Claire de Mareschal

Please tell us about your research project.

Studies of French in the 17th and 18th centuries generally reveal a unitarist vision of classical French that corresponds to the written language of the great authors. However, more and more, the attention of researchers has turned to documentary sources to reveal the full extent of the variational phenomena in the history of the language. As a DPhil student in French linguistics under the supervision of Pr. André Thibault at Sorbonne Université, I am working on documents selected among the French Prize Papers, which are about 160 000 documents exchanged between the French Caribbean and metropolitan France during the 17th and 18th centuries. They were taken by English privateers on captured French ships and conserved as pieces of evidence for the trial which determined if the vessel was legally seized. A significant part of these documents were written by people with low literacy. The objectives of this thesis are to advance the state of knowledge on French as it was actually practised outside the formally educated circles, in particular by more or less literate writers whose production corresponds to a private, non-official practice of the language, to the extent that these are private texts not intended for wide circulation and partially reflecting the immediate communicative. The study of this state of language is also important to better draw the contours of what was the basis (the input) of the Caribbean French as well as the Caribbean French-based Creoles.

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

I am very grateful to have been awarded the Monthly Scholarship of the Maison Française d'Oxford for the month of June 2023. Thanks to this bursary, I was able to consult some important documents hosted by the Bodleian Libraries, to meet researchers of my field, and to go to the National Archives of London to attend a formation with the archivists.

First impressions of Oxford/the University?

Even though I arrived at the end of the term, I was impressed by the many high-quality scientific events. Compared with Paris, the city is small and really quiet, and it is above all literally designed for academic activities: I felt that Oxford was definitely the best place to write a DPhil thesis - that is why I'll certainly come back during the summer!