Introduction

On 20 April 1667, in the southwestern city of Toulouse, Lizette Paute — a sixty-four-year-old widow accused of running a house of prostitution, stealing lamps from a church, and counterfeiting coin — was led from her prison cell inside the city hall to the chambre de la gêne, the municipal court’s torture chamber. There, six of the southwestern city’s eight capitouls (city councilors and judges on the municipal court), two assesseurs (officers of the court charged with assisting the judges), and a greffier (clerk) were waiting. After Paute was seated on a squat wooden stool, Bernard Limoges, the greffier, read her the sentence to torture that had been pronounced by the Parlement of Toulouse, the sovereign appeals court that reviewed every death sentence handed down by the lower jurisdiction. Paute was then asked to recite her name, place of birth, marital status, and whether she had children. The greffier dutifully noted her answers, choosing normal indirect speech to paraphrase her words in the third person, transcribing, for example, “She answers her name is Lizette Paute native of Villemur.”Footnote ¹ Reminded that she had already been questioned concerning the serious charges weighing against her (the gravest accusation, counterfeiting currency, carried the death penalty), and interrogated once again, she persisted in denying the charges. The judges then summoned the executioner, his valet, and several guards into the chamber, who placed their hands on a Bible and swore to do their duty faithfully and never to reveal the details of what would now take place.

As the executioner bound Paute’s hands behind her back with ropes strung through a pulley fixed to the ceiling high above in preparation for a form of torture called the estrapade (strappado), the accused “was once more exhorted to tell the truth and reveal the name of her accomplices in the aforementioned sacrileges.”Footnote ² The greffier Limoges chose this moment to abruptly modify the form in which he put the woman’s testimony to paper, making three changes. First, the clerk switched from normal indirect speech to quoted direct speech and began to transcribe her responses word for word. Second, he abandoned the French in which he had chosen to record the proceedings up until that point in order to transcribe her responses in the local dialect of Occitan, the Romance language widely used in Toulouse and across Southern France in that period — the first hint in the document that those present in the chambre de la gêne were not all speaking French among themselves. And third, he also modified his handwriting as if to emphasize the distinctive status of the old woman’s words, noting, for example, “She said ah my God, I don’t know how to answer [italics in Occitan and in modified hand].”Footnote ³

At this point, the executioner, his assistant, and the guards hoisted her up and then abruptly let out slack, blocking the rope just before the plummeting woman hit the ground, her arms and shoulders bearing the full weight of her body as they absorbed the terrible force of the fall. The capitouls interrogated her again, the greffier careful once more to transcribe her answer in Occitan. “Ah my God I am innocent,”Footnote ⁴ Paute cried out, protesting that she knew nothing about the crimes she was charged with. The judges then ordered the executioner to lower the old woman. Once again, she was “exhorted to tell the truth,” though now the clerk switched back to indirect speech, recording her answer in French: “She said she told it.”Footnote ⁵ The capitouls ordered Paute hauled up and let fall a second time. Interrogated again, the clerk switched back to first-person voice and Occitan to transcribe her response. “She said ah my God Holy Virgin help me I don’t know . . . monsieur Dutil [calling out to one of the assesseurs by name] help me I am dead,” noted the clerk, before seamlessly resuming third-person paraphrase in French to record her alibi: “and she claimed that at the time the lamps were stolen, she was in Castelnaudary [a nearby city].”Footnote ⁶ “And seeing that the aforementioned Paute persisted in her previous Answers and the second” application of the estrapade “was complete,” the judges ordered her remanded to prison, and a second round of torture scheduled for two days later.Footnote ⁷

On 22 April, the capitouls celebrated a virtually identical liturgy of judicial violence and bilingual transcription inside Toulouse’s city hall and across the pages of their tribunal’s records. Just as he had two days before, the greffier paraphrased Paute’s answers to the preliminary round of questions in the third person and in French. When Paute endured the estrapade for a second time, Limoges once again transcribed her first-person testimony word for word in Occitan, recording (again in a modified hand) that “the aforementioned Paute was lifted up high she shouted out while in tears my God I can’t do anything but die I can’t say anything else mother of my God our lady I don’t know monsieur about the aforementioned locks and all the rest.”Footnote ⁸ The judges then ordered the executioner to apply a second form of torture reserved for women in which a vise known as the mordaches (or brodequins) was affixed to the accused’s calf and progressively tightened. The mordaches were applied only once, Paute again invoked the Virgin’s help in anguished cries, which Limoges yet again dutifully recorded word for word in Occitan. The procedure now complete, the judges ordered Paute — who still hadn’t confessed — returned to the jail.

This grisly chapter in the richly documented annals of early modern France’s legal apparatus opens a window onto the workings of a central feature of the inquisitorial, Roman-law-inspired legal systems in place throughout much of Continental Europe in this period: judicial torture. In their campaign to restrict state-directed violence, Enlightenment figures like Voltaire (1694–1778) and Cesare Beccaria (1738–94) bequeathed disapproval of judicial torture to modern sensibilities as well as a telos of moral progress to historical scholarship.Footnote ⁹ In recent decades, however, historians have turned their backs on older Whiggish narratives and sought to develop more-historicized understandings of early modern law. Newer scholarship emphasizes that torture was extensively theorized, generally accepted, and widely practiced across early modern Europe, and seeks to make historically contextualized sense of this fact. Researchers have reconstructed the theoretical, legal, and procedural frameworks for torture’s use in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods,Footnote ¹⁰ trawled judicial archives to observe torture in practice,Footnote ¹¹ studied torture as a window into early modern attitudes toward pain and the body,Footnote ¹² read interrogations for evidence of early modern conceptions of the self,Footnote ¹³ explored the Inquisition’s use of torture in policing Catholic orthodoxy,Footnote ¹⁴ uncovered how Protestant communities mobilized judicial torture to similar ends,Footnote ¹⁵ documented torture’s central role in the early modern hunt for witches,Footnote ¹⁶ argued that interrogation under torture represented a kind of protoethnographic project,Footnote ¹⁷ and situated judicial torture among the ritualized spectacles of violence staged by states to discipline their subjects.Footnote ¹⁸

Paute’s interrogation, however, points to a dimension of judicial torture that has failed to attract any scholarly attention of note: language. Its participants spoke multiple languages, mixing Toulouse’s everyday vernacular, Occitan, with the idiom of judicial procedure for most French courts in this period, French, thus creating within the torture chamber’s walls an ephemeral multilingual community whose members brought with them linguistic skills and habits acquired and in play in France’s intensely multilingual society. The authors of the written record of her interrogations took pains to preserve some trace of this multilingual encounter, offering evidence not only of what took place linguistically during her ordeal, but also of the Toulouse tribunal’s procedures and practices for managing and mediating linguistic difference. That Paute’s experience of torture was a multilingual one is clear, but its record also raises a number of questions whose answers are anything but.

The judicial record is silent on significant aspects of this linguistic exchange. The transcript offers no indication as to who was speaking what language, when, and to whom. Paute may have switched from French to Occitan on her own accord in the course of the interrogation, but it is also entirely possible that the greffier decided at one point to cease translating her Occitan answers into French and instead record them in the original. In the event that Paute spoke in Occitan all along, the record offers no clues as to why the greffier switched languages. Nor does the transcript contain any evidence as to whether everyone present could understand each other. It does not indicate whether the judges pronounced their questions in Oc (a synonym for Occitan), or whether their queries were first enunciated in French and then translated for Paute’s benefit. In the event that the judges’ questions were translated, the record does not specify who did the translating. The record is similarly mute as to the language in which the judges addressed the executioner, his valet, and the attendant guards, as well as the idiom in which these strong-armed judicial auxiliaries spoke (or whether they spoke at all). These silences invite historical analysis, which in turn can shed light on language, judicial torture, and legal procedure more broadly.

By sketching a history of linguistic mediation in judicial torture in early modern France, this article engages with four distinct scholarly conversations. First, it proposes to fill an important historiographical gap by integrating language into the history of judicial torture. Second, it offers new insights into the mediation of linguistic difference within judicial institutions more broadly, a question that has likewise not attracted the attention it deserves.Footnote ¹⁹ Third, it contributes to scholarship on the intrinsically mediated character of written texts like judicial interrogation transcripts that purport to capture oral expression on paper. By mediation, I mean the range of practices wielded by judicial officials in order to make sense of and record oral testimony on paper, including transcription, paraphrasis, summary, annotation, and omission, as well as translation. Such records are always the product of choices — what questions to ask, what in the answers to leave in writing, what to leave out, how to represent oral discourse in writing.Footnote ²⁰ In her assessment nearly forty years ago of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s pathbreaking ethnography of an Occitan-speaking medieval village, Natalie Zemon Davis regretted that he had not taken the mediated and translated nature of his source, a series of Inquisition transcripts, into account.Footnote ²¹ While scholars have answered her call to think about the mediated nature of such texts in general, they have not given their linguistic dimension the same consideration. Fourth, this article joins a still young conversation among historians committed to taking language seriously as a historical phenomenon.Footnote ²² Some historians reconstruct the histories of individual languages in social, cultural, and political contexts.Footnote ²³ Others examine language’s role as a medium for cooperation, trade, social and cultural exchange, government administration, colonial conquest, and Christian evangelization. Some analyze language as a site for the elaboration of cultural identities. Others focus on the cultural functions and social trajectories of linguistic intermediaries themselves.Footnote ²⁴

While taking inspiration from such perspectives, this study proposes a new arena for thinking about language, by focusing specifically on linguistic mediation as a practice pregnant with cultural, social, and political significance. It analyzes such linguistic negotiation as the product of a dynamic interplay between practice and context, historical agent and linguistic difference. Episodes like Paute’s questioning under torture can only be deciphered in relation to a set of interlocking contexts. Law and institutions offered a first context: the early modern French judicial system and its use of torture; the social situation that took form inside the torture chamber itself, comprised of judges, greffiers, executioner, guards, and the accused; and the application of pain to the accused’s body in the belief that this could effectively extract the truth. Local linguistic environments constituted a second context, one in which consecrated languages like French, the idiom of social prestige and (most) state administrative practice, rubbed philological shoulders with everyday vernaculars like Occitan. Contemporary patterns and cultures of linguistic mediation formed still another context: the rules, procedures, and habits that courts relied on to bridge linguistic difference. Textual cultures and practices represented a last context: the production of texts, via processes of mediation, recording what took place during the interrogation, certified as authentic by the signatures of judges, greffiers, and, in some cases, interpreters (as well as the accused, if she or he knew how to sign), invested with legal authority, whose vocation was to be archived, referred to, and put to use in judicial proceedings that would weigh heavily on the fate of the accused.

Any study of the place of linguistic mediation in judicial torture must necessarily rest on an examination of precisely these interrogation transcripts. For the historian of judicial torture, they offer virtually the only evidence available of what took place within the walls of courts’ torture chambers. Viewed from inside the judicial system, these documents represented the end point of the interrogation as process, recording in legally actionable form either a confession of guilt or a protestation of innocence whose enunciation was the very reason physical duress had been applied. They are remarkably rich sources, whose content provides precious glimpses of the linguistic experience of torture, and whose generic form makes it possible to reconstruct magistrates’ and clerks’ mediation protocols, procedures, and work habits. They are also frustratingly incomplete sources, fragmentary and at times laconic records of complex oral exchanges. Taking such texts to be multilayered and historically inscribed sources — what historian of early modern Italy John Martin calls “tortured testimonies”Footnote ²⁵ — this article proposes to read them both along and against the documentary grain with respect to language. Such an approach entails reconstructing multilingual encounters and tribunals’ linguistic-mediation procedures from the explicit traces they left in the transcripts, as well as interrogating all that they leave unsaid about language, in order to weigh why certain instances or aspects of linguistic mediation merit note and others are passed over in silence. Given how frequently participants in judicial interrogations confronted linguistic difference, to omit mention of linguistic information was as much a mode of transcription as the choice to acknowledge it or to signal that translation had taken place.

This article grounds its analysis on close readings of instances of linguistic mediation that took place during the course of interrogations under torture in Toulouse courts in the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁶ Using these sources, it reconstructs Toulouse tribunals’ linguistic practices. The study compares these cases with examples drawn from jurisdictions in other linguistic contexts — primarily Brittany and the Basque Country, as well as a brief excursus to France’s overseas empire. A comparative perspective not only throws the specificities of Toulouse’s linguistic context and its courts’ practices into sharp relief, it makes it possible to understand why courts in different places chose to bridge language gaps in different ways. A history of language in the torture chambers of early modern European courts, this study argues, is essential for a full understanding of what took place there. Embedded within multilingual societies and habitually confronted with linguistic difference in the course of ordinary legal procedure, tribunals recognized the everyday sociolinguistic dimension of their work and developed a set of practices for mediating linguistic difference. While this history represents a missing chapter in the procedural history of early modern justice more broadly, this article argues further that the question of translation takes on particular significance in the context of judicial torture. Judges’ and scribes’ linguistic choices reflect a complex dynamic between court officials’ habitual scribal and linguistic practices, on the one hand, and their infliction of physical suffering in a carefully regulated effort to establish judicial facts, on the other, a dynamic that sheds light on how early modern tribunals conceived of and set out uncovering the truth.

Judicial Torture in Early Modern France

Judicial torture in the early modern period was carefully regulated by law, deployed rarely and only in limited circumstances, applicable in cases in which the defendant was accused of a capital crime and judges were nearly convinced of her or his guilt, and imagined by jurists to represent an efficacious instrument for extracting the truth. The law provided for two distinct procedures for judicial torture. In what was called the question préparatoire (preparatory interrogation), judges who had amassed a strong body of circumstantial evidence pointing to a defendant’s guilt at the close of a lengthy investigation could, after deliberation, order the accused to be tortured in order to extract a confession. Magistrates resorted to this form of torture for a specific purpose: to obtain the kind of proof sufficient to justify a conviction and a maximum sentence in cases where such proof was lacking. Early modern legal doctrine and procedure laid out clear technical guidelines for classifying different types of evidence in a carefully delineated typology of proofs, each ranked in a hierarchy of value. The more serious the crime, the graver the penalty, and the more robust the proofs needed in order to obtain a conviction and impose the maximum punishment. In capital cases, a body of strong circumstantial evidence of guilt represented a “proximate” proof, helpful to judges as they conducted their investigations, but insufficient to condemn a defendant to death. A court needed “full” or “complete” proofs, conclusive evidence establishing guilt with certainty: credible testimony from two reliable and disinterested eyewitnesses, textual evidence in certain circumstances, or the accused’s confession.

Some jurisdictions added additional layers of judicial oversight of torture. Every case in which the capitoulat court of Toulouse, the same jurisdiction that tried Paute, sentenced defendants to death, for example, was automatically appealed to the Parlement of Toulouse for review. The goal of the question préparatoire (the form of torture to which Paute was subjected) was thus to obtain an incontrovertible, “full” proof of guilt, in the form of the accused’s confession, without which she or he could not be put to death (though a defendant who persisted in denying the charges could still be sentenced to a lesser penalty, like imprisonment in the king’s galleys). Strict rules specified the types of physical violence that could be inflicted and placed limits on how often and for how long they could be applied — all in evidence in Paute’s case. And a defendant’s confession could only be considered valid legal evidence if she or he freely confirmed it within a day of the torture session. Judges only had recourse to the question préalable (preliminary interrogation), the second form of judicial torture, after they had already condemned a defendant to death, but still hoped to obtain the names of eventual accomplices.Footnote ²⁷

Like the Roman-law-based inquisitorial legal systems in place across most of Continental Europe, judicial torture was motivated by one goal: establishing the truth. As the Roman-law expert Azo of Bologna (ca. 1150–ca. 1225) put it, “Torture is the inquiry after truth by means of torment.” A few decades before Paute’s trial in Toulouse, the German civil lawyer Heinrich Bocer (1561–1630) concurred: “Torture is interrogation by torment of the body, concerning a crime known to have occurred, legitimately ordered by a judge for the purpose of eliciting the truth about the said crime.”Footnote ²⁸ But as Pontius Pilate asked while adjudicating a much earlier trial (one that also involved torture, and, judging by the sign hung atop Jesus’s cross, was also multilingual), “What is truth?”Footnote ²⁹ Early modern magistrates considering recourse to torture asked themselves a variant of Pilate’s question, “how do we know the truth?” They thought about truth in distinct ways: as an absolute (whether Paute had in fact struck fake coin), as an epistemological question (how it could be determined whether Paute had counterfeited the king’s currency), and as a technical legal problem (how criteria could be established for assessing the weight different forms of evidence should carry in determining a defendant’s guilt; the choice to trust two eyewitnesses, and not one or three; the rules for ascertaining what made some eyewitnesses trustworthy and others not). In the face of such thorny methodological problems, torture represented a pragmatic tool for obtaining evidence that, by dint of the very mode of its extraction, met a widely accepted technical definition of full proof of guilt, one sufficient for a conviction and a maximum penalty.

