes, it will also be more common in less formal than in more formal styles for all speakers (Romaine 1982: 123).

In seventeenth-century France an equation is made between the ability to speak well and good social breeding. This emerges most obviously in Vaugelas's definition of good usage as ‘la façon de parler de la plus saine partie de la Cour, conformément à la façon d'escrire de la plus saine partie des Autheurs du temps’ (Vaugelas 1647: Preface II, 3). It is equally evident in Sorel's characterization (1664: 2) of the way people are judged in seventeenth-century French society: