“Ne les rudoyez pas”. Rules and formulae for master-servant directives in nineteenth-century French conduct and etiquette manuals
Additional information
Authors
Type
Journal Article
Year
2026
Language
English
Abstract
This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.
Keywords
Commands, Conduct, Discernment, Domestics, Etiquette, Formula, Formulary, French, Kindness, Masters, Nineteenth century, Politeness, Requests, Servants
Journal
Journal of French Language Studies
Volume
36
Pages (or article number)
1-30
ISSN
0959-2695, 1474-0079
Diffusion
License
CC BY
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Hybrid