To presume torture’s efficacy as an instrument for distilling truth, however, necessitated a broader epistemology that understood testimony extracted under physical duress to be particularly reliable. Historian Esther Cohen has argued that law courts’ faith in torture makes sense only in the context of medieval and early modern conceptions of the body, pain, and suffering. Contemporaries perceived pain to represent not only an unavoidable, but also a useful part of life. They saw in suffering a divinely ordained mark of postlapsarian humanity; a form of experience with spiritual, medical, and cultural utility; a means to grow closer to God; and a crucible from which healing, purification, penance, and truth would (or could) emerge.Footnote ³⁰ Jurists argued that in the context of the torture chamber, racking a defendant’s body weakened the will to lie or dissimulate, creating conditions in which he or she would be more likely to speak the truth.

Not all contemporaries were quite so confident in torture’s truth-seeking capacities. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), himself a judge in the Parlement of Bordeaux, famously condemned the question in his essay “Of Conscience”:

Montaigne condemns torture on moral and civilizational grounds, qualifying it as “barbarous” in a reversal of the civilization-barbarism binary to which he returned in “Of Cannibals.” Going further, Montaigne pointedly rejects any correlation between physical suffering and truth telling, arguing that torture produces precisely the opposite result. Torture does nothing more than discriminate between the strong and the weak willed — between those capable of coping with pain while persisting in their testimony and those who, insufficiently steeled against suffering, modify their testimony in order to placate their tormentors and put an end to their ordeal. A century later, the moralist Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) boiled this view down to a sharp turn of esprit: “The question is a marvelous invention and altogether guaranteed to provoke the downfall of an innocent person who has a weak character, and to save a guilty person who was born strong.”Footnote ³²

While most early modern jurists did not share Montaigne’s and La Bruyère’s deep skepticism of judicial torture, they nonetheless placed real limits on their faith in its reliability — limits whose implicit rationales softly echoed Montaigne’s concerns.Footnote ³³ It is precisely because jurists did not trust torture to be a foolproof method that they submitted testimony extracted under physical duress to such close scrutiny. To a certain extent, judges were trained to distrust all testimony. One legal treatise laid out specific guidelines on how to conduct interrogations aimed precisely at helping magistrates sift veracious wheat from mendacious chaff, prescribing that “the Judge must keep his eyes fixed on the accused, during the entire time he interrogates him, and observe attentively all his movements. If he trembles, if he weeps, or sighs, the judge will ask him the cause of these movements. In the same way, if he falters, or if he hesitates; if he is slow, and thinks over his responses; the Judge will ply him with reiterated questions, and will make sure all this is mentioned in the [text of the] interrogation.”Footnote ³⁴ Torture only raised the stakes. Judges needed to weigh the three points that composed judicial torture’s inquisitorial triangle — the accused’s racked body, the accused’s will, and the accused’s words — to discern if these words could indeed be trusted. Magistrates could not simply accept the phrases that escaped tortured defendants’ lips at face value. They had to fix an attentive gaze on the accused’s body and turn an alert ear to the accused’s words — their tone, their pace, the manner in which they were enunciated — for signs that the accused’s will might be breaking, and for clues as to whether her or his testimony might be sincere or dissembling.Footnote ³⁵

Along with all the other signs that might reveal the suffering subject’s honesty or deceit, judges needed to pay close attention to language too — not simply what the accused said or the way in which she or he said it, but the very idiom in which he or she spoke. The conceptual and juridical framework that saw in pain a useful instrument for drawing out the truth, but nonetheless recognized that this instrument’s imperfections necessitated procedural safeguards and a critical eye, also provided judges and greffiers a set of logics with which to make linguistic choices during interrogations. The officials questioning Lizette Paute turned to precisely these logics for help in deciding when to translate her testimony from Occitan to French, and when not to.

Judging a Multilingual Society

Tribunals all across France, to varying degrees and in various ways, faced similar linguistic challenges: suspects, complainants, witnesses, and victims testified in a variety of languages. Early modern France was a multilingual society whose inhabitants spoke a dizzying array of tongues: dialects of French in the northern half of the kingdom; Breton in the western part of Brittany; Basque in the far southwest; dialects of Occitan across the south; and various forms of another Romance tongue, Francoprovençal, around Lyon and in Dauphiné. The territories annexed by the Crown during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought new languages into judicial play: Germanic Flemish and Alsatian in Alsace, Lorraine, and Flanders; Catalan in Roussillon; and Corsican in Corsica.Footnote ³⁶

Each tribunal thus faced a specific language mix determined largely by its jurisdiction’s linguistic geography. In francophone regions, lower courts’ dockets would have typically been filled with locals who spoke regional dialects of French, making communication relatively straightforward: interrogations, testimony, deliberations, and court documents would have all been spoken, recited, recorded, and read back in French. In nonfrancophone regions, however, judges and lawyers accustomed to deliberating and keeping court records in French were frequently confronted with oral testimony pronounced in other tongues.

Local judicial institutions fashioned a range of strategies to accommodate linguistic plurality in the courtroom. The specific forms these strategies took represented attempts to adapt procedure and practice to local sociocultural circumstances. As a result, there was no kingdom-wide norm, no standardized way of handling linguistic difference in French tribunals. The decision to render oral testimony like that of Lizette Paute’s in an idiom other than that in which it was pronounced, for example, did not represent a straightforward solution to a simple linguistic problem. Rather, translation offered a response tailored to widely varying imperatives: it could be necessary for the sake of uncomprehending judges, it could be required by law, or it could simply be a choice left to the discretion of polyglot magistrates or greffiers. The motivations to translate, as well as translation’s modalities, varied from context to context, determined by the array of languages in play, the linguistic skills of the judicial officials present, and courts’ scribal and translational habits. Compare, for example, the very different ways in which courts handled local idioms in Brittany, the Basque Country, and the king’s overseas colonies, on the one hand, and in the Occitan-speaking south, on the other. In the Breton-speaking parts of Brittany and in the French Basque Country, many court officials, like local elites generally, spoke and wrote French, but had no (or only approximate) mastery of the local tongue. Furthermore, the linguistic impenetrability for Romance-language speakers of non-Indo-European Basque and Celtic Breton rendered the task of linguistic mediation a particularly challenging one. As Pierre de Lancre, a Bordeaux judge with firsthand experience hunting witches in the Basque Country, put it, magistrates’ ignorance of Basque meant that “it is necessary to call on translators and interpreters to conduct trials.”Footnote ³⁷

Magistrates unfamiliar with the language in which a deponent testified were entirely at the mercy of interpreters’ translations. In such situations, an unscrupulous or incapable interpreter could set a guilty person free or send an innocent defendant to her death. Well aware that interpreters could reshape, twist, omit, or reinvent testimony in translation, early modern lawmakers established procedures for safeguarding against problems and abuses. Courts repeatedly exhorted court interpreters to translate accurately. When the Parlement of Paris took on the services of a notary and a clerk in 1440 to translate documents for an appeal from the county of Flanders, the judges felt it necessary to stipulate that the documents “be transcribed and translated from the Flemish language into the French language, faithfully, without changing the substance of the facts in any way [italics in Latin].”Footnote ³⁸ Mindful that their judges often lacked the linguistic tools to monitor the fidelity of courtroom interpreting, Basque and Breton courts developed formalized procedures aimed at preventing translation problems.Footnote ³⁹ Tribunals there swore interpreters in with an oath to translate precisely,Footnote ⁴⁰ and required them to sign their names to interrogation transcripts; these measures placed linguistic intermediaries under the same obligation as witnesses and defendants to speak (or translate) truthfully.Footnote ⁴¹

More broadly, jurists recognized that translation itself was a complex exercise, and even the most learned and principled of interpreters could encounter difficulties in rendering statements from one idiom to another accurately. Deeply troubled by his experience puzzling over suspected witches’ Basque-language testimony, Lancre concluded that judges couldn’t simply put their trust in an interpreter’s philological skills and good faith. Instead, they needed to build a healthy skepticism about translation into their habits and procedures. Lancre warned that defendants’ “life or death depends on this: not to change in any way their responses, and not to change or alter even a little the true meaning of their words. . . . this is the reason that in the Parlements one always calls upon two Interpreters. As well as the fact that we see by experience that very often the two Interpreters report the same thing differently.”Footnote ⁴² For the linguistic pessimist Lancre, even the most elaborate of procedural precautions could not dispel all doubts concerning translated testimony. To a certain extent, jurists’ anxieties about translation’s capacity to convey meaning from one idiom to another accurately echo their worries concerning torture’s capacity to elicit the truth from defendants’ lips — losses in translation and human bad faith were both potential obstacles in the judicial quest for truth. Implicit in Lancre’s linguistic soul-searching was a scribal ideal: courts should leave critical testimony untranslated and written into the record in the language in which it was uttered. In the Basque Country and Brittany, however, the fact that so many judges didn’t understand the local tongues made this ideal moot, obliging courts to take the evidentiary risk of translating all Basque- and Breton-language testimony into French in full.

