Society Languages of France in 1863 and 1836

[Tomenable]

Map:

 

[HereToLearn]

Nice and Menton were Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont until 1860, when they were more or less voluntarily passed to France by a plebiscite that was rigged by both the French and the Italian royal House of Savoy. I'm surprised they are not marked as "FULLY" non-Francophone areas.

 

[MOESAN]

The fact all people knew standard Franch doesn't signify they were not diglossic or billingual speakers. At these times (1863) patois or dialects were known by rural people in western Normandy (I've a subdialect at hand for N-E Cotentin in Manche) - I've a brother-in-law who know a good bit of Poitevin patois todate, in Ill-et-Vilaine the patois were known and even spoken no long ago in rural areas.
In Brittany, the departement doesn't reflect reality: western parts of Morbihan and Côtes-du-Nord (Côtes-d'Armor todate) were Breton speaking and their eastern parts were patois speaking, so largely more than 50% non French speaking - even in Loire-Atlantique, breton was spoken more or less in the northwestern part close to southern Morbihan at these times and some fishers of Bats and Le Croisic were able to speak breton around 1910 -
Very often until the middle of the 20th Cy, rural pops were diglossic (more than billingual because "patois" or dialects were not learned) all around France and the French spoken in the Center around Paris had some regional taste.
these maps are partly useful but reality is more complicated even if todate these remnants of "patois", dialects and allogene languages (Basque, Breton, Flemish, Alsacian, Thiois (Franconic Germanic of N-Lorraine), Corsican, Catalan) are very weak.
in 1863 I suppose the "French" was still very regional among the common people and not the standard French learned in school or known todate by the media. This in spite of the brutal way the governments used to standardize France language since the beginning of the 19th Cy.-

 

[Riverman]

The rural area of most of Moselle and Southern Haut Rhin was nearly completely German speaking. I have ancestors from those areas, and while some might have been bilingual, German was the first language for the vast majority. They also married, quite often, beyond the Rhine into Germany, Luxemburg and Switzerland respectively.

 

[MOESAN]

The rural area of most of Moselle and Southern Haut Rhin was nearly completely German speaking. I have ancestors from those areas, and while some might have been bilingual, German was the first language for the vast majority. They also married, quite often, beyond the Rhine into Germany, Luxemburg and Switzerland respectively.

Surely. French state tried to put schools children to believe that the kind of German spoken in Lorraine North and Alsace/Elsass had been freshly enough introduced by the "Prussians" but their dalectal isoglosses prove that they were part of diverse very ancient German subgroups (sub-AlemannicS, sub-FranconicS and was not the result of a standard Germanic languages imposed by force... the western Lorraine dialect were very close to Luxemburg one - the eastern one closer to Rheinisch Franconic; same local divergences in Elsass.

 

[Riverman]

Alsatians married more often into Switzerland and Baden, Lothringer into Luxemburg, Saarland and Rhineland. Pretty much along the dialectal borderlines.