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>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 69
ABSTRACT (en)
As far as “shocks” go, none was greater to late eighteenth-century minds than the events of 1789. Whether they took part in it, observed it from a distance or opposed it, the Revolution was experienced as a world-historical event whose ideological roots were transnational and whose impact extended far beyond national and linguistic borders. Its meaning and exportability as a political model were the object of fierce debate across Europe. These political issues were frequently seen and addressed as problems of language, as testified by a plethora of initiatives around language planning, dictionaries and instruction manuals explaining the meaning of the new revolutionary lexicon. But how did the shockwave of 1789 translate into other parts of Europe? And how translatable was the new language of the Revolution, which enlisted the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment but also redefined the political nation, seizing on the rhetoric of patriotism and love of country? This article looks for concrete answers to these large speculative questions by considering some examples of language policies, political lexicography and discourses on translation from the 1790s in France, Britain, and the Italian states.
KEYWORDS (en)
French Revolution, political language, translation, radicalism, Italy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.2
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