Basque and Breton tribunals’ procedure-heavy translation practices provided a clear, easy-to-follow (albeit scribally tedious) model for judicial linguistic mediation, one that was easily exportable to novel linguistic contexts. The royal officials who erected new administrative apparatuses with which to govern the Crown’s overseas empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reproduced precisely this framework to manage the wide linguistic gulfs that separated them from the idioms in use in the colonies. In North America, New France’s courts adopted linguistic procedures that jurists in Quimper or Pau would have found punctiliously familiar. Consider an interrogation that took place in the summer of 1720 in the royal jurisdiction of Montréal. Ignace Gaientarongouian, a La Montagne Iroquois who lived in the Catholic mission of Nouvelle Lorette in Sault-au-Récollet, was arrested and imprisoned for having thrown rocks while drunk at an Abenaki man, knocking him unconscious. At the start of the interrogation transcript, the greffier rehearsed the linguistic procedure:

In what follows, the greffier prefaces the transcription of each and every one of Gaientarongouian’s answers with the following, or similar, words: “This Question having been translated by the Aforementioned Sr. de la Cauvignerie for the aforementioned Savage the Aforementioned Sr. de la Chauvignerie told us that the Aforementioned Savage [said].”Footnote ⁴⁴ At the interrogation’s close, after the greffier noted that the defendant did not know how to write and could not therefore sign his name, the interpreter signed the transcript alongside the judge and greffier.Footnote ⁴⁵ If one substituted Breton and Basque for Iroquois, the court record’s translational boilerplate could easily pass for an interrogation taken down in the Basque Country or Brittany.

Given how readily French officials exported this model overseas, it is striking that Occitan-speaking jurisdictions like Toulouse eschewed it altogether, preferring markedly less formal kinds of linguistic mediation. Typically bilingual and accustomed to using Oc in everyday life, elites there entertained a different relationship with local linguistic cultures than their Basque and Breton counterparts. Virtually every judicial official, whether judge or greffier, spoke both Occitan and French fluently, and was perfectly capable of questioning Occitan-speakers and understanding their answers. In contrast to Basque and Breton, both employed in this period almost exclusively as oral tongues, Occitan could boast a long and prestigious history as a language of written record and literary creation. In many communities in the sixteenth century, town councils kept the written record of their deliberations in Oc. In cities like Toulouse, historically minded elites tended the memorial flame of the medieval troubadours and were enthusiastic authors, readers, and patrons of Occitan-language poetry.Footnote ⁴⁶ Whether the great robe nobles who sat in the sovereign parlements or the lesser magistrates who adjudicated in local jurisdictions, judges were important actors in this culture of letters. So, too, albeit on a more modest scale, the designated keepers of judicial scribal record: the greffiers, university-educated venal officeholders (like judges) who also typically doubled as notaires, or, in the case of the parlements’ exalted greffiers en chef, enjoyed noble status. (Recruited from the lower orders, executioners and guards were almost certainly excluded from this lettered culture, and likely primarily Occitanophone.)Footnote ⁴⁷ Many lower tribunals still employed Occitan as their language of written record well into the sixteenth century. Greffiers in these jurisdictions simply recorded Occitan testimony within interrogation transcripts whose frame texts they also drafted in Oc.Footnote ⁴⁸

This distinctive linguistic culture helps make sense of a striking series of absences in the judicial archives of Southern France. First, the records of interrogations in the Occitan-speaking south never mention recourse to an interpreter at all, even as its courts progressively adopted French as their language of written record during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This translational silence reflects court officials’ linguistic abilities: judges could easily pose their questions and understand answers in Oc, and translating Occitan testimony into French for the written record was a simple task for greffiers. Second, despite the fact that the vast majority of deponents almost certainly testified in Occitan, greffiers in most cases translated testimony uttered in Occitan into French in the transcript without comment. Such practices make it impossible to determine with certainty in what language the deponent spoke during the interrogation, and whether his or her words were translated. They also make it impossible to determine who is doing the translating — that is, to ascertain whether judges dictated the French version they wished greffiers to commit to paper, or (more likely in my view) whether clerks simply translated on the fly. If such translational silences deny historians access to important dimensions of the linguistic experience of southern courts, they nonetheless represent interesting historical phenomena in their own right, offering rich evidence of meridional legal officials’ deeply bilingual culture. For these polyglots, shuttling back and forth between French and Occitan was not only easy, but banal and unworthy of note.

In some instances, however, the question of language suddenly wells up in the interrogation transcript, becoming a matter for the record and the law. Consider the case of a monk accused of stealing a pascal candle from a church heard on appeal before the sénéchaussée (the royal court) of Toulouse in 1523. In this trial, the greffier recorded portions of testimony in the original Occitan. During one interrogation of the defendant, the transcript reads: “Interrogated as to why he was appealing and for what he had been condemned He said that he is appealing because they had condemned him to be hung against reason for I know that I did not say the truth since I want to discharge my conscience [italics in Oc].”Footnote ⁴⁹

Such examples speak to another important difference between interrogation transcripts in Brittany, the Basque Country, and the colonies, and those in the Occitan-speaking south. In the former, even the most linguistically virtuosic greffier had no choice but to translate Basque-, Breton-, and Iroqouis-language testimony into French on behalf of magistrates generally incapable of reading transcripts in the local tongues. In the latter, where judges generally spoke, read, and wrote both French and Oc fluently, scribes had considerably more leeway for recording depositions pronounced in the southern tongue. To record a phrase pronounced in Basque untranslated in the official record would have meant concealing its meaning from the very judges charged with assessing its legal import; to transcribe testimony in Occitan offered magistrates capable of understanding them access to the defendant’s apparently unmediated words. The clerks who produced interrogations in southern courts, then, had options and made choices typically denied their colleagues in Brittany, the Basque Country, and the colonies.

By the late seventeenth century, the Crown began to mandate a common set of linguistic mediation procedures for courts across its kingdom. Louis XIV’s vast 1670 reform of criminal procedure laid down for the first time a set of rules for judicial translation in royal tribunals confronted with languages other than French: “If the accused does not understand the French language at all, the habitual interpreter, or if there is none, the person who will be appointed by the judge, after taking the oath, will explain to the accused the questions which will be addressed to him by the judge, and to the judge the accused’s responses, and all this will be transcribed in the French language, signed by the judge, the interpreter and the accused.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Writing into law a set of practices that most courts in Brittany and the Basque Country already followed, the royal ordinance required that judges appoint an interpreter and swear him in, that greffiers transcribe deponents’ answers in French, and that interpreters sign the transcript at the conclusion of the interrogation. Responding to longstanding concerns, this regulatory framework was designed to ensure intercomprehension between judges and deponents, guarantee the reliability of courtroom translation, and safeguard against incompetent or ill-intentioned linguistic intermediaries.

That southern courts appear to have ignored the 1670 Criminal Ordinance’s linguistic dispositions altogether, and that the Crown does not seem to have been particularly troubled by this, is especially interesting. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze why these jurisdictions forwent interpreters, eschewed mention of linguistic matters in the court record, and flouted royal injunction. While part of the explanation lies in the simple fact that southern legal officials were fluent Occitan speakers, and had no need for intermediaries, it isn’t sufficient. After all, some judges and clerks in Brittany and the Basque Country did know Basque or Breton, but were required to use official interpreters anyway.

