Ad usum Delphini
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The Latin formula ad usum Delphini means "to use the dauphin ". It can be traced back to the French royal court in the late 17th century, but possibly even older, and originally referred to an adaptation of literary works from classical antiquity . These were "defused" in the sense of the prevailing moral concepts , as some of the content was felt to be unsuitable for the teaching of the Crown Prince (who traditionally bore the title Dauphin in France ). The term was later also generally adopted for texts that, for example, after censorship measures , appeared "cleaned", that is mostly shortened.
History of origin
The actual meaning is revealed as follows: The Counts of Vienne wore the dolphin (French dauphin , Latin delphinus ) as a heraldic animal since Guigues IV , the name of this animal, as was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, was also used as a poetic honorary name for used by the prince. Since the late Middle Ages, the area of the County of Viennois has therefore also been referred to by the name Dauphiné (Latin Delphinatus ), which is still in use today .
The last Count of Vienne, Humbert II , sold his rule to the French King Philip VI in the plague year of 1349 . It is said that a clause of the Treaty of Romans-sur-Isère (March 30, 1349) (incomplete and not in the original) stipulated that the second-born prince of France should bear the title of Count des Viennois. By transferring the apanage to his eldest son, who later became John II , in breach of this agreement, Philip also made him de facto the first Dauphin in the later common sense. But is the title - only on - other sources indicate that Charles V was applied.
Since the 15th century, the French heir to the throne was called Dauphin (initially only colloquially). In principle, this title, which was initially difficult to understand, was based on the same idea that made the heir to the throne in the United Kingdom the Prince of Wales . It was not until 1830 that Louis-Antoine de Bourbon, duc d'Angoulême , the son and presumptive successor of Charles X, renounced the now official title of Dauphin de France .
The training of the heir to the throne
In the training of the Dauphin, great importance has been attached since the Renaissance to familiarizing him with the classical works of ancient Greek and especially Latin literature. In the more prudish epochs of European cultural history, one often encountered the supposed problem that the old authors apparently engaged in undesirably permissive (sexual) ethics .
So it happened that at the French court at times significantly reduced or otherwise “defused” editions by writers of antiquity “for the use (for teaching) of the Dauphin” were circulating. The actual title ad usum Delphini appears for the first time in the collection of Latin classics, commissioned by the Duke of Montausier and under the supervision of royal tutors (such as Jacques Bénigne Bossuet and Pierre-Daniel Huet ) in 64 volumes from 1670 to Published in 1698.
The censored poets
Popular victims of the censorship activities described were, for example, literary greats such as Homer , Aristophanes , Plautus , Terenz , Ovid , Juvenal and Martial , whose bluntness, especially in erotic questions (such as homosexual love) , seemed to the royal tutors in Versailles to be too questionable from time to time. Some biblical passages (preferably from the Old Testament ) were dealt with in a similar way.
The procedure was particularly complex when editing the French-language classics; unwanted passages from works in verse form then had to be repositioned, such as the following "slippery" lines from the drama Esther by Jean Racine (Act I, Scene 1)
Lorsque le roi, contre elle enflammé de dépit,
La chassa de son trône ainsi que de son lit [...]
(When the angry king
chased her from his throne as well as from his bed ...)
which became:
Lorsque le roi contre elle irrité sans retour,
La chassa de son trône ainsi que de sa cour [...]
(When the king was irrevocably angry with
her and chased her from his throne as well as from his court ...)
The “Victorian” 19th century
The phrase ad usum Delphini came into general use in the 19th century, an era whose downright prudish zeitgeist was later often given the catchphrase “Victorian” . It is characteristic in this context how the immanent criticism of censorship measures (with the main focus on sexual implications) was expressed in a very coded way.
Nonetheless, the aristocratic model of the French collection of texts had a fruitful effect on the development of a bourgeois pedagogy that endeavored to convey literary classics in a child-friendly manner. Examples that are known to the present are the Tales from Shakespeare published by Charles and Mary Lamb in 1807 (German under the title Shakespeare retold ) or the "adjusted" complete edition The Family Shakespeare by Thomas Bowdler , published around the same time . Here, too, the editors' main concern was to defuse the poet's works, the contents of which were often viewed as too violent and - again - erotically charged.
Shift in meaning in the modern age
In the present the phrase is only used occasionally, whereby a shift in meaning can be recognized; It is now primarily no longer about the “moral”, but rather about the political offensive nature of texts. An ironic twist arises from the implication that the - at least nominally - sovereign democratically constituted states (namely the people) are left in the dark by deliberately embellished or euphemistic presentation of news or facts.
It is also known that some states in the USA have attempted to index literary or scientific classics (such as Mark Twain's novels Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species ) - in some cases successfully . The reasons can be of a completely opposite nature: In Darwin's case it was radical creationists who intended a ban, in Twain's case, his use of the nowadays taboo word “ nigger ” was provocative for many liberal Americans. Occasionally, these prohibitions were circumvented by issuing versions based on the ad usum Delphini method . A current example from Germany is the deletion of the word Negro king from the book Pippi Longstocking and corresponding reformulations of the works of Otfried Preußler .
literature
- Ernst Robert Curtius : European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 7. printing. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1990, ISBN 0-691-01899-5 ( Bollingen Series 36).
- Norbert Elias : About the process of civilization. Sociogenetic and psychogenetic studies. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-09934-5 .
- Egon Friedell : Cultural History of the Modern Age. Volume 1. 17th edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1984, ISBN 978-3-423-30061-2 ( dtv 30061).
- Roland Seim , Josef Spiegel (ed.): “From 18” - censored, discussed, suppressed. Volume 1: Examples from the cultural history of the Federal Republic of Germany. "The third degree". Reprint of the catalog from the Kulturbüro Münster eV, 6th reprint for the 3rd improved, revised and updated edition. Telos Verlag, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-933060-01-X .