Saying everything or the Government of the Tongue

To say everything is an expression that appears in the French language in the 13th century. The contexts of use and semantic inflections it has known allow an understanding of the fluctuating boundaries between private and public spheres. An analysis of the 1750-1990 period isolates three moments : the birth of autobiography and the right to criticize, until the revolutionary period in the 18th century ; fights around the freedom of the press and realistic aesthetics in the 19th century ; debates about the place of literature from 1945 until the 1960s when the term comes to mean what appears to be the aim of literature.