Consider a case heard by a court in Tardets, a town in Basque-speaking Soule, whose judge knew Basque, yet whose verdict was overturned on appeal to the Parlement of Navarre in 1731 for the simple reason that the lower court had not retained an interpreter. Citing the 1670 Criminal Ordinance, the parlement’s ruling declared that lower courts in its Basque- and Occitan-speaking jurisdiction were required to take on interpreters to translate the testimony of non-French speakers, even when court officials knew the language of the deponent. Joined by a range of local elites, magistrates in the affected tribunals protested energetically. The Estates of Navarre, the province’s representative assembly, dispatched a deputy to the parlement in order to lobby to allow lower courts to forgo the cost, delay, and complication of hiring an interpreter when both judge and greffier knew the language of the deponent, claiming that “the practice has always been never to use any” when a tribunal’s personnel possessed the necessary linguistic skills.Footnote ⁵¹ The parlement referred the matter to the royal chancellor, who, falling back on the linguistic dispositions of the 1670 Criminal Ordinance, rejected the Estates’ request as far as criminal matters were concerned. The king’s jurists nonetheless acknowledged the merits of the Estates’ request: after referring the matter to the royal chancellor again, the parlement conceded that interpreters were not necessary in such circumstances on the civil side. This episode is interesting for four reasons. First, it illustrates that appellate courts were ready to strike down lower courts’ decisions on purely linguistic grounds, that is, for violations of proper judicial translation procedure. Second, it shows that on the judicial ground level, some judges working in the first instance found the requirement to take on an interpreter to translate a language they already knew to be as unwieldy as it was absurd. Third, it confirms that Basque-speaking judges and greffiers typically interrogated Basque-speaking witnesses and defendants via French-Basque interpreters in courtrooms in the Basque Country. And fourth, it demonstrates that parlements and Crown alike believed that testimony pronounced in Basque should only ever be weighed by judges and enter the legal record via the mediation of an interpreter. There was no room here for on-the-fly translation or ad hoc linguistic arrangements.

Something about Occitan, then, made it different from Basque and Breton (or Iroquois, for that matter), and exempted it from such dispositions.Footnote ⁵² Something about its character as a language rendered testimony’s semantic voyage between the Occitan of oral deposition and the French of written record unproblematic, freeing it from time- and Crown-sanctioned translational imperatives. Consider how contemporaries themselves conceived the linguistic relationship between French and Occitan. One well-traveled observer remarked late in the sixteenth century that one “could conclude that there are very few distinct languages in the world, and that most of them are merely mixtures, never encountering a sudden shift in them; such that, if he considers French, he discovers that in the Walloon provinces, and even further north in France it loses its naïveté, alters itself progressing into Burgundy, becomes barbarous in Savoie, . . . approaching the Alps draws certain traits from the Lombards and Piedmontese, in Lombardy and Piemont is changed into Italian, retaining a few French traits which are shed in Tuscany, where pure Italian is to be found, . . . if one tackles the side of France that neighbors Spain, he will find similar transitions, . . . [French] becomes mixed in the County of Roussillon, and in the Pyrenees is transformed into Spanish, . . . and ends up becoming pure Spanish in old Castile.”Footnote ⁵³ Emphasizing the linguistic affinities that bound the Romance tongues together, the author presents Catalan, Francoprovençal, French, Italian, Oc, and Spanish not as distinct languages separated by linguistic frontiers or walls of mutual incomprehension, but rather as points situated along a linguistic continuum.

French speakers who left accounts of their travels repeatedly applied this conceptual framework to the linguistic realities they encountered, remarking on the ease with which they could cope with the Romance idioms they had not already mastered. As the philologist Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) put it, “a French person easily understands a Gascon or a Provençal person.”Footnote ⁵⁴ When Montaigne met a compatriot while traveling through Italy who didn’t know any Italian, the essayist shared a simple recipe for communicating with locals by relying on the Romance tongues he did know: simply add Italianized endings to Latin, French, Spanish, or Occitan words.Footnote ⁵⁵ In contrast, French speakers described non-Romance idioms in starkly different terms. In the fifteenth century, one commentator declared that people “in Breton-speaking Brittany speak a language that no one but them can understand unless they learn it,”Footnote ⁵⁶ implying that many other languages in France could be understood without formally learning them. Lancre judged Basque to be “difficult,”Footnote ⁵⁷ and Jean de Coras, a judge in the Parlement of Toulouse, deemed it “quite obscure, and so difficult.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Like meridional greffiers in their interrogation transcripts, French speakers traveling through the Midi almost never remark linguistic difference there — although they consistently note it in Brittany, the Basque Country, Flanders, Alsace, and Lorraine.Footnote ⁵⁹

Some went further, fashioning a set of linguistic categories whose contours and fluidity set them apart from modern classifications. Consider how the German humanist Sebastien Münster mapped France’s linguistic geography: “All these regions speak the French language, even if it differs in a number of places, lower Brittany excepted, which has a separate language.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Münster’s “French language” represents a voluminous linguistic category indeed, one that encompasses all of France’s Romance languages. “The French language,” according to the royal geographer Pierre du Val, likewise embraced a multiplicity of tongues, of which “its principle Idioms are French and Gascon.”Footnote ⁶¹ Or consider how some southern jurists responded to the most famous early modern example of linguistic legislation, the 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, which instructed legal officials to record their official acts “in the maternal French language.”Footnote ⁶² When Toulouse’s capitoulat court integrated the new law’s linguistic dispositions into its own procedure, it “instructed that all the ordinary notaries of this court be ordered and informed to transcribe their rulings and acts of justice in French or in the vernacular tongue,” meaning Oc.Footnote ⁶³ A Roman-law specialist explained that the 1539 ordinance’s clause “says mother French, not simply French, in order to signify that it does not intend to force anyone to make use of the French language, but rather [the language] of the country’s people.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Part of the reason that southern courts never treated Occitan testimony in the same way that their Breton and Basque counterparts did, and that no one ever thought the 1670 Criminal Ordinance’s dispositions concerning defendants who do “not understand the French language at all” applied there, was that contemporaries understood Occitan to be in some sense part of French or, at the very least, so intimately related that translation was superfluous.

The ways in which French courts managed unusually complex linguistic situations illustrate just how differently they treated Romance and non-Romance languages. Consider how French officials in the king’s South Asian possessions adapted Basque and Breton procedures to new linguistic challenges, borne not only of the philological distance separating Indian and European tongues, but also of the shortage of qualified local interpreters who spoke French. In a case concerning a Brahmin accused of forging documents heard in 1729 before the Conseil Supérieur of Pondicherry, the sovereign tribunal of France’s most important trading outpost in India, officials questioned two Malabar merchants as witnesses with the help of “the named Laze who Understands and speaks the aforementioned Malabar language [Malalayam] and we took his oath to interpret well and faithfully . . . which was done in the Portuguese language which he and we Understand.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By necessity, the Pondicherry court introduced a second linguistic layer into the translation sequence: witnesses gave testimony in Malalayam, which interpreters translated into Portuguese on behalf of bilingual French officials, who then translated the Portuguese into French themselves for the sake of the written record. In this case, judges treated Malalayam exactly as their counterparts in Brittany, the southwest, or New France would Breton, Basque, or Iroquois, swearing in a designated interpreter; in contrast, they treated Portuguese more like how southern judges would handle its Romance cousin Occitan, relying on their own mastery of the Lusophone tongue and forgoing any oaths or signatures that might authenticate Portuguese-French translation.

This examination of translation practices in early modern French courts across the kingdom and the empire illustrates three important features of the French judicial system’s management of linguistic plurality. First, it demonstrates that Crown and magistrates alike were acutely aware of the issues at stake, and took pains to develop a set of linguistic best practices. Second, there was no single overarching policy or practice; rather, courts fashioned a variety of approaches to the problem in different regions, in light of local traditions, and in the face of varying linguistic contexts. Third, the comparison between the Basque Country, Brittany, and the empire, on the one hand, and the Occitan-speaking south, on the other, brings two opposing approaches to judicial translation into evidence. Where Basque, Breton, and overseas tribunals favored systematic rules, formalized procedure, and designated interpreters for judicial translation, courts in Occitan-speaking regions never called on stand-alone intermediaries when hearing testimony in Oc. They also made little or no reference to translation in the record, and, when they did signal matters linguistic, did so infrequently and in unsystematic ways, the implicit logics of which are not always easy to discern.

