Ginger Nally (NUI Maynooth)
French Translations of U.S. State Constitutions and the role of their translator, Louis-Alexandre, Duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville
The United States of America and France were the first two nations to proclaim to the world the Rights of Man : America in 1776, and France in 1789. These sacred rights were first drafted in America in the Declaration of Rights of Virginia, swiftly followed by the Declaration of Independence, and then reconfirmed in the declaration of rights attached to the state constitutions of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Massachusetts. The fervor surrounding the Declaration of Independence has most often obscured the importance of the thirteen state constitutions and their significant contribution to the history of democratic ideas, constitutionalism, and government structure. It is even less well-known that six of these state constitutions were accompanied by a declaration of rights, which served as the preamble to the constitutions of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Massachusetts. It was, in fact, the Declaration of Rights of Virginia, written by George Mason, that would have a large influence on Thomas Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence and later on the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. A number of historians have acknowledged the importance of the American constitutions in the formulation of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of 1789, including Bernard Faÿ, Gilbert Chinard, Durand Echeverria, Robert Palmer, Louis Gottschalk, Joyce Appleby, and Marcel Gauchet, among others. What has been given little consideration, however, is the influence exerted by the role of the translator of these pivotal documents in Franco-American history. In France, this translator was Louis-Alexandre, duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville et de la Roche-Guyon.
The paucity of studies conducted on the eighteenth-century French translations of the American founding documents is striking, as well as the negligible amount of studies dedicated to a key political actor in the unfolding of Franco-American history, namely, La Rochefoucauld d’Enville. In this paper, we have provided an analysis of the French translations of the thirteen state constitutions as well as an inquiry into the ideology and designs of their key translator. Our analyses have taken into account numerous translation issues, such as Lawrence Venuti has explored in the field of translation, as well as the particularities of English-French translation, such as Hélène Chuquet and Michel Paillard have explored. With that said, our study does not set out to demonstrate these linguistic complexities, although they abound in these texts. Our objective is rather to consider the translator’s role by an analysis of the information that the translator added to the original source text and that which he suppressed, as well as a number of vocabulary manipulations, stylistic modifications, all serving particular objectives. We seek to examine the translator’s role in the dissemination of ideas, the possible intentions of the translator in his translation techniques, the overall effect of the translations against that of the original source text, and the perception of the translator in his own perception of his role as translator. We have supported our findings with correspondence between La Rochefoucauld and his lifelong friend, Benjamin Franklin, that confirm the ideology of the former.
