Contents
Acknowledgments
Linguistic Map of France in the Middle Ages
Map of the French-Speaking World
Introduction
Part One ~ Origins
Chapter 1 The Romance of French
Chapter 2 In French and Not Otherwise
Chapter 3 The Dawn of Purism
Part Two ~ Spread
Chapter 4 Far from the Sun
Chapter 5 The Language of Genius
Chapter 6 Revolutionary French
Chapter 7 New Sanctuaries
Chapter 8 French without Faute
Chatper 9 Tool for an Empire
Chapter 10 Lost Worlds
Part Three ~ Adaptation
Chapter 11 The Power of Attraction
Chapter 12 The Invention of Cultural Diplomacy
Chapter 13 A New Playing Field
Chapter 14 Choosing French
Chapter 15 Rocking the Boat
Chapter 16 The Francophonie
Part Four ~ Change
Chapter 17 The Struggle for Standards
Chapter 18 Protecting the Future
Chapter 19 Global Hesitations
Chapter 20 The Unwritten Chapters
Appendices
Selected Bibliography
Index
Notes
Acknowledgments
This book was a big project, and if we managed to research and write it in less than thirty months, it’s because a great number of people and institutions gave us financial, intellectual and moral support.
Among our backers we would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its considerable financial assistance at an early stage of the project. We were thrilled (and a little relieved) that our three original editors, Michael Schellenberg of Knopf Canada, Michael Flamini of St. Martin’s Press and Jeremy Robson of Robson Books, signed us on so quickly. As for our principal editor, Michael Schellenberg, his professionalism, flexibility, wise observations and guidance have been a great source of reassurance to us during every stage of the process. We also received support in the form of grants from Jacques Saada, Canada’s minister responsible for the Francophonie; Monique Gagnon-Tremblay, Quebec’s minister of international affairs and the Francophonie; Line Beauchamp, Quebec’s minister of culture and communications; and Nathalie Normandeau, Quebec’s minister of tourism and regional affairs. Diane Audet, of the Air France office in Montreal, arranged for special ticket prices for some of our travels.
It would be impossible to thank the couple of hundred people we interviewed for this book, but some individuals made a particularly important intellectual contribution, for which we are especially grateful. Linguist Henriette Walter, who has authored many books, was something of an intellectual godmother to us. Abdou Diouf, secretary-general of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, supported our project wholeheartedly from the start, as did Alain Marquer, vice-president in charge of development for the Fédération des Alliances françaises. Xavier North, then director of cultural cooperation and French language at France’s ministry of foreign affairs; Laurent Personne, cabinet director of the French Academy’s permanent secretary; and Bernard Cerquiglini, then director of the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France, provided us with key institutional insight. Françoise Ploquin generously opened the archives of Le Français dans le monde for us. Professor Edy Kaufman, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Maryland, gave us information, insights and hospitality in both Israel and the United States.
We also benefited from the help and insight of Guy Dumas, deputy minister in charge of Quebec’s Secretariat à la langue française; and of Jean-Louis Roy, president of Rights and Democracy, former Quebec delegate in Paris and former head of the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique. Astou Gueye, liaison officer at the Canadian embassy in Dakar, made our trip to Senegal an invaluable experience. Jayne Abrate and Margot Steinhart of the American Association of Teachers of French and Chris Pinet of the French Review all supported us warmly and opened many doors for us in the world of French teaching in the United States and beyond.
A number of specialists assisted us in the late stage of reviewing. In addition to Guy Dumas and Jean-Louis Roy, we would like to thank Professor Clyde Thogmartin of Iowa State University of Science and Technology; Professor Albert Valdman, director of the Creole Institute; and Philippe Blanchet, director of the Centre de recherche sur la diversité linguistique de la francophonie at the University of Rennes in Brittany.
Finally we would like to thank five people whose contribution had a more personal significance to us. To start with, Jean-Benoît’s father, Yvan Nadeau, got us out of a few financial pickles during our costly research. Jean-François Nantel and Valérie Lehmann offered us both friendship and the use of their Paris apartment as a pied-à-terre. Our agent, Ed Knappman, gave early impetus to the project. And finally, Peter Martin, former director of the Institute of Current World Affairs, sent us to study the French in 1999–2000. Without his support and confidence back then, we would never have dreamed of writing this book.
All these people were behind the scenes of The Story of French and we would like to thank them, as well as all the others who generously offered us their time and insight while we were researching and writing.
MAP 1 - LINGUISTIC MAP OF FRANCE CIRCA 1100, BEFORE THE FRENCH LANGUAGE CAME INTO EXISTENCE
This map shows the languages that pre-existed French. The shaded part of the map is present-day France. Over the centuries, the language developed out of a linguistic melting pot. Although French ultimately superseded them, most of these regional languages and dialects are still spoken today in France.
