Marc Fumaroli: The Fanatical Levellers Who Would Eliminate Latin

Here.

Marc Fumaroli holds a place, in French cultural life, more akin to that held in Russia by the late student of Old Russian Literature Dmitri Likhachev — that is,he is first, and mainly, a scholar devoted to the study of his own country’s literature and lanaguage. Both Fumaroli and Likhachev, however, have written on related matters — here is Fumaroli on the possible elimination of Latin in the French schools, and Likhachev, at the end of his life, wrote a small book, On Truth And Beauty, for the young of Russia (the book could be, but has not been, translated into English for a wider audience. The American who comes to mind, as an analoguous figure, in Jacques Barzun who, however, wrote on so many things — on literature and music and language and history — and never limited himself largely to, indeed wrote relatively little about, American literature. He was a Europeanist, not an Americanist.