All through its history the Academy’s work on the dictionary has been plagued by incompetence and delays. In 1642 the Academy decided to pay one of its members, Vaugelas himself, to work full-time on the dictionary, hoping to speed up its pace. He knew his business, reaching the letter I before he died in 1650. During the next twenty years the Academy managed to review what Vaugelas had done but did not move ahead. Colbert, who had no tolerance for their slow pace, instructed his chancellor, Charles Perrault, to pay salaries to all the members, hoping to stimulate their work. The rule was that Academy members who were present at the stroke of the meeting hour would be paid. That led to members spending the first half-hour of meetings debating whether the clock was right. Perrault tried to solve that problem by supplying the Academy with a state-of-the-art clock, but the prolonged, sometimes senseless debates persisted and became a staple of Academy folklore. As an example, early Academy member Antoine Furetière recounted an occasion when two members threw books at each other because they couldn’t agree about who should belong to a particular committee.
The task of defining a language in a rational way and setting its standards is enormous. It involves choosing words and deciding on their spelling. In some cases words had competing spellings that reflected different pronunciations. The Academy decided that the proper spelling for “asparagus” would be asperge, as some people said, rather than asparge, as others did; “to heal” would be guérir rather than guarir; and “cheese” became fromage rather than formage. However, in other cases, spelling didn’t match pronunciation at all. For instance, the S in beste (beast) and teste (head)—later to be spelled bête and tête—was not even pronounced.
The Academy’s choices tended to be conservative on the whole; it generally opted for etymology over pronunciation. Why? According to historian Ferdinand Brunot, members of the Academy steered away from phonetic spellings because they were afraid of looking ignorant of the historical roots of a word. But this orientation was also the expression of a class struggle. The lettered class promoted complicated spellings as a way of holding on to power; by making it hard to learn French, they made it harder for anyone outside their class to enter the circles of power.
Delays in the Academy’s dictionary project were such that, in 1674, the Academy was given a monopoly from the King for producing a dictionary of bon usage, for they feared that more enterprising lexicographers (dictionary makers) might be working behind their backs. And they were right. In 1680 César-Pierre Richelet managed to publish his Dictionnaire françoys contenant les mots et les choses (French Dictionary of Words and Things). Le Richelet, as it came to be known, was the first monolingual French dictionary without references in Latin. A previous landmark in the field, Jean Nicot’s Trésor de la langue française, published in 1606, still defined one word in ten by using Latin. With twenty-five thousand entries, Richelet’s dictionary stands as the prototype of the general dictionary. It included the Court’s best language, but also the language spoken by common people, as well as terms taken from science, the trades and technology, and quotations from authors. Le Richelet was a great success and became the standard French dictionary of its time—six editions had appeared by 1735. Strangely, the Academy didn’t protest Richelet’s stepping onto their turf; he had an excellent reputation, since he had created the first dictionary of French rhymes in 1667. And Richelet was sly enough to print his dictionary in Geneva, out of the King’s reach.
Another competitor was less fortunate. Antoine Furetière probably began working on his Dictionnaire universel in the 1660s, behind the Academy’s back, while attending its dictionary meetings the whole time. Furetière disagreed with the Academy’s overall approach for a prescriptive dictionary. In his opinion, the French needed a good general descriptive dictionary of French as it was used, not a dictionary of ideal French. But instead of trying to change his colleagues’ approach, Furetière went underground. Word got out only because he went to the King to get a monopoly to write a dictionary of scientific and technical terms, with a promise that it would exclude bon usage, the Academy’s turf. This provoked a rift, especially when it was discovered that Furetière planned to include definitions of bon usage after all. The Academy accused him of plagiarism and dragged him into court. Furetière argued, quite sensibly, that he couldn’t possibly define technical terms of navigation or chemistry without defining words such as “sea” and “fire,” which were part of the vocabulary of bon usage. In the end he lost his privilege and the Academy even expelled him, a very rare case. Ostracized and ill, Furetière sold his work to a Dutch publisher; he died in 1688, two years before his dictionary was printed.
Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel was far superior to that of the Academy. It was one of the greatest achievements of seventeenth-century lexicography and one of the most remarkable intellectual accomplishments of its time. Working alone, he produced the world’s first encyclopedic dictionary, with forty-five thousand entries—in less than twenty years. (Compare the achievement of Samuel Johnson, who wrote his English dictionary, published in 1755, with the help of seven lexicographers over a period of seven years.) While many spelling variations remained from the previous century—français was still spelled françoys—the language of Furetière’s dictionary was modern. The definitions are clear, objective and rarely judgemental. He defines the sexual organs in graphic terms, and his definitions of words such as cul (ass) and merde (shit) have none of the prudishness one would expect from the priest he was. Furetière was interested in all aspects of human activity, including anatomy, medicine, agriculture, the navy and the sciences. His definition of sucrerie (sugar mill) distinguishes those of the West Indies from those in Europe. The author even included a novelty: a thematic index that listed words by trade, for readers who were seeking definitions of specific terms used by, say, butchers or shoemakers. But Furetière’s reputation was destroyed by the Academy, and no one ever spoke of Le Furetière as they did of Le Richelet or would later of dictionaries such as Le Robert and Le Larousse. Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel did, however, suffer the ultimate tribute of greatness—it was copied, pillaged and imitated, and it ultimately inspired the work of the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists.
Spurred on by the controversy and the looming prospect of ridicule, the Academy finally published Le dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1694, after fifty-five years of work. Even the King could not quite hide his disappointment when it was presented to him. “Messieurs, voici un ouvrage attendu depuis fort longtemps” (“Gentlemen, this is a long-awaited work”) was all he had to say. The dictionary impressed no one in France. It had only thirteen thousand definitions. Spellings in the Academy dictionary were similar to Furetière’s, but definitions were concise to the point of being curt. Man, for instance, was defined as animal raisonnable (animal with reason). Woman was “la femelle de l’homme” (“the female of man”). The order of entries was generally alphabetical, but many words were classified etymologically, so that matrice (women’s reproductive organs) came right below mère (mother). The Academy’s dictionary was sharper on normative comments, including long discussions of usage, such as the proper use of moy (me) and je (I). It condemned archaic terms with the comment “Il est vieux” (“It’s old”) after the definition. But the omissions were glaring—the Academy almost forgot to include the word académie, and left out the word françoys until the third edition, in 1740.
Some of the Academy’s choices were frankly bizarre. The word anglais (English) was missing from every edition, but is expected to appear in the latest edition, slated for the 2010s. This absence is all the more puzzling since anglais is the root of accepted terms such as anglaise (a dance), anglican, anglicanisme, angliciser, anglicisme, anglomane, anglophilie, anglophile, anglophobe and anglophobie—all present in the 1935 edition. But it could have been worse: The word allemand (German) was actually removed from the 1935 edition (after being included in the 1835 and 1878 editions), though allemande (a dance) remained. The r
eal purpose of the Academy’s dictionary was to define an ideal French, and even in this it fell short. The purest of the purists regarded it as extremely vulgar because it contained words in bad taste that were used in the marketplace.
One of the oddest decisions made by the Academy was to exclude technical or scientific terms from its main dictionary. In effect, it subcontracted the job to one Thomas Corneille, the brother of the famous playwright Pierre Corneille, who published the Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences in the same year. While it would be false to pretend that it completely neglected its original mandate, this part of the job was clearly regarded as secondary.
In all, the Academy has managed to produce eight editions, with an average of thirty-seven years between them (the ninth edition has been in the works for seventy years now). The only period during which the Academy showed any semblance of real activity was the eighteenth century, when it produced no fewer than four editions. Members of the Academy at that time included Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert. In the spirit of reform, they set out to remodel the dictionary. The 1718 edition re-established alphabetical order, and the 1760 edition modified the spelling of eight thousand of the eighteen thousand words. But things were still slow to improve. “Woman” wasn’t promoted to the rank of “female and companion of man” until the sixth edition, in 1835.
