The following quotes testify central efforts in nationalizing the administrative language which were then unspoken in rural communities. While I don't think there were any significant political resistance to it other than the schoolchildren having trouble to obey their teachers, it is still true that it was a political, artificial incursion of a language through public education.
"Elected constitutional bishop by his diocese of Blois, it was in 1794 that Abbé Grégoire submitted to the Convention his ‘Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française’. In this report he effectively recommended the ‘sole and invariable use of the language of liberty in a Republic one and indivisible’. To achieve this, he suggested producing short works, songs and newspapers in French which would be sent into all the communes. He proposed that only the national language be permitted in all the municipalities, and he even went so far as to ask – with the utmost seriousness – that future spouses ‘should be subjected to the obligation to prove that they can read, write and speak the national language’ before they got married."
"In the course of a linguistic survey which I carried out several years ago in various French-speaking regions, more than a few of the older participants recalled the somewhat sadistic custom of handling an object, which varied according to the region, to the first child who used a patois word in class. The guilty pupil would then pass the object to the next child who used the patois, and so on until the end of the lesson, when punishment would befall the last unfortunate who had not been able to get rid of the object before the bell sounded for break.
This left bilingual child with mixed feelings of shame and attachment towards the patois. In Les tilleuls de Lautenbach, the author Jean Egen recounts that as a child he spoke Alsacien only at home.
'When I was playing outside with little Gaulard or little Parrot, if I saw my mother coming, before she could even open her mouth I would begin speaking to her in French because I was afraid that she would speak to me in dialect.'
He also said of his mother: ‘To her husband and children she spoke only the dialect. To God she spoke German, and a little French to please Dad.’"
Although it is clear that there were people who supported the suppression of Patois and incursion of French:
"Nowadays, when so many people believe that the search for their own identity involves a return to the dialects, some of the answers to Grégoire’s questionnaire are not without surprise, since they contain letters witnessing to a real desire on the part of the people to be ‘delivered’ from their patois. Several letters ask expressly and emphatically for central government to organise serious teaching of the national language in the regions as quickly as possible."
And when the conscripts of the First World War, who came from all over the France, started to communicate with each other in French that they had learn in school instead of their Patois, they continued speaking French even at home after the war ended, thus accelerating the decline of the Patois.
Source: French Inside Out: The Worldwide Development of the French Language in the Past, the Present and the Future (Henriette Walter) Routledge, 1993
"Elected constitutional bishop by his diocese of Blois, it was in 1794 that Abbé Grégoire submitted to the Convention his ‘Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française’. In this report he effectively recommended the ‘sole and invariable use of the language of liberty in a Republic one and indivisible’. To achieve this, he suggested producing short works, songs and newspapers in French which would be sent into all the communes. He proposed that only the national language be permitted in all the municipalities, and he even went so far as to ask – with the utmost seriousness – that future spouses ‘should be subjected to the obligation to prove that they can read, write and speak the national language’ before they got married."
"In the course of a linguistic survey which I carried out several years ago in various French-speaking regions, more than a few of the older participants recalled the somewhat sadistic custom of handling an object, which varied according to the region, to the first child who used a patois word in class. The guilty pupil would then pass the object to the next child who used the patois, and so on until the end of the lesson, when punishment would befall the last unfortunate who had not been able to get rid of the object before the bell sounded for break.
This left bilingual child with mixed feelings of shame and attachment towards the patois. In Les tilleuls de Lautenbach, the author Jean Egen recounts that as a child he spoke Alsacien only at home.
'When I was playing outside with little Gaulard or little Parrot, if I saw my mother coming, before she could even open her mouth I would begin speaking to her in French because I was afraid that she would speak to me in dialect.'
He also said of his mother: ‘To her husband and children she spoke only the dialect. To God she spoke German, and a little French to please Dad.’"
Although it is clear that there were people who supported the suppression of Patois and incursion of French:
"Nowadays, when so many people believe that the search for their own identity involves a return to the dialects, some of the answers to Grégoire’s questionnaire are not without surprise, since they contain letters witnessing to a real desire on the part of the people to be ‘delivered’ from their patois. Several letters ask expressly and emphatically for central government to organise serious teaching of the national language in the regions as quickly as possible."
And when the conscripts of the First World War, who came from all over the France, started to communicate with each other in French that they had learn in school instead of their Patois, they continued speaking French even at home after the war ended, thus accelerating the decline of the Patois.
Source: French Inside Out: The Worldwide Development of the French Language in the Past, the Present and the Future (Henriette Walter) Routledge, 1993