Language Pedagogy and Political-Cognitive Autonomy in Mid-19th Century Geneva

Charles-Louis Longchamp (1802–1874) was the dominant figure in Latin studies in Geneva in the 1850s and 1860s and had a formative influence on the Latin teachers of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Longchamp’s work was in the grammaire générale tradition, which, on account of historical anomalies falling out from the Genevese Revolution of 1846 to 1848, was still being taught in Geneva up to the mid-1870s, despite having been put aside in France in the 1830s and 1840s. Longchamp succeeded briefly in getting his Latin grammars onto the school curriculum, replacing those imported from France, which Longchamp argued were making the Genevese mentally indistinguishable from the French, weakening their power to think for themselves and putting their political independence at risk. His own grammars offered “a sort of bulwark against invasion by the foreign mind, a guarantee against annexation”. Longchamp’s pedagogical approach had echoes in Saussure’s teaching of Germanic languages in Paris in the 1880s, and in the ‘stylistics’ of Saussure’s successor Charles Bally (1865–1947).