In jurisdictions like Brittany and the Basque Country, courts and Crown organized procedure around the assumption of local tongues’ opacity to French speakers, an assumption based in part on lived experience of incomprehension (think of Lancre’s remarks concerning Basque-language testimony), but also on a conviction that, even when judicial officials possessed genuine mastery of Basque or Breton, these idioms were so impenetrable that interpreters were still necessary. In the Occitan-speaking south, however, practices were organized around the assumption of Occitan’s transparency to French speakers, which implied that there was no need for interpreters or even for remark. This too was based in part on lived experience — legal officials were typically fluent Occitan speakers, and even for the rare jurist who might be ignorant of Oc, he could certainly make out far more of what was said in another Romance tongue than he could testimony in Breton or Basque. But it was also based on a linguistic imaginary that grouped French and Oc closely together — so closely, indeed, that Occitan-language testimony escaped the 1670 Criminal Ordinance’s requirement that interpreters be present for non-French speakers. Historically specific modes of linguistic categorization thus had important consequences for linguistic mediation in the courtroom, and help explain why French courts treated judicial translation differently in various linguistic contexts. Jurists’ presumption that Basque and Breton were opaque made interpreters visible in the judicial archive, which signals their intervention, identifies them by name, and records their signature; in contrast, the presumption that Occitan was transparent rendered both translators and translation invisible.Footnote ⁶⁶ Basque’s and Breton’s presumed opacity, however, ensured that these languages would themselves almost always be absent from interrogation transcripts, erased by interpreters’ French renderings; it was Occitan’s presumed transparence that afforded it a recurring place on the pages of judicial records, a scriptural privilege unique among France’s regional tongues.

Translation in the Torture Chamber

Lizette Paute’s 1667 interrogation under torture took place under circumstances specific to Toulouse’s sociolinguistic context. Her interrogators and their greffier were almost certainly all perfectly bilingual French- and Occitan-speakers. All the judges present were more than capable of questioning her in what was almost certainly her native tongue (and possibly theirs), and of translating her answers into French if necessary. They were doubtless steeped in the world of Occitan letters and literary sociability inhabited by the city’s elite to which they belonged. Their numbers likely counted admirers of Toulouse’s great seventeenth-century Occitan-language poet, Pierre Goudelin (1580–1649), customers for some of the many editions of his poetry printed over the course of the century, and even several of his patrons.Footnote ⁶⁷ Admittedly, the capitoulat court had long before switched from Occitan to French in its written records, and the Parlement of Toulouse drafted its documents in French from its foundation in 1444.Footnote ⁶⁸ These legal officials were nonetheless steeped in a lettered culture that emphasized the linguistic proximity between French and Oc, and figured Occitan-language testimony to be transparent, unproblematic objects of analysis. Any French translation that greffiers penned into the record was therefore not for the benefit of judges ignorant of Occitan, nor aimed at hewing to explicit procedural requirements. They were choices on the part of greffier or judge, whose implicit rationales must be deduced.

The simple fact that the judges present knew Occitan obliges the historian to seek an explanation that can account for the greffier Limoges’s switch into Occitan midway into the old woman’s interrogation. Perhaps this represents a faithful record of the linguistic sequence of events, an indication that Paute was, like her inquisitors, herself bilingual, and that she pronounced her responses to the judges’ preliminary round of questions in French, before switching to Occitan when the estrapade and the mordaches were applied. Polyglossia was by no means a cultural skill reserved for elites. Many among the lower orders had some command of multiple tongues. A Norman nobleman traveling in Brittany in 1636 was surprised to encounter so many people “speaking as much Breton as French, whether in Vannes or in all towns, everyone speaks French, and that, in the fields, even most peasants know how to speak French.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In the Basque Country a few decades later, a royal official observed that “the vernacular language is Basque; many there nonetheless speak French, Gascon and Béarnais and some even Spanish.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It is, therefore, perfectly conceivable that Paute might have responded initially in French, and spontaneously switched to Occitan under torture. One could build from this an elaborate interpretation about polyglots’ psychological relationships with their various languages and the ways in which they react under stress, fear, and pain. Perhaps Paute was a native Occitan speaker whose second language was French, and who chose to engage her interrogators at the start in the language of legal procedure but, as the pain grew too intense, unconsciously resorted to the idiom with which she was more comfortable. Perhaps bilinguals like Paute elected to speak French to their interrogators as part of a strategy calculated to impress them with their linguistic capabilities, or alternatively to express defiance and demonstrate their resolve.

Such an interpretation could account for Anthoine Delbosc, a day laborer living near Lavaur who was accused of murdering one of his employers, a peasant named Bellegarde who had caught Delbosc stealing grapes off his vines, and who was put to torture in 1668. Almost all Delbosc’s answers to the court’s preliminary questions were recorded in French. When the executioner and guards had bound Delbosc and prepared him for the first estrapade, the judges repeated their questions one last time before ordering him hoisted. The greffier noted: “He said I said I’m innocent Jesus God . . . and that he had slept a little that he never felt any kind of animosity towards the aforementioned Bellegarde nor had ever had any trouble with him that he is ready to suffer everything for the love of the good Jesus I am innocent [italics in Oc].”Footnote ⁷¹ One could argue that, whereas Paute only fell back on her linguistic comfort zone under great physical suffering, Delbosc cracked even before torture had been applied. It was the mere fear of physical pain that sent Delbosc scrambling for his vernacular security blanket.

Such interpretations are entirely plausible — and in my view probably capture at least some multilingual defendants’ experiences. Given the fragmentary nature of the archival record, however, they are also entirely speculative. Such readings nonetheless echo certain early modern understandings of language use. The well-known Limousin schoolboy episode in Rabelais’s Pantagruel, for example, sets in motion precisely these kinds of logics: a polyglot speaker switching idioms during a conversation — what sociolinguists call code-switching — as a deliberate communication strategy on the one hand, and as an involuntary response to pain on the other. The giant Pantagruel meets a pompous university student who pontificates in an incomprehensibly macaronic mixture of Latin and French. As one of Pantagruel’s companions complains, “all he does is butcher Latin, . . . and he believes that this makes him some kind of great orator in French, because he disdains the common way of speaking.”Footnote ⁷² To punish the student for his pretentious misuse of Latin, Pantagruel grabs him by the neck and chokes him. Consumed by pain and fear, the student promptly abandons his Latinate aspirations, switches to his native Limousin dialect to plea for his life, and defecates. At which Pantagruel proclaims: “At this moment you speak naturally.”Footnote ⁷³ In a similar episode in Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Pantagruel’s companion Panurge, normally so quick to boast of his boundless philological abilities, surrenders to fear on board a ship caught in a terrible storm and begins muttering unintelligible sounds — “Otto to to to to ti. Bou bou bou” — before, like the Limousin student, defecating.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Rabelais’s rendering, fear and physical suffering — precisely those states that judicial torture was designed to elicit — provoke immediate linguistic reactions, pushing polyglots to reach for their mother tongues.

While it may be impossible to determine whether Paute knew any French with certainty, or to test whether such interpretations faithfully represent defendants’ experiences in the torture chamber more generally, that a large majority of interrogations taken down in Toulouse in the seventeenth century follow precisely this French-to-Occitan pattern suggests that their linguistic form is more the product of greffiers’ transcriptive choices than of deponents’ linguistic actions. Given how consistently clerks applied this linguistic schema in interrogation transcripts, shifts from French to Oc often appear to be disconnected from actual linguistic performance or defendants’ language competence.

In a surprisingly large number of cases, scribes record testimony in French pronounced by commoners from Toulouse’s rural hinterland — precisely those kinds of people who were largely Occitan-speaking, according to contemporary sources. The interrogation transcript of twenty-two-year-old Vital Saltet, accused of murder and tortured in 1684, follows exactly the same pattern as Paute’s: Saltet’s answers to the judges’ preliminary questions are recorded in indirect speech in French, whereas most of his answers are transcribed in Oc once the proverbial screws began to be turned.Footnote ⁷⁵ When Bernard Masseloup, a fifty-three-year-old husband, father of one, and laboureur (a ploughman, typically a prosperous peasant) in the village of Dalbenque in Quercy, accused of murdering his sister- and brother-in-law in a bid to inherit their property, was put to the question in 1687, the scribe switched from French to Occitan to record his answers only after the executioner had begun to apply physical pressure.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1695, when the grain merchant François Ollés (sixty years old, married, and father of four in Espaon, a village west of Toulouse) was accused of murdering a Spaniard whose body had been discovered hidden under a mound of wheat, the scribe followed precisely the same French-to-Occitan pattern.Footnote ⁷⁷ In some cases, greffiers kept entire transcripts in French. Take thirty-five-year-old laboureur Jean Despax — born in Esparron, southwest of Toulouse, and at the time of his arrest living in the hamlet of Marignac with his wife and one-year-old child — who was sentenced to death by hanging for theft in 1683. Put to the question préalable in search of accomplices, Despax admitted his own guilt, but denied that he had committed his crimes in league with others; throughout, the greffier noted his responses exclusively in French.Footnote ⁷⁸ So too when Anne Vernhes, an unmarried woman from Naucelle, north of Albi, accused of infanticide, underwent the question in 1696.Footnote ⁷⁹ That an individual peasant, grain merchant, or manual laborer might know enough French to spar with judges in court is perfectly credible. That Toulouse’s judicial archives as a whole present roughly similar sequences of linguistic events for defendants under torture, regardless of whether they were peasants or merchants, farm hands or laboureurs, young or old, men or women, suggests rather that two broad phenomena were at work in the torture experience: first, that much more Occitan was spoken in Toulouse’s torture chamber than the court’s interrogation transcripts indicate; second, that the transcripts’ linguistic architecture is more a translational and scribal artifact than a record of the real sequence of linguistic events.

