A Career in Tongues, or The Linguistic Self-Fashioning of the Chevalier d'Arvieux

abstract:This article analyzes the place of language in the career of the seventeenth-century French merchant, courtier, and diplomat Laurent d'Arvieux. It highlights how linguistic skills functioned as cultural capital, that is, valuable resources that polyglots could mobilize as part of broader social strategies aimed at social and professional advancement in the early modern world. Born into a family of noble merchants from Marseille, d'Arvieux acquired a range of languages in the Near East, including Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish—skills he subsequently put to use on various diplomatic missions in the Ottoman world on behalf of Louis XIV. Giving pride of place to his own polyglot talents and his repeated role as interpreter in a variety of contexts, d'Arvieux's Memoirs highlight how effective linguistic intermediaries could be at putting their expertise to use to win recognition, office, and advancement. Moreover, his text represents an exercise in self-interested self-fashioning, making it possible to gauge how social agents incorporated their linguistic talents and exploits into representations of their social identities and trajectories. D'Arvieux's life shows that the history of linguistic mediation is not only one of function—the brokering of cultural exchange—but also of intermediaries' own social calculations, aspirations, and self-representations.