Let the words be gazetted henceforth
Instructors from the 2008 Symposium (L to R):
Walter Grünzweig, Ed Folsom, Mario Corona, Betsy Erkkila, Éric Athenot
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I’m sure we all remember Eric Athenot’s fascinating, shocking discovery that the word “enfans,”—used by Whitman to name the “Enfans d’Adam” cluster in 1860, later “Children of Adam,”—was associated, in France, with an older French and was used in Bourbon regime propaganda as a way of signifying the “old ways.” I decided to look into the matter myself.
I did a basic word search on APS and came up with some interesting results. The “enfans” spelling was in circulation in American periodicals as early as 1800. An anonymous author compiling a list of post-revolutionary French nomenclature in a New York periodical in 1800 includes among his list “Les Enfans du Soleil,” an insurgent group from Languedoc and Lyon. More interestingly, though, I found an example in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post of 1860, where the phrase (note spelling) “enfans de troup” was used to describe a good American soldier. Was this the source of Whitman’s spelling of the word in 1860? Or is it a tantalizing coincidence? So hard to tell.
Any contenders? What do you think? Was Whitman accidentally aligning himself with the French monarchy due to his ignorance of French culture and linguistic history? Or was this spelling simply a variation of a French word alive and well in mid-19C American popular culture?
Blake Bronson-Bartlett
August 27, 2008 at 2:00 am