Flemish Radicals, Jacobins, and Nazis: The Francophones of Flanders and Arguments against the State Regulation of Language during the Twentieth Century

Both popular and scholarly treatments of the French-speaking world tend to reify all French speakers into a homogeneous bloc with a deeply state-centered approach to language legislation. Such an analysis, informed by the examples of France and Québec, neglects the specificity of different social and political contexts. In this article, I use the example of the French speakers of Flanders, who often argued against the state regulation of language and in doing so adopted a political discourse that was radically different than that often associated with so-called French speakers, to complicate o... Mehr ...