It took the Academy 296 years to complete a grammar, which it published in 1935. Meanwhile, the book that would set the standard for French grammar guides was the Grammaire générale et raisonnée, published in 1665 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot. Hundreds more would be published before the Academy came out with its own. The plans to produce a rhetoric and a poetic never got off the ground. Even the academicians came to recognize that art and expression evolve in unpredictable ways.
We visited the French Academy to try to understand its role in modern French (more on that in chapters 8 and 17) and how the dictionary project had evolved. The Academy is located in the Institut de France, across the Seine from the Louvre, where it shares its offices with four other academies (of sciences, fine art, history and humanities). The baroque-cum-classical-cum-Italianate building is unmistakable, with its curved façade and oval coupole (dome)—coupole became the nickname of the Academy’s meeting place. After passing through the front gate we were led through a series of corridors where the staff of the Academy have their offices. The seventeenth-century building was designed before the advent of running water, sewage and electricity; with its peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpets, the overall effect—at least in the office area—is shabby chic, at best.
The two great meeting halls and the library were closer to what we were expecting from this prestigious institution; they were furnished with long polished wood tables and high-backed padded chairs arranged with almost geometric perfection. We were struck by the huge oil painting of Cardinal Richelieu on the back wall of the Red Salon, the hall where Academy members meet to discuss the dictionary. In the portrait (a copy) he is standing in a red robe with his usual ramrod posture and piercing gaze, looking awfully serious for someone who’s watching over a discussion of grammar rules. But of course, grammar is serious business here.
The Academy has about forty employees, most of whom are secretaries, ushers, bailiffs and guards. It manages about sixty literary awards and a number of grants, and more than a dozen properties, including several large castles. We didn’t run into any of the Academy’s forty “immortals” while we were there, and were told that they are rarely on the premises. If they do come, it’s only on Thursday, the day of dictionary meetings, and many, we were told, are chronically absent.
The reputation—or notoriety—of the French Academy is owed to a misconception. Outside of France it is seen as a kind of language police. In reality the Academy has never passed laws on language use; it has no authority to. The French government has official language terminology committees that make rules about what constitutes acceptable French and what doesn’t (more on this in chapter 18). These committees then run their choices by the Academy for rubber-stamping.
The French Academy’s main job is still to create a dictionary. Most of the work on the dictionary is done by eight lexicographers at the Academy who prepare lists of words and definitions for the academicians. On Thursdays the immortals debate definitions and decide which words to include in the next edition of the dictionary, its ninth. As Laurent Personne, the directeur de cabinet of the permanent secretary, and his chief lexicographer, Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, explained, the ninth edition, which was begun in 1935, was delayed by the Second World War and then by the disruptions caused by the Algerian war of 1954–62 and the student riots of May 1968. The Academy essentially did nothing after that until the appointment of Maurice Druon as permanent secretary in 1980. Since then, progress has been surprisingly swift (they were at the letter R as of early 2006). The new edition will double the number of words to forty thousand.
Although the French Academy still has great symbolic value, its dictionary is not well respected as a language resource. It has never been widely used in France, largely because, with an average of thirty-seven years between each edition, it can’t keep up with the times and is often already outdated by the time it’s published. The early editions had considerably more success outside France (more on this in chapter 5). The only exception was the sixth edition (1835), which was used as the reference when the French government defined official spellings for its civil service examinations.
Today, the Academy’s new website gets about two million hits per year, compared to fifty million for Quebec’s Terminology Bank. But in a way, the dictionary is not really the point. As Laurent Personne explained, the real role of the Academy is to preside over the French language, rather like a House of Lords for culture. Sometimes the Academy does act, as when it accepted spelling reforms in the early 1990s. At other times its inaction is conspicuous, as in 1997, when it refused to accept the feminization of titles (more on these two issues in chapter 17). Personne described the Academy as a “magistrature morale” (moral magistrate). “We are not there to decide on rules or establish law, but to consecrate usage,” he said.
