The Regency French Study Guide

This is the companion guide to French & Modern Languages, the flashcard lesson in which a governess drills you on the French phrases a lady was expected to place into English conversation, and reprimands you for mangling them. The lesson is short. This page explains where the whole practice came from, gives a working glossary of the phrases that actually earned their keep in a Regency drawing room, and describes exactly what it signalled to get one wrong.

The thing to understand first is that "French" as an accomplishment did not mean fluency. It meant a reading knowledge, a passable accent, and the social judgement to drop the right French phrase in the right place without reaching. That last part was the real test, and it is the one Austen watches most closely.

Why French Was an Accomplishment

For more than a century before the Regency, French had been the working language of European diplomacy and of polite culture across the Continent. English had already absorbed a large courtesy vocabulary from it, words for manners, dress, cookery, and social situations that had no neat English equivalent. Knowing French, even a little, meant being able to use that vocabulary correctly rather than guessing at it.

It was also, frankly, a marker of expense. French was taught by a governess, a visiting master, or a period at a fashionable school, and all three cost money. A girl who could produce a well-placed French phrase and a decent accent had visibly been given a certain kind of education, which is precisely why it was worth putting on the list.

The long war with France did not dislodge any of this. Polite English society went on speaking of bon ton and the beau monde throughout, and a lady's French was no more unpatriotic than her Italian songs.

The Emigre Tutors, and the Accent

One consequence of the French Revolution was that thousands of French emigres, many of them genuinely well-born and well-educated, arrived in England from 1789 onward with no money and a language to sell. A great many of them became tutors and schoolmistresses.

For a generation of English gentry children this meant that the French they were taught, and the accent, came from actual educated Parisians rather than from an English governess working out of a grammar. The standard available to a family that could pay for it went up. It also sharpened the contrast, because a girl taught by an emigre and a girl who had picked up her French phrases socially now sounded audibly different.

A Working Glossary of Drawing-Room French

These are the phrases that genuinely earned their place in polite English conversation of the period. Several had been so thoroughly absorbed that Austen and her contemporaries wrote them without italics or apology.

entre nous

Between ourselves. The correct way to preface a confidence, in place of a blunt "keep this to yourself."

tete-a-tete

Literally head to head; a private conversation between two people. Fully naturalised in English by this date.

a contretemps

An awkward hitch, a mischance, a piece of bad timing. A spilled cup is a contretemps. A ruined evening is not "a total disaster."

le coup de grace

The finishing stroke, the blow that settles a matter. Used for the last thing that ends an argument, an evening, or a courtship.

hors de question

Out of the question, not to be entertained. The composed way to refuse a proposal outright, in place of "no possible way."

en desespoir de cause

In despair, every other course having failed; as a last resort. Used, often drily, of someone who has given up and made a scene.

indisposed (from indispose)

Slightly unwell. The polite word for it. One did not announce to a room that one felt "sick."

sang-froid

Cold blood; composure under pressure. A close cousin of the "certain something."

savoir-faire

Knowing what to do; social competence, tact in action.

ennui

A settled, fashionable boredom, deeper than being merely bored. A word people used partly to show they knew it.

penchant

A leaning or inclination toward someone or something, usually romantic and usually half-admitted.

protegee

A young woman under an older person's patronage and protection. Note the feminine ending; a man is a protege.

eclat

Brilliance, dazzling public effect, a showy success. Austen uses it plainly.

on dit

Literally "one says"; a piece of gossip, a rumour going round. "The on dit is that they are engaged."

bon ton / the ton

Good form, and by extension fashionable society itself. "The ton" is the whole world of people who matter.

How to Place a French Phrase

The rule was economy. One well-chosen French phrase in a conversation was elegant. Three was a performance, and a performance of exactly the sort of striving the accomplishment was meant to conceal.

The phrase had to fit the register of the sentence around it. "Entre nous" belonged in a low, confidential aside across a card table, not called out across a room. It also had to be genuinely the better word. If plain English said the thing perfectly well, plain English was the more secure choice, because reaching for French where English would do was itself a small tell.

Pronunciation mattered less than most people assume, as long as it was consistent and unembarrassed. A confident, slightly anglicised delivery passed easily. A nervous, over-corrected one, with the speaker plainly listening to herself, did not.

Mangling It, and What That Told the Room

Getting a foreign phrase wrong in company was read as social information. It suggested the speaker had acquired the phrase by ear, at parties, rather than being taught the language, and was pitching above her education to sound in the mode.

Austen's clearest example is not French but Italian, and it is deliberate. In Emma, Mrs. Elton repeatedly refers to her husband as her caro sposo, showing off a scrap of Italian, and Austen lets the reader notice that she does not always get even that much right. The foreign tag is part of how we are meant to place her: new money, anxious about status, performing an education she is still assembling.

The specific errors that gave a person away were mismatched gender endings, like calling a woman a protege; using a strong idiom for a weak situation, like coup de grace for a minor mishap; and stacking phrases, three or four to a paragraph, which no genuinely fluent speaker ever did.

"…the resources of caro sposo…"
Mrs. Elton, Emma — Austen using a mangled foreign phrase to place a character

The Other Modern Languages

Caroline Bingley's list says "the modern languages," plural, and French was only the first of them.

Italian was the language of song. A young lady who performed at the pianoforte was very often singing in Italian, and enough Italian to pronounce the words correctly and understand roughly what she was singing was part of a musical education. It carried far less conversational weight than French.

German was a distant third, more common in families with Court or Hanoverian connections, and not generally expected. Latin and Greek were pointedly not on the list. They were a man's education, and a woman who advertised them risked being thought a bluestocking, which in the wrong company was not a compliment.

Where These Rules Come From

The evidence for how French actually sat in Regency conversation is spread across letters, periodicals, and the novels themselves, more than any single manual. The main sources this guide leans on are all in the public domain.

• Jane Austen's letters, which use French and Italian tags naturally and correctly, and give a good sense of which phrases an educated woman of the gentry treated as ordinary English.
• Austen's novels, especially Emma for Mrs. Elton's foreign tags and Mansfield Park for the assumption that a young lady's education includes French.
• Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son (and Trusler's Regency-era abridgement Principles of Politeness), the standard authority on French as the mark of a polished person, and on the difference between using a language and showing it off.
• The fashionable periodicals, La Belle Assemblee and Ackermann's Repository, whose prose is full of exactly the French society vocabulary in casual use, and shows which terms had crossed fully into English.
• Contemporary accounts of the emigre community in England, for the role of French exiles as tutors and the effect on how French was taught.