9. Know-It-Alls
1: “Le poilu, l’une des figures les plus œcuméniques du XXe siècle,” interview with Nicolas Offenstadt, by Véronique Soulé, in Libération, January 25, 2014.
2: “Les communards ont suivi par devoir de camaraderie,” interview with Robert Tombs, by Dominique Kalifa, in Libération, April 10, 2014.
3: Ernst and Young, Au cœur du rayonnement et de la compétitivité de la France, November 1, 2013.
4: BOP Consulting and Mayor of London, World Cities Culture Report 2014.
5: Les mondes de Gotlib, Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, March 12 to July 27, 2014.
10. Down by Nature
1: Read also Guillaume Duval, Sandrine Foulon, Sandra Moatti, and Laurent Jeanneau, “Cinq idées reçues sur les Français,” Alternatives économiques, July–August 2015.
2: It’s predictable for the Anglo-American press to indulge in French bashing—Francophobia has been a subgenre of English literature since 1066. Anti-French articles, whether written in 1951, 1973, 1998, or 2013, almost all say exactly the same thing, and the ones that will be written in 2029 or 2041 will probably be similar. They focus on familiar themes: “France is in decline”; “The French language is on the decline”; “France is too centralized”; or “The French resist change.” In our opinion, they all display the same flawed logic and bad faith (this was the subject of our first book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong). On the other hand, such criticism is fair game, since the French have produced plenty of anti-British and anti-American writing themselves. For that matter, the link between foreign policy and the international content in the press is ancient and well documented. Even when printers started producing early forms of newspaper in the seventeenth century, kings granted printers charters on the condition that they write strictly about local gossip and foreign affairs.
But a large part of the negative bias in reporting on France is explained by the fact that foreign journalists get their information and opinions from the French themselves. The French are the last ones to put forward a positive assessment of their country: they tend to say France is in a crisis no matter what’s actually going on. Curiously, French defeatism then begets even more French defeatism as the French turn around and mirror what has been said about them in the foreign press. In short, French bashing à la française gives new meaning to the expression “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
3: The Road to Recovery: Insights from an International Comparative Study of Business “Birth” and “Death” Rates, RSM International, July 2013.
4: Suicide rates in France (15 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants) are 50 percent higher than the European average, which is just slightly higher than that of the United States. The British reduced their suicide rate from 16 to 6 per 100,000 in the last fifty years partly because they declared it a public health issue in the 1950s and developed programs to fight it. The French regarded it as a personal matter until the 1990s and are still doing very little concretely to prevent it.
5: France’s self-help publishing industry dates back a century to a pharmacist named Émile Coué (1857–1926) who created a method of “autosuggestion” (akin to mind-body intervention). His goal was to help people with physical ailments and psychological problems cure themselves. The method became very popular worldwide, particularly in the United States, where it generated a whole school of positive thinking that then, in many ways, went on to conquer the world. Coué’s theory fell out of favor in France after his death in 1926 when autosuggestion became identified with right-wing conservatism. Today, the Coué method is a common metaphor the French press use to disparage anything resembling optimism or boosterism.
6: Jamel Debbouze’s actual words were “What really gets on my nerves in this country is that you have to sound pessimistic to come across as intelligent,” in an article called “Non, la France n’est pas raciste!” (No, France isn’t racist), published in Le Parisien, November 27, 2013.
7: Rousseau’s most famous quote, “Man is born good and society corrupts him,” is a summary, not his actual words. The opening words of Rousseau’s Social Contract are: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.” (translation by G.D.H. Cole, 1782).
8: In “Intuitions,” 1932, published posthumously in 1976 as part of Youthful Writings.
9: It can even be argued that pessimism is structural to French society since its political economy is largely Malthusian. Robert Malthus was a British demographer whose 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population theorized that crisis was a permanent feature of humanity since people fought for a limited resource called land, which did not expand at the same rate as the population. Two centuries of industrial and postindustrial growth have proved him wrong, but the French have, curiously, organized all their labor around the idea that jobs are rationed—in other words, there will never be enough. Hence their very complex labor code.
10: Systematic pessimism can be said to answer some deep psychological impulses. This idea has been demonstrated in the twentieth century with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the unease a person experiences in the presence of two ideas that cannot be reconciled. Consider these two ideas: “France is the greatest country in the world” and “France is not that great.” The more you believe the first idea, the stronger the dissonance—unless you react by developing an adapted discourse, like: “France was never that great anyway,” which reduces the dissonance. Negativism in France fills exactly that role.
11: There are many stories in the news about France’s Revenue Services cracking down on tax shelters. In a fascinating interview on such shelters, the tax specialist Paul Devaux explains that the main risk in using them lies in “attracting the attention of France’s Revenue Service inspectors.” See “Les conditions pour bénéficier de ces dispositifs sont souvent complexes,” Le Parisien, November 4, 2013.
