At the Jesuit high school in Manhattan that I attended, my freshman year, 1985, was the first in which Latin was no longer the language required for the first two years. Father Headmaster wrote to explain that the school nevertheless still strongly encouraged its young charges to take Latin, in keeping with Jesuit tradition and as an introduction to Western culture. Most of the entering class followed his advice, and we immersed ourselves, unselfconsciously for middle-class adolescents, in the campaigns of Caesar and the conjugations of irregular verbs. Without knowing exactly why, we had a sense that Latin still had something significant to say to us. Since that time, the situation has changed dramatically; such encouraging letters are no longer written, and Latin is much less emphasized.

We did not know then that we were part of a long intellectual tradition, now almost extinct, that had placed Latin at its center. Françoise Waquet, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, traces this tradition, as well as the possibilities of its revival, in her richly researched and delightful Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. The subtitle should not frighten anyone concerned with the fate of “the old language,” as the translation nicely puts it. Rather than a nod to chic French theory, Latin as the “empire of a sign” echoes the old French reactionary (and most definitely unchic) Joseph de Maistre, who defended Latin as the “signe européen” in his 1819 book On the Pope.

Waquet focuses on the Latin of the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, when its fate as a “dead language” was sealed. While Latin had been the common language of Europe since the Middle Ages, its role changed after the Renaissance and Reformation. On the one hand, its use as a common spoken tongue faded almost into insignificance; on the other, Latin expanded its cultural and intellectual place in both Catholic and Protestant Europe.

Waquet describes for us “a unitary intellectual Europe in which, until a relatively recent date, learning was expressed in Latin.” And not only in science or literature, which were “nothing … compared to the enduring predominance of the old language in the schools and the Church: here childhood memories took over, and there came back to me the memory of a time—not so very long ago—when Latin was a part of people’s lives.” The influence of Latinitas extended from the Old World into the New. Most of the founders (but not all—the physician Benjamin Rush strongly opposed Latin education) thought the classical languages were essential to an informed citizenry, and Roman examples and imagery are staples of early American political culture. In institutions such as the Boston Latin School, the ideals of the Latin educational tradition were continued in America.

The watershed occurred, not surprisingly, in the 1960s. By the end of that decade, Latin was simply no longer considered valuable to Western intellectual life. Not because Latin or its study was out-of-date (of course, it had long since been replaced by the vernaculars), rather, “Latin disappeared because it no longer meant anything to the contemporary world.” To the revolutionaries in those heady days, Latin represented all that needed to be overthrown: religion, history, tradition, a system of cultural symbols derided for their “ethnocentric” and “hierarchical” foundations. Echoing arguments used by Rush two centuries earlier, they simply saw no use for Latin. Almost without resistance, the language of Europe disappeared.

Waquet examines Latinity from a variety of historical, literary, and academic sources. The first part, “The European Sign,” explores the “familiar world” Latin created. Drawing on Eamon Duffy’s work on pre-Reformation England as well as historical research derived from Brittany and elsewhere, Waquet concludes that though formally unknown to the majority of the populace, Latin nevertheless was part of their quotidian lives. The book sheds light on an aspect of the history of the language that is almost incomprehensible in our ironic, postmodern world: simple loyalty to old forms and a deep respect for the power of words. When Latin was overthrown, a new world, and one not necessarily better, appeared: “[t]he disappearance of Latin meant more than the interruption of banal habits, the replacement of simple mechanisms; it disarranged a mental universe in which that unintelligible language had become fully domesticated.” This is not a paean to ignorant peasants thumbing unintelligible breviaries: the data suggest, rather, that most of the uneducated in fact knew bits of Latin, from long use if not from formal education. And even for those who did not, Latin provided a background tradition, a “bass line” as Waquet calls it, that made the larger world comprehensible.

The second part, “Standards and Ability,” looks with a sometimes sardonic eye on the actual quality of the Latin written, read, and spoken by pupils, scholars, and politicians over the last four centuries. The conclusions Waquet draws are not entirely favorable to those seeking a widespread reinstatement of Latin. According to available records, for example, in the eighteenth-century most students achieved only a basic proficiency. Even those who were supposed to be conversant in the old language, such as those submitting doctoral dissertations in Latin, in fact often lacked competence in the classical tongue. In this harsh verdict, Waquet reveals a bias toward “classical” Latin, in which the use of non-Ciceronian vocabulary or word order is considered a flaw. One implication of Waquet’s research, however, is that a strict adherence to such a truncated classical model led to Latin’s decline.

The final section, “What Latin Meant,” expands the field to consider the cultural implications of adhering to a Latin-centered curriculum, even when it had increasingly less practical utility. Why learn Latin if no one needs it anymore? By the late seventeenth century, the now familiar canon of arguments defending Latin had arisen: as background for the modern languages, as general cultivation of the mind, as the language of religion, as a mark of social class, or (as in my high school) as a way into Western culture. Taken together, the arguments contend that Latin releases us from what Eliot called the provinciality of time; the old language is both familiar and strange, and the combination is a fruitful source of intellectual reflection and cultural sophistication.

In its wide scope, Latin demonstrates that far from being a “dead” language Latin was rightfully considered a critical component of cultural life for the majority of the peoples whose cultures were heir to that of Rome, from Russia (in which there is now an academy teaching spoken and written Latin) to the United States. In light of the exhaustive detail Waquet provides on the vitality, importance, and sheer cultural weight of Latin in the modern period, comparison with the other “universal language,” English, is instructive. English may be the language of international commerce and communication, but it is used almost exclusively as an instrument. It has never developed a broad system of cultural symbols like the one that made Latin the common and unifying language of the West. Waquet’s somewhat harsh assessment of English’s weaknesses may bear a residual trace of Gallic pride (one wonders at her reaction had French retained its status as the standard international and diplomatic language), but is nonetheless persuasive.

Waquet concludes with a call for a modest Latin revival in order to save it both from the pedants as well as from those who treat Latin as a subject for nostalgia or decoration. Waquet advocates creating a cadre of “professionals of humanist literary culture” who will concentrate on Latin as a subject in itself, in order to “have access to those wellsprings of our own culture, the Fathers of the Church and the Corpus juris” and the mass of medieval and early modern documents that have yet to be translated. While one hopes this may not be its ultimate end—one lesson of Latin is that the language should not remain the preserve of the academic class—with scholars of Waquet’s generosity and ability, the old language might yet have a future.