Introduction
If there was one place in the world where we never expected to hear French, it was Tel Aviv. Julie had twice travelled extensively in Israel before we started to research this book, and it had simply never occurred to her that there was a significant francophone presence there. Most Israelis speak Hebrew and English, so it’s hard to imagine that French has even a fighting chance as a second language among them. Yet the first language we heard when we stepped out of our hotel in Tel Aviv was French—a pair of women chatting at a corner store across the street.
That was a surprise, since we hadn’t gone to Israel to meet francophones. Our goal was to visit the Hebrew Language Academy in Jerusalem. We had chosen it almost randomly from among some seventy bodies that regulate language across the world to illustrate the fact that France isn’t the only country with a language academy. But when we looked at Israeli society through francophone eyes, we discovered that ten percent of Israelis speak French, including almost all the Moroccan immigrants who live there. In fact, Israel has many more French speakers than Louisiana does.
It turns out there are French-speaking communities not only in the cities of Netanya and Ashdod, but also in urban centres. Tel Aviv has a substantial francophone population; Jerusalem has a vibrant French cultural centre, Le Centre culturel français Romain Gary; a French bookstore, Librairie Vice-Versa; and a large French expatriate community. When we strolled through the Arab quarter of the Old City chatting in French, merchants beckoned us into their shops in French. When we ran into communication problems with an Israeli taxi driver who didn’t speak English, French provided a miracle solution.
Our dip into the Middle East solidified an impression that got stronger throughout our research for this book: that French is more resilient than people generally believe. No matter how people feel about France, they are still interested in the French language. Israel was a case in point. Because of diplomatic tensions over the Palestinian question, very few Israelis hol
d France in high esteem today. But the reputation of the French language in Israel has suffered very little by association. Jerusalem’s Centre culturel français attracts enough students to offer French courses regularly, and Israel still has two French lycées, plus a dozen or so French schools run by Catholic religious orders referred to as les frères. While the use of French is probably not increasing in Israel, it is holding its own, as both a mother tongue and a second language.
This basic impression was confirmed everywhere we travelled to research this book, including Louisiana, the eastern United States, the Canadian Maritimes, northern Ontario, Senegal, Tunisia, Guadeloupe, Algeria, France, Belgium and Switzerland. In terms of relative numbers of speakers, French may be declining as an international language, but it has an enduring hold on the world, a level of influence that in many ways surpasses—and is even independent of—France’s.
When people think of the “French paradox,” they are usually thinking about how the French can eat rich foods and drink great quantities of wine yet somehow remain slim. But there is another French paradox, this one about the language: In spite of the ascendancy of English, French has held on to its influence. Where did this influence come from, and how has French retained it? These are the questions we set out to answer in The Story of French.
As an international language, French is said to be waning. English not so long ago surpassed French as the world’s lingua franca and is now the undisputed international language of business, diplomacy and academic exchange. In numbers of speakers, French ranks only ninth in the world, far behind Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and English, and neck-and-neck with Portuguese. It has relatively little economic clout; the combined GDP of the countries where French is spoken places it far behind English, well behind both Japanese and German, and just ahead of Spanish. French speakers seem to be so insecure that they pass laws banning other languages and spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars making sure their language gets used in literature, music and film.
From other perspectives, however, French appears to be flourishing. Among international languages, French is in a class of its own. Of the six thousand languages now spoken on Earth, French is one of only fifteen spoken by more than a hundred million people, and one of a dozen used as official languages in more than one country. Among these, only four—English, French, Spanish and Arabic—have official status in more than twenty countries. French, with thirty-three countries, ranks second to English, with forty-five. Two G8 countries (France and Canada) are French-speaking, as are four member countries of the European Union (France, Belgium, Luxembourg and soon-to-be member Romania). French is the number-two second-language choice of students across the planet, attracting learners as far away as Lesotho and Azerbaijan, with two million teachers and a hundred million students worldwide. It is the only language besides English that is taught in every country of the world. Finally, there have never been as many French speakers in the world as there are today: The number has tripled since the Second World War. (For more details on these figures, refer to the Appendix.)
It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to claim that French is another global language, and, as we have seen, perhaps the other global language, in an increasingly English-dominated world.
As two Canadians, we have a unique relationship with French that in some ways made us well-suited to explore its paradoxes. Along with Mauritius, the Seychelles, Cameroon and Vanuatu, Canada is one of five countries in the world where French and English are both official languages. Montreal, where we have lived for almost twenty years, is a rare bicultural metropolis, and the only one in the world where English and French co-exist almost equally in day-to-day life.
Jean-Benoît is a native French speaker. He was born and raised in Quebec, a Canadian province that was a French-speaking “Lost World” for two hundred years (it was cut off from contact with France from the end of New France in 1763 until the 1960s). His family is francophone, a term French speakers in Canada commonly use to distinguish themselves from both the European French, and North American English speakers, whom they refer to as anglophones. Jean-Benoît learned English when he was a teenager and decided to continue his studies in English at McGill University in Montreal. That’s where he met Julie, who, like him, had just enrolled in the political science program. Julie is an anglophone who was raised in English-speaking Ontario. She moved to Montreal to study (in English), but decided to stay and learn French after she graduated.