12: The famous prelude to the French Revolution, known as the episode of the cahiers de doléances (registers of grievances), sheds an interesting light on how negativity operates where money is concerned. The grievances were compiled over the months of March and April 1789, a few months before the French Revolution began. There were sixty thousand of them coming from as many towns and parishes, and much of their content is about the harshness of life. As Graham Robb puts it in The Discovery of France, they are not completely reliable because they could be used to avoid taxes in a time when people were taxed on apparent wealth. There is no doubt that harvests had been bad since 1784 and particularly bad in 1788, but the uniformity of the language in the cahiers de doléances also suggests a willful if not sly posture. It can be argued that this posture endures.
13: Many extreme expressions of negativism have their roots in repressed ideas, like nationalism, and their function is very similar to those of a geyser: they’re like a natural steam valve. The historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco, author of La famille en désordre (The family in disorder), argues that the very strong opposition to the same-sex marriage law in France expressed deep-seated convictions but also fear of the loss of the nation and the loss of sovereignty (mirrored by the refusal to change the parent-child relation). “There is a great fear, the fear of the future, the fear of being reduced to nothing,” she said. Quoted in “Notre identité est bien triple: biologique, psychique, sociale,” in Libération, February 10, 2014.
11. Fixation on French
1: Quebeckers have a radically different culture of the language. This is partly because of their exposure to English, but the main reason has to do with history. Two centuries ago, the vast majority of the French still did not speak French as a mother tongue but only learned it at school. This was not the case in Quebec. Quebeckers all spoke French and learned it from their families. So Quebeckers have a much older, and much less elitist, relationship with their language. Part of what makes Quebec French sound so strange to the French is not
the accent, which is not particularly unusual, but the Quebec culture of language, that is, what Quebeckers consider good and bad in language. Quebeckers cultivate a strong populism and nonelitism that the French find unsettling. They do not aspire to speak as they write. Many assume these cultural traits are borrowed from the surrounding English culture. In fact, it simply comes from the fact that Quebeckers’ language culture does not come exclusively from school.
2: Eric Liblot, “Guillaume Gallienne: Singulier, pluriel,” L’Express, November 20, 2013.
3: We explain the history of purism in detail in our book The Story of French.
4: Contrary to the stereotype, the French norm developed mainly outside of institutions like the French Academy by a number of enterprising lexicographers, including Antoine Furetière and César Richelet. Both wrote the first true French dictionaries in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, companies like Larousse were founded and became very successful businesses. Richelet, Larousse, and Littré are the equivalents of Johnson and Webster in English, and equally influential.
5: The one thing that escapes most French purists when they discuss the decadence of their language is how much it echoes the discourse on the decadence of Spanish from Hispanic purists or the decadence of English from British or American purists. And it’s the same as the one held by German or Arabic purists about their own languages. In a way, its lack of originality speaks of a larger truth.
Since World War II, three things have happened to most international languages: a lot more people speak them; a lot more people are schooled in them; and a lot more people write and publish owing to new technologies based on writing. No generation has written and published more than the present one. Consequently, people now publish writing very spontaneously in a variety of registers. And the fact that these writings can reach so many people so quickly creates a natural tension between standards and actual language. How speakers of a language react to this tension varies depending on the culture of the language. There are purists in English who complain about falling standards in writing, but English has a strong culture of simplicity so purism remains marginal. Spanish speakers are more purist, but since the language has twenty-two academies, the idea that there are competing standards is a fact of life. French has the same evolution with the difference that errors are qualified as fautes, not to be tolerated, but since they occur nonetheless, the discourse on the decline of French is equally great. People will blame the young or foreigners, but standards change because the French are just keeping up with the times.
12. English Envy
1: We explain this at length in our book The Story of French.
2: The linguist Henriette Walter, in L’aventure des mots français venus d’ailleurs, examined the thirty-five thousand most current words in French dictionaries and found that four thousand come from other languages, including one thousand from English. There are a lot more English words being used in spoken French, but it is impossible to count them. The spoken language shifts constantly, and most borrowings in speech never make it into the dictionary.
3: The debate on anglicisms is complicated by the fact that some so-called anglicisms are not anglicisms at all. Obsolète, for instance, became common in French in the 1960s as a result of the influence of the English word “obsolete.” But it was originally a French term, derived from Latin, which fell out of usage during the eighteenth century and was repopularized through English, but with new meaning. So how much of a borrowing is it, exactly? Since its English derivatives, “obsolescence” and “obsolescent,” have Latin roots to begin with, they don’t require any adaptation to be used in French.
Words that are labeled anglicisms are often the results of the normal process of the evolution of languages. The verb réaliser (to realize) has half a dozen definitions in French, much like in English. In fact, the English word itself and most English senses of the term come from French. But one of the meanings of réaliser (to understand clearly, to be fully aware) only entered the French language in 1850, under the influence of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was translating Edgar Allan Poe. Writers adopted the new sense of the word, introduced by Baudelaire, and used it in italics for two or three generations before it was accepted in their language.