Fuzzy as it sounds, the idea of consecration is actually what the Academy is all about. If a word enters the Academy’s dictionary, its use is indeed “consecrated.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone uses the word—that’s not the point. Consecration means that the word is recognized as part of the ideal French that every francophone is supposed to have in the back of his or her mind. In other words, the French Academy is a place to store the French language in its ideal form—a kind of museum of ideal French. In fact, some Academy members even describe themselves as curators of the French language.
In its four-hundred-year history, the French Academy has had little impact on how French is actually used. But the ethic of purism that inspired the Academy’s creation would have a major impact on how French evolved over the centuries. Since the seventeenth century, French authors and grammarians have had the objective of clarity in mind, not just to produce a language that is precise, but also to make French comprehensible to as wide a public as possible. The fables of La Fontaine and the fairy tales of Perrault are monuments of that century that are still read today because of the genius of authors who wanted to write for all of humankind. In the eighteenth century the doctrine of purism made it possible for French writers to export their work and spread their influence over the entire European continent (the subject of chapter 5). In fact, most French authors remained obsessed with clarity and precision until the twentieth century.
But first and foremost, this purist ethic shaped how francophones put together their dictionaries. The French lexicographic tradition is far more prescriptive than the English. There is no equivalent in French of the Oxford English Dictionary. From its inception, the OED was meant to be a vocabulary collection and a great inventory of archaisms and regionalisms—almost half the words on any give
n page are no longer used. In comparison, French lexicographers do their spring cleaning regularly so that the language doesn’t hold on to words it doesn’t need. Ever since Malherbe’s time, synonyms, neologisms, regionalisms and archaisms have been weeded out on a regular basis and pushed into obsolescence. Sometimes, however, archaic terms are rescued from limbo and repopularized by an author or public figure. Charles de Gaulle is famous for labelling the May 1968 riots la chienlit (shit-a-bed), resurrecting a sixteenth-century insult that hadn’t been heard for centuries.
The logic of French purism since Malherbe has been that each word should have a precise definition; no two words are perfectly synonymous. In Webster’s English dictionary the word tolerate has a definition. But put up with is defined merely as “tolerate,” without further explanation. No French dictionary would ever do that. A French dictionary of synonyms goes much further than an English thesaurus, which merely lists the synonyms. It will either give precise definitions for each equivalent, categorize the synonyms as literal, analogous or figurative, or differentiate them in some other way.
The French tradition seems to have convinced everyone that there are fewer words in French than English. A popular statistic of comparison is the Oxford English Dictionary’s six hundred thousand entries as compared to Le Robert’s hundred thousand. Yet half the vocabulary in the OED is never, or almost never, used. At the time of its creation the OED was meant as an inventory of English words not listed in any other dictionary. In 1987 linguist Henriette Walter disproved the old, false misconception about the paucity of French vocabulary. She simply added 175,000 terms found in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plus half a million technical terms, plus a couple of hundred thousand new words created since the 1960s, and came up with a total of 1.2 million different words. And this is a conservative estimate, since it excludes archaic and technical terms that fell out of use before the nineteenth century. Quebec’s Grand dictionnaire terminologique, created by the Office québécois de la langue française (French Language Commission), lists a million French terms used in two hundred fields of science, industry and technology. According to Sherbrooke University professor Pierre Martel, who is currently working on the first modern dictionary of Quebec French, twenty to thirty thousand new terms are created in French every year “if you consider all regional varieties, all fields of research and all slangs,” although, according to Martel, “Most of these terms are short-lived and used by very few people, sometimes as few as half a dozen.” The real difference between English and French dictionaries is one of spirit. Because they exclude things such as technical and scientific vocabularies, French dictionaries have fewer words. On the other hand, the definitions are infinitely more precise. If French dictionaries included all words—the way English dictionaries do—the number of entries would be much larger. But they don’t, and that’s because of the principle of bon usage, according to which only words that are used (or deemed useful) find their way in; the rest are relegated to specialized dictionaries. In other words, if the English dictionary is like an inventory, the French dictionary is like a tool-box, with words divided up into categories, each with specific instructions about how to use it. The mandate? To help users speak pure French.
The Story of French Page 8