In cases where defendants under interrogation spoke only (or mostly) in Occitan, it is necessary to weigh what inspired greffiers to move from French and third-person speech to Occitan and first-person voice. To a certain extent, and in specific instances, scouring the record for a legible logic or a discernible rationale behind scribes’ linguistic moves may be an altogether vain exercise. During Saltet’s interrogation, for example, the greffier moves back and forth between Oc and French in his transcription of a single response with no apparent rhyme or reason. When the executioner applied for the third time the question de l’eau — a form of torture reserved for men similar to waterboarding, in which the accused is forced to swallow great quantities of water — the scribe writes, “he said he never had him in his power and that he is being done wrong, aie aie the harm they are doing to me [italics in Oc].”Footnote ⁸⁰ To a certain extent, linguistic shifts like these reflect the cultural disposition of profoundly bilingual elites accustomed to switching back and forth between French and Oc. Examples abound of southerners freely mixing the two. When a prisoner on trial in Aix-en-Provence gave his guards the slip and barricaded himself inside the city’s prison with a priest, he communicated with his hostage as well as the archers besieging the prison in both tongues. When an arrow penetrated his chest during the archers’ final assault, the prisoner exclaimed “My God have mercy on my soul” in French. When a second arrow fatally pierced his stomach, he switched idioms, crying out “Praise be to God I am dying, Father pray to God for me, hand me the sword and the guns” in Occitan.Footnote ⁸¹

Likewise, many texts blend multiple languages with no discernible correlation between authorial intention, textual genre, or target audience, on the one hand, and change of idiom, on the other. In 1532, someone hastily scribbled a letter to a Toulouse notary and capitoul in a linguistic jumble melding Occitan, Latin, and French, sometimes in the same sentence.Footnote ⁸² In 1556, a Swiss student studying medicine in Montpellier received a letter from a friend written half in Latin, half in French.Footnote ⁸³ In the sixteenth-century southwest, elites often maintained the registers of their town councils’ deliberations in a confusing mishmash of French and Occitan.Footnote ⁸⁴ In certain administrative texts, French and Oc are so tightly mixed that it is impossible to determine in which language they were written.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such examples illustrate an easy coexistence between the written languages of the south (Oc, Latin, and French), a cultural disposition that pushed scribes to mix them together on the page almost reflexively, in ways their Breton and Basque colleagues (whose local tongues did not enjoy status as written idioms) did not. Many polyglots mixed simply for the sake of it, as if to stretch their linguistic muscles.

While the particular motivations behind individual deponents’ and greffiers’ linguistic choices may be impossible to discern with certainty, the broader pattern that emerges from an exhaustive reading of Toulouse’s judicial torture interrogation points to an underlying scribal and linguistic logic. As with Paute’s interrogation, the switch to Occitan in the transcript typically takes place only after the executioner has begun to apply physical pressure. Precisely this pattern is at work in the transcript of an interrogation of Jean Barbet, a weaver suspected of counterfeiting coin, who was put to the question in Toulouse in 1662. The clerk, following standard practice, drafted the interrogation’s frame text, all of the judges’ questions, and most of the prisoner’s answers in French. The suspect’s modest social status and the fact that some of his testimony is transcribed in Occitan suggest that the interrogation probably took place (largely or exclusively) in this language, and that the greffier translated the proceedings into French as he put it to paper. It is only once the court’s executioner began to torture Barbet, under the investigating judges’ watchful guidance, that the scribe began to transcribe the prisoner’s replies in Occitan. The following passage from the transcript begins with the prisoner’s protestation of innocence just before the start of torture on the second day of his interrogation:

Taking his cue from the executioner’s swinging iron bar, the greffier initiated a coherent set of transcriptional shifts (virtually identical to those that punctuate Paute’s interrogation): from translated indirect narration written in ordinary hand to untranslated direct narration transcribed in a distinctive italicized script — that is, first paraphrasing Barbet’s answers in the third person and in French, and then recording his first-person speech in Occitan, while juxtaposing the two on the page with contrasting handwriting. It is especially interesting that the scribe took pains to manipulate the scriptural technologies at his disposal — the pen-and-ink skills that were, after all, greffiers’ most important stock in trade — to highlight the weaver’s Occitan phrases, abandoning the secretarial cursive ordinarily in use in such documents in favor of an italicized script.Footnote ⁸⁷ His grammatical, linguistic, and calligraphic moves all work together to set these responses apart, signaling to the reader that they are meant to be taken as the actual words uttered by Barbet. That the scribe only switches once the executioner has begun to implement the question suggests that he attributes greater significance to the words uttered by the prisoner under torture. That the document’s purpose is to be reread by the court’s judges indicates that the greffier believes his higher-ups share his heightened interest in the words and language pronounced by bodies in pain. That judicial torture’s very function was to extract the truth and that the transcript served as a means to help judges evaluate the veracity or mendacity of defendants’ utterances suggest that magistrates assigned answers extracted under duress greater truth value. Finally, that greffiers dispensed with translating phrases valued for their greater potential to reveal the truth suggests that Lancre’s anxieties concerning the intrinsic unreliability of translation were widely shared: when taking down particularly crucial testimony, southern greffiers frequently thought it best to stick to the original tongue.

Judicial torture sessions that ended before the executioner could put the tools of his violent trade to use make it possible to probe the internal consistency of these scribal logics precisely because the torturous imperative to forgo translation had not yet entered into play. The interrogation of Pierre Faure, a Toulouse notary accused of fabricating wills, offers a test case for observing translation and mediation strategies in the absence of pain. Sentenced to torture in 1633, he caved before the estrapade ordeal could begin, confessing his crime just as the executioner’s valets were readying themselves to hoist him up. The transcript of Faure’s interrogation records all his answers in French. One explanation might be that Faure simply spoke French to his judges during the interrogation — a plausible hypothesis for a notary. That Faure’s answers are also recorded in normal indirect speech (exactly like Paute or Barbet’s words before their physical ordeals began), however, points to another, likelier scenario: his greffier simply did not consider testimony uttered in the absence of physical duress to merit the same textual and linguistic attentions. Faure freely confessed before torture could be applied, so there was simply no need to resort to transcription practices suited to the higher truth value of testimony extracted under pain.Footnote ⁸⁸

That southern courts eschewed translation when they deemed particular words pronounced in Occitan to be of heightened legal relevance is manifest in different contexts as well. In an honor-obsessed society in which insults easily sparked violence and could be considered crimes in and of themselves, tribunals paid particular attention to the words exchanged in a fight.Footnote ⁸⁹ Greffiers bent over backwards to transcribe insults as accurately as possible, often in the idiom in which they were yelled, so as to help judges evaluate whether they justified the injured parties’ violent response. When the sénéchal of Armagnac heard a case concerning a charivari in 1557, the greffier recorded that a group of villages assembled “in front of the married couple’s house” had “said whore and cagot [italics in Oc].” One of the judges even explained why the court assigned linguistic accuracy such great importance in this case: “it must be determined whether the insult is excessive or not and it seems to him that it is not at all excessive.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Scribes did not systematically transcribe insults in the original tongue, however, just as they did not follow uniform procedures in interrogation transcripts. When the ecclesiastical court of Pamiers interrogated successive witnesses about the precise words pronounced by a woman accused of insulting a local priest in the 1660s, the greffier studiously penned each abusive term into the record — though not before having translated each into French.Footnote ⁹¹ As these inconsistent examples illustrate, the porous character of the boundary separating French from Oc left ample room for fluidity in the courtroom mediation of the two tongues.