French purists often pounce on the influence of English in French word order or sentence structure, but their conclusions are often debatable. The French singer Lorie marked generations with her song called “La positive attitude” and purists claimed it violated the nature of French (the proper French would be l’attitude positive). In fact, there are many cases of adjectives that acquire new meaning depending on whether they are placed before or after nouns in French. For example, a simple soldat (a private) is not a soldat simple (a stupid soldier). Another case of English syntax in French is the use of the English genitive in ’s, as in “my mother’s mother.” However, the only case of a Frenchified English genitive is the officially accepted la pin’s (a pin), which was introduced in the 1990s. This constitutes absolutely faulty English (it’s supposed to be plural, not possessive) and cannot be regarded as an anglicism of syntax, but rather as faux English.
4: To French-speaking Quebeckers, Madinier’s assessment makes it sound like she is downplaying, or even rationalizing, the threat of English. French-speaking Quebeckers are much more adamant about protecting French from English than the French are, and with reason. The risk of French disappearing in Quebec, where 7 million French speakers are surrounded by a sea of English, is very real. To offer an illustration of how much more serious Quebeckers are about language protection: Quebec’s Office of the French Language has ten times more employees than France’s DGLFLF.
5: See the fascinating study L’anglais hors la loi? Enquête sur les langues de recherché et d’enseignement en France, by François Héran, in Population et Sociétés, INED, May 21, 2013.
6: For readers interested in the finer details of this, the French administration often requires that official documents in a foreign language be translated into French. This requirement doesn’t come from the Loi Toubon, but from the 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, which still has the force of law in France. This edict was about the management of institutions, particularly those concerning the administration of law and justice. Two clauses state that French is the official language of French administration (as opposed to Latin, Italian, or any of the regional languages). Even if this law is nearly five centuries old, French tribunals regularly cite it in their decisions—concerning not just English but any of the two dozen national languages of the European Union.
7: The importance of the French Academy is mostly symbolic. As a matter of fact, the French Academy doesn’t really “do” much at all. Its original purpose, when it was founded in 1635, was to produce a French dictionary. It is notoriously slow in doing this (the last edition appeared in 1935), and the dictionary itself is notoriously incomplete (and has been rarely used by the French public). It sells very little, and nowhere near the sales of Larousse, or the dictionary of the Spanish equivalent, the Real Academia Española in Madrid.
8: Few know that the original version of the show was not American, but Dutch, although it had an English title: The Voice of Holland. The Americans were the first to buy it, and called it The Voice.
9: In typical French negativist spirit, the symposium’s title was Quel avenir pour la langue française dans les médias audiovisuels? (Is there a future for French in the audio-visual media?), December 9, 2013.
10: There are plenty of legitimate reasons to protect one’s language, but in France, the defenders of French often weaken their arguments in two ways. First, they base many of their arguments on aesthetic judgments. They will say that English borrowings “disfigure” French. That, of course, flies in the face of the etymology of most French words, which come from foreign sources. Secondly, French defenders tend to pepper their arguments with gratuitous, chauvinistic, and sometimes quasi-racist comments that might have flown a century ago but
sound ridiculous today. A typical author along this line is Alain Borer, who wrote a book titled De quel amour blessée?, essentially a collection of pointless aesthetic pronouncements and chauvinist clichés. The French language defenders would be better off without such bad advocates.
For that matter, discussions of language are often complicated by the fact that people confuse the science of language, that is, linguistics, with a set of values that they ascribe to a language—which is inherently political and sociological. The common assumption that English is simpler or more precise actually has nothing to do with English itself. It’s about the culture that surrounds English and shaped the language. The case of English influence and anglicisms is compounded by notions of foreign policy and anti-American (or pro-American, as the case may be) feelings. Opinions about English are shaped by external values that have nothing to do with the language.
11: Many studies conclude that the French are less bilingual than other Europeans, but there’s a catch. The surveys are based on voluntary declaration, and the French often claim not to speak a language when they actually do. The issue, again, is purism and their idea of language. They transpose this purism onto other languages, assuming other cultures feel the same way about their language as the French do. The result? The French won’t say they speak German unless they speak very good German.
13. Looking Out for France
1: From the study Enquête sur l’expatriation des Français, by the Direction des Français à l’étranger et de l’administration consulaire, Ministère des affaires étrangères, May 2013.
2: Because of its official policy of language protection, the Quebec government puts a lot of effort into coming up with French terminology. It monitors two hundred sectors to identify new specialized terms and novel technical jargon, then defines and translates the terms if it deems this necessary. The Quebec Office for the French Language (OQLF) has created a huge online database called Le grand dictionnaire terminologique (The great terminological dictionary), which has millions of entries. Each year, it receives 50 million information requests. That is twenty-five times more requests than the French Academy gets—what’s more, half the requests come from Europe. The University of Sherbrooke, in Quebec, spent twenty years developing an online dictionary called Usito. This is the first case, in the history of French, of a general standard dictionary being produced outside of France.
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