A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France

What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? This book takes up that classic question by concentrating on the politics of language in the second half of the 18th century. The author traces the emergence of both a new anxiety about the abuse of words and a new interest in the power of gestural communication, from ballet to the sign language of the deaf. She then explores the significance of a variety of semiotic experiments within the revolutionary struggle. A Revolution in Language explains why leading revolutionaries came to see politics as a struggle for authority over signs. And it shows how ideas about language shaped French Revolutionary political culture as a whole.