In the judicial archives of southern tribunals, translation choices function as a kind of barometer of the truth value legal officials assigned to testimony. Insults merited transcription in Occitan because they were linguistic acts that themselves represented potential crimes, and as such needed to be carefully evaluated, if possible in the idiom in which they had been uttered. Testimony extracted under torture merited deferential linguistic treatment not so much because of the status of the words themselves, but because of the conditions in which the defendant had pronounced them. Over the course of interrogations conducted under torture, many of the same questions are asked over and over again: judges ask whether the defendant committed the crime of which she was accused; in the event she denies, they ask how she can account for her whereabouts and for other pieces of evidence that point to her guilt; they inquire whether she had any accomplices; and so forth. When the same questions are asked before the executioner starts his gruesome work, scribes typically record them in French; it is only after the defendant is dropped from the ceiling, the screws of the mordaches are tightened, or the defendant struggles to catch his breath after nearly drowning, that greffiers choose to transcribe the answers to the very same questions in Occitan. Pain itself imparted greater truth value to testimony extracted from suspects under torture, and translation risked obscuring this verity.

Conclusion

What conclusions can be drawn from this examination of the history of linguistic mediation in Toulouse’s torture chamber? This article offers three broad observations. First, French courts were deeply engaged with the linguistic plurality sustained by the society in which they were embedded, and whose justice and tranquility they were charged with maintaining. Jurists theorized it, judges thought about it, and lawmakers and tribunals alike explicitly acknowledged this basic cultural fact. Second, French courts developed a range of robust methods and processes to mediate between the languages of procedure and deliberation on the one hand, and the idioms of the plaintiffs, victims, witnesses, and defendants who passed through their chambers on the other. The variety of approaches to judicial translation testifies both to the early modern state’s hybrid, negotiated, and ad hoc character and to the long-term inertia of locally entrenched bureaucratic practices. These varied linguistic mediation modes also represent a set of local solutions keyed to contemporary understandings of local linguistic circumstances. French jurists’ perceptions of the differing linguistic relationships between French, Occitan, Breton, Basque, and the languages of the colonies helped shape differing regimes of linguistic mediation. Third, the rationale for judicial torture as an efficacious instrument for extracting the truth invested the various logics and imperatives surrounding language and translation with particular importance. In a dynamic unique to the Occitan-speaking south — Breton and Basque courts’ translation procedures did not leave greffiers the same kind of translational freedom that their Occitanophone colleagues enjoyed — court scribes’ linguistic choices revealed the differing degrees of truth value judges assigned to particular forms of testimony.

Tribunals’ juggling of the various languages in play in the chambre de la gêne, then, could be characterized as torturous translations. It remains to specify in what ways. From the perspective of the accused, the term is certainly an apt one. Torture was for them a terrifying experience, and language frequently contributed to their terror. Notwithstanding royal edicts like the 1670 Criminal Ordinance that exhorted courts to explain meticulously every step of procedure to defendants during their trials, incomprehension fed the fear felt by speakers of Occitan or other local tongues who knew little or no French as they listened to judges and greffiers confer among themselves in French or quote legal principles in Latin. Defendants who understood what was at stake in the translation and transcription process, and who could maintain their focus in spite of the pain, might worry about whether interpreters and greffiers were getting their testimony down accurately.Footnote ⁹² Defendants desperately fighting to stick to their story and escape execution knew all too well that language was their own worst enemy, and that a wrong word could lead to their ruin.

The very words that made up testimony, too, followed a torturous path, from the accused’s lips to the interrogation transcript’s page, via a series of steps that could include successive iterations of translation and transcription by translators or scribes. For the historian, condemned to navigate the fragmentary and mediated nature of the sources in search of firm analytic ground, interpreting translation in the judicial archive is a torturous exercise indeed. As for judges, this article has already demonstrated that magistrates in the Breton- and Basque-speaking regions of France and in the colonies, confronted with testimony pronounced in languages they had little or no grip on, felt themselves to be on most uncertain ground — think of Lancre’s anxious handwringing about scrutinizing unsteadily translated Basque testimony for signs that the devil might be at work. They built their procedures around the supposition that Basque- and Breton-language testimony was intrinsically obscure, necessitating designated intermediaries, detail-oriented translational procedures, and safeguards in order to forestall linguistic miscarriages of justice.

It is possible that judges in the Occitan-speaking south represent the exception in this linguistically tortured landscape. After all, court officials there spoke the two languages of deposition, deliberation, and documentation fluently. Indeed, southern courts based their translation procedures on the assumption that Occitan-language testimony was transparent, its linguistic character so unproblematic that it could be either translated into French in the record without a designated interpreter or even a remark or left in the original for Occitanophone judges to mull over after the executioner had packed up his tools. While Toulouse judges may not have thought that Occitan represented a problem in and of itself, their treatment of language nonetheless suggests that they viewed testimony extracted under torture as highly problematic. Consider the most striking linguistic pattern that structures judicial interrogations taken down in Toulouse over the course of the seventeenth century: greffiers’ tendency to switch to Occitan to transcribe answers only after torture began to be applied. While this choice reflected the greater truth value assigned to testimony pronounced by bodies in pain, as this article has demonstrated, in the vast majority of cases, defendants’ answers didn’t change substantively once the ordeal began in earnest. Given that most defendants maintained their innocence from start to finish,Footnote ⁹³ greffiers found themselves transcribing similar or even identical answers, first paraphrased in French, and then transcribed in Occitan (albeit embellished with anguished screams). Judges sitting down to read the interrogation transcript, then, almost always pondered protestations of innocence in both French and Occitan — a linguistic pattern that was at once a product of torture’s vocation as a distiller of truth and a damning verdict on its failure to deliver. Magistrates reviewing testimony that had been purposefully left in Occitan so as to bring the judicial gaze closer to the truth were forced to confront an unsettling fact: torture did virtually nothing to modify defendants’ stories and bring the guilty out into the open.

In her study of torture in Toulouse, Lisa Silverman detects in the interrogations conducted between 1600 and 1780 what she calls “the gradual breakdown of the epistemology of torture. Growing uncertainty about the meaning of pain and its relationship to the truth is suggested in the loss of the language of pain, visible in the increasingly abstract and concise language of the interrogations and in the desacralization of truth in the 1720s.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This study argues that Toulouse judges already faced a full-blown epistemological crisis of confidence in torture by the seventeenth century, one laid bare by their linguistic practices. By the end of the seventeenth century, greffiers increasingly didn’t bother to transcribe any testimony in Occitan at all, a choice consistent with Silverman’s findings that, after 1720, greffiers cease employing quoted direct speech, instead paraphrasing all the way, and increasingly omit references to defendants’ cries of suffering.Footnote ⁹⁵ These scriptural choices represent nothing short of a tacit admission that torture was not an efficacious instrument for truth-finding, at least on the terms medieval and early modern legal theorists had imagined it to be.

It is tempting to read defendants’ cries of agony in Occitan as the voice of the subaltern piercing the veil of early modern social domination and state control, a fleeting but authentic record of actual speech. Any historian who has read such transcriptions in the archives will be familiar with the troubling sensation of having suddenly gained precious access to orality and firsthand historical experience (myself included). That judicial torture’s victims gave desperate voice to their pain, often in their mother tongues, there can be no doubt. As this article has argued, however, judicial torture’s linguistic dimension was mediated through dense layers of translation and transcription protocols, of which the choice not to translate Occitan-language testimony was as much a part as the decision to translate. Recording testimony in the idiom of expression was an archival privilege reserved for Occitan-speakers and denied Basque-, Breton-, Iroquois-, and Malalayam-speakers. The very coexistence of a range of language-specific mediation procedures demonstrates all that is owed to greffiers’ attitudes and practices for the Occitan phrases that populate the pages of transcripts. When reading such interrogations, the historian sees tortured subjects through the judges’ gaze and hears their words through judges’ ears. What in fact becomes visible in the judicial torture archive is the judges’ struggle to make sense of what they heard and witnessed, to square the impossible epistemologies of body, pain, language, and verity, as they stared fixedly at the broken, writhing body before them, listening intently to the accused’s sobs, silences, hesitations, and cries and straining to peer into the tortured individual’s very soul to catch a glimpse of the truth.