The dictionary question aside, the purist approach had two hidden traps, and over the centuries French speakers have fallen into both of them. The first was that the plainness they sought led to extreme dryness. That’s the term that comes to mind when one reads French poetry from between the 1600s and the arrival of the Romantic movement in France in 1830. Before 1600, French poetry had been praised for its refinement and inventiveness. But the influence of Malherbe led creative people to eschew the very things that help a language develop, such as wordplay and neologisms. In other words, bon usage had a castrating effect. “On a appauvri la langue en voulant la purifier” (“The language was impoverished in our effort to purify it”), wrote French Academy member Henri Fenelon in 1716. His observation came fifty years too late, and it raised very few echoes in the next century. The damage had been done.
The other trap of purism was to create a gulf between bon usage and scientific and technical language. The seeds had already been planted when Furetière was quarrelling with the Academy. He maintained that “an architect speaks as good French when he uses technical terms like plinths and stylobate…as a courtier who speaks of alcoves, stands or lustres.” But his view did not prevail. For the next two centuries the Academy put cultural and court language on a pedestal and relegated scientific language to a sort of linguistic ghetto. The problem that promoters of French had with scientific language came mainly from their opposition to jargon and their anti-Latin stance (the influence of Latin was strong in scientific circles). Language promoters also dismissed legal vocabulary as outdated, as much of it had been created along with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. French science remained strong throughout that period, but the separation between the idea of bon usage and the rest of society meant that the people at the top didn’t pay any attention to what was going on below them. So the Academy inadvertently deprived French elites of a major source of linguistic and cognitive renewal.
Yet the prescriptive approach of French dictionaries had one positive outcome: What “pure” French lost in lexical richness, it gained in lexical precision. Because it was defined, French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was regarded as easier to learn. People using Le Richelet and Le Furetière and the Grammaire raisonnée of Lancelot and Arnauld could pick up the basics of the language. For that matter, the Academy’s dictionary had much more success outside France than inside, because it allowed people with no access to the French court to get a good idea of the correct usage that was the rule there. Because French was the first European language with a fully developed written system of spelling and grammar, France was also the first country to develop a group of literary stars (later called philosophers or intellectuals), a phenomenon that would help boost the great admiration that Europe developed for the French language.
One effect of this success was that most of the courts of Europe (and overseas) wanted to develop their own clones of the French Academy. Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Philadelphia all created academies modelled on the French Academy. The most successful clone, Spain’s Real academia española de la lengua (Royal Spanish Language Academy), became a model of effectiveness, and remains so. Created in 1713, it issued its first Spanish dictionary after thirteen years of work; the twentieth edition was delivered in 1984. Better still, it published eight editions of a Spanish grammar between 1741 and 1815, accomplishing a complete reform and rationalization of the Spanish language. The French Academy never got close to those results. Over the centuries most countries would establish their own form of language institution, whether they called it an academy, an institute, a commission or a committee.
One of the great enigmas of the period is why the English never followed the trend and created an academy—all the more so since many of them viewed the French Academy with envy. The English intelligentsia complained bitterly about the corruption of their language, from about 1660 until publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. People wrote as they spoke; nobody seemed to follow any fixed rules. This was perceived as a great problem by men of science, and the Royal Academy of Science created a committee to tackle it. Many writers joined the movement. Jonathan Swift, the most outspoken promoter of an English academy, wrote: “Some method should be thought for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever.” Daniel Defoe went even further, at least rhetorically, writing that it was “criminal to coin words as money.”
Yet the project of an English academy never materialized, probably because it went against the grain of society. Unlike the French, the English never felt it necessary to define their language (or their civil law, or even their constitution, for that matter). After they gained their independence, the Americans toyed with the idea, but rejected it as a royalist institution. Robert McCrum suggests in his book The Story of English that plans for an English academy may never have materialized simply because the idea was so obviously French. That explanation is a bit reductive, since most languages have some form of academy, but the concept of a language academy would become a classic illustration of the different spirits of English and French.
In the same century that the French Academy was created, the age-old rivalry between English and French would be carried over land and sea. And it would determine the fate of French on an entire continent.
Part Two ~
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Chapter 4 ~
Far from the Sun
A swift twenty-minute ferry ride from Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, the island of Gorée is an ideal place to get away from the commotion of the West African metropolis for an afternoon. Tourists and well-off Dakar residents flock to this peaceful, sandy haven to admire its steep rocky cliffs, historic forts and the hundred or so colourful colonial houses that line its cobblestone streets. The tiny island is dense with history and activity. On one side, residents have transformed two Second World War bunkers into dwellings. In the centre is an exclusive college where young girls study under the chubby silhouettes of baobab trees. Near the port, children swim and play on the beach all day while their parents sip sodas at quaint beachside cafés.
