Don du franais et parole (post) coloniale

This article aims to give a renewed theoretical substance to the words of francophonie. It tries to reconstruct the conditions of enunciation which characterize the French (post) colonial scene from the Ancien Rgime to the present. In each epoch of the French colonial empire, a theologico-political core governed the effects of censorship and of lingual reduction through the so-called gift of languages. If, according to the Code noir especially, a slave was mute or inaudible by definition, the French and Haitian Revolutions opened a new space for a black discourse in French. Such a lingual event, as well as the triumph of the Jacobinist conception of the national idiom, helps us to understand the uses and ruses of the Third Republic regarding the teaching of the French language in the colonies. Thus, a necessarily (post)colonial francophonie could name the process of bypassing the colonial order of speech and silence.