Epigraphy and palaeography

The eighth entry is l’apparat critique, and the two words look like a pair an English reader already owns. The second one is safe: critique is the adjective here, and « the critical apparatus » is the term of art on both sides. The first is not. Standing on its own, l’apparat has nothing to do with equipment at all. It means pomp, state ceremony, the display that a formal occasion puts on — un dîner d’apparat is a banquet, une tenue d’apparat is full dress, recevoir en grand apparat is to receive somebody with every honour, and une salle d’apparat is a room built to impress rather than to be used. The word an English reader is actually reaching for is l’appareil: the machine, the device, the set of instruments, and by extension the machinery of a state or a party. Two habits follow. Never render « the apparatus » as l’apparat, which turns a laboratory bench into a ceremony. And when l’apparat appears without critique beside it, expect gold braid rather than footnotes, because the scholarly sense survives only inside the fixed phrase of this list, taken whole from the Latin apparatus criticus.