When we moved in together in 1991, Julie’s French was still pretty shaky, so we started our own system of language exchange, alternating the household language weekly between French and English, starting every Monday morning. The system worked well. Jean-Benoît started publishing magazine articles in English in 1994, and Julie started publishing in French in 1995. We have been writing for national magazines in both of Canada’s official languages ever since. This is unusual, even in Canada, where only a small minority of Canadians are truly bilingual, and fewer yet are bicultural. But working in both media worlds has given us a first-hand understanding of how differently anglophone and francophone Canadians see the world.
In 1999 we added a European twist to our bilingual profile by moving to Paris. Jean-Benoît became a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. His mandate was to explain why the French were resisting globalization, a topic that was on everyone’s mind at the time. The problem was that, two weeks after we arrived in France, we realized that the French weren’t resisting globalization at all. Luckily Jean-Benoît was allowed to switch his subject, so we both spent the next two years writing about who the French are and explaining why they think and organize themselves the way they do.
That work inspired us to write a book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, which we released in the middle of the Iraq crisis in 2003. Our objective was to explain the reality behind perceptions of the French, particularly to the Anglo-American press. The timing for the book turned out to be risky, but we survived the intense French-bashing at the beginning of the Iraq war and the book has been selling well ever since. It was translated into French in 2005, and turned out to be as popular in France as it is in the English-speaking world.
Although The Story of French was written after Sixty Million Frenchmen, we got the idea for both books at the same time. Four months after we arrived in France, Jean-Benoît visited Monaco to attend an international conference of finance ministers of the Francophonie, the organization of French-speaking countries that resembles the Commonwealth. During this conference he realized how much language had become a new political reality on the international scene, with countries aligning themselves on issues on the basis of their native or adopted tongues—many propagandists in favour of invading Iraq in 2003 did so on the basis of “Anglo-Saxon” solidarity. When he saw the Francophonie at work, Jean-Benoît also understood to what extent the French language had become a globalizing force of its own—with or without France.
We decided to write a book to explain how this happened, starting from the very beginning of the story. From the outset we wanted to explore a few large themes—or myths. One was the Académie française, the French Academy. When people think of the French language, this is often the first thing that springs to mind. The Academy has long been a pet peeve of Anglo-American commentators, who hold it up as proof that the French are stuck in the past. In a way, as we learned, critics are right to laugh at the forty “immortals” wearing Napoleonic hats and carrying swords who get together every week to root out unworthy words from the French language. The French Academy is a little obsolete.
At the same time, when they are ridiculing the Academy, commentators almost always miss the point. The Academy in no way “polices” French. Its main job has always been to produce a French dictionary, and that’s still mostly what it does. Insofar as it regulates the language at all, it has hardly played more than a symbolic role since the mid-nineteenth century. But that doesn’t make the Academy any less important, either historically or toda
y.
The creation of the French Academy in the seventeenth century was actually a breakthrough for European languages, and one of the main factors that enabled French to become the language of Europe’s elite. That in turn was one of the reasons why French spread across Europe, and eventually the world. In other words, the Academy was progressive, and it played an important historical role in making French what it is today, not only grammatically but also geopolitically. Today it still functions, if only symbolically, as a kind of museum of French-language normes, or standards. While these are often ridiculed, especially in the English-language media, language norms are an important facet of francophone culture, a value that stands on its own.
As for language protection, another francophone society, Quebec, took that on in the twentieth century and did a much more thorough job of it than the French ever have. Along with many other countries in the world, France considers Quebec’s standards to be a reference point in the field.
One peculiar and often overlooked feature of French is that, unlike English, it is still very much associated with its European “mother” country. Indeed, of all the international languages, French is the only one of which the majority of native speakers are still in their country of origin. The French never migrated en masse, so all native francophones outside of France and Algeria form a minority in their respective countries. As a result, France and Paris still tend to dominate the world view of French speakers, unlike Britain, Spain or Portugal, which have been surpassed by larger nations that speak their tongues.
But all that is changing. As we discovered during our research, the French language is less and less “controlled” by Paris. While the French Academy continues to play its (largely symbolic) role in defining French, francophones the world over use the language as it suits them. Real French, the language spoken by 175 million people across the planet, is alive and kicking and readily adapting to different political, cultural and religious contexts. Under the influence of local regionalisms, argots, verlan (slang) and other languages such as English and Arabic—to name but the most important—French speakers communicate in their own versions of French, not the stiff parlance taught in schools. And, increasingly, francophone societies outside France are speaking with each other, often completely bypassing Paris.
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