At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, only about half of the population of that country knew French, and bilingualism was common. France continued to accommodate a myriad of tongues right through the 19th century: Flemish, Provençal, Gascon, Catalan, Basque, and so on, and many dialects and patois, as well as extraordinary variation in spoken language within regions. The diversity wasn’t merely lingual: A variety of pre-Christian religious beliefs and superstitions, worldviews and ways of life flourished simultaneously in the more provincial countryside beyond Paris. Even the legal order varied greatly: In addition to the difference between regions influenced by customary law — essentially northern France — and Roman law, a variety of local systems of justice survived intact, each system bringing along with it a strong sense of belonging to one of the myriad petites patries of the hexagon.
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