The idyllic atmosphere is almost enough to make one forget the island’s turbulent and horrific history as a slave port. The Dutch first claimed Gorée in the seventeenth century; its name comes from the Dutch goede raede (good harbour). It was later claimed by the Portuguese, Danish and English, finally ending up in French hands. The Europeans vied for Gorée because it was an ideal location for holding slaves and as a stopover before the journey across the Atlantic. It had plenty of water and was close enough to the shore to allow commerce with the mainland, yet far enough to be protected from threats from the continent. Most visitors who arrive there today are herded straight from the ferry to the Maison aux esclaves (slave house), where a local guide recounts a short history of the island’s role in holding slaves and shipping them to the Americas. Although Gorée’s real importance in the slave trade is a matter of controversy among historians, the island has become a kind of living museum of the two-hundred-year period when Europeans tore apart African society to supply labour to their colonial plantations.
In writing the history of the French language (or of any European language), authors tend to brush over colonialism and skip the European slave trade, probably because the issues seem too painful to be reduced to episodes in the story of a language. We are not writing an apology for French colonialism or its methods, but the subject cannot be avoided. If French became not only a European but also an African, Asian and American language, it is because France became an important colonial power.
The first colonial push, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution, was not even remotely about exporting language (unlike the second colonial push, in which Europeans attempted to export “civilization,” as discussed in chapter 9). Early colonialism was strictly about importing (often stolen) wealth. Throughout the colonial period the nature of the treasure changed according to fashion and new tastes—from gol
d to beaver fur to luxury products such as coffee, cocoa and, of course, sugar. Europe’s crowned heads saw the world as a zero-sum game: Whatever territory they didn’t snatch, others would surely scoop up in their place. But no one had a master plan. They started out by sending adventurous trader-explorers and giving them charters—basically trade monopolies—in exchange for a cut of their profits and a promise to take settlers to the new territories. In effect, the entrepreneurs were given royal charters to loot and plunder the local natives and raid their competitors.
The French were no exception to this pattern, even though, like the English, they got started relatively late. Both countries sent merchants, navigators and pirates overseas during the sixteenth century, but neither established trading posts or permanent settlements until the beginning of the seventeenth century, a good 110 years after the Spaniards and more than 150 years after the Portuguese. In the seventeenth century the French pushed with some success into Africa, India and the Caribbean. They occupied Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion) in 1638, then opened their first trading post in Senegal and began sending colonists in 1687. They opened a trading post in Pondicherry in 1674—few people know that this section of India remained French until 1954. They colonized Île-de-France (present-day Mauritius), off the coast of Mozambique, in 1712.
By the time the French got to the Caribbean, the Spanish and the Portuguese had already claimed most of the islands. All the French could do was grab what was left over and try to seize territory from their European rivals. In the end, some islands changed crowns a dozen times. The French occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, but the real prize was the western part of the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti, which the French called Saint-Domingue. In 1665 Saint-Domingue became a formal colony of France, and in 1697 the island of Hispaniola was formally partitioned between France and Spain (into today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic). Nobody suspected it at the time, but this was quite a coup for the French; Saint-Domingue would turn out to be the most profitable of all European colonies during the eighteenth century.
By the seventeenth century the quest for gold bullion was already giving way to the market for exotic goods and commodities. The political economy had evolved, and the development of trade routes had made bulky items such as tobacco and fur profitable. New products—indigo, coffee and cocoa—became popular in Europe, but when Europeans decided they preferred their cocoa and coffee drinks sweetened, there were not enough bees and berries in Europe to produce all the sugar they needed. This sudden change in taste hastened the development of slave-based sugar plantations and, with them, slave trading and an interest in places like the island of Gorée.
Sugar cane is not actually native to the Caribbean. The Arabs discovered it in Egypt—the word sucre (sugar) is derived from the Arabic sukkar. Christopher Columbus picked it up on a stopover in the Canary Islands. As Europeans discovered, the Caribbean was perfectly designed for sugar plantations, as the islands were sparsely populated and the weather was the same all year round. The Spanish began building sugar mills in the mid-1500s. After local populations in the Caribbean had been decimated by European-imported disease, the Spanish went looking for manpower, and discovered that African slaves were more resistant to diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever and malaria than the local natives or the engagés (European contract workers).
The French were late getting into the sugar trade, but they took to it with a vengeance. The French colonies of the Caribbean soon became part of a single system that linked them to half a dozen African slave-trading posts in Congo, Angola, Guinea, Senegal and Benin (which also supplied slaves to Brazil and the American colonies). Because it was the shortest distance across the Atlantic from the Caribbean, West Africa was hotly disputed between the French, English and Dutch. The French soon got the upper hand. After establishing trading posts on the west coast of Africa, they began building fortresses and warehouses and founded the city of Saint-Louis in 1659. By 1750 they controlled a quarter of the slave trade.
Caribbean plantations produced coffee, cocoa and cotton in vast quantities, but sugar was the backbone of the trade, to the point that the French called their possessions the Îles à Sucre (Sugar Islands). Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the other islands combined, even Jamaica, and became the prize that everyone was after—it was dubbed la perle des Antilles (the pearl of the Caribbean). Saint-Domingue was the biggest sugar producer in the world by 1750. In the eighteenth century the settlers of Saint-Domingue were rich enough to build theatres, where they watched French plays, and to send their children to school in Paris. For a brief period they even had a local newspaper, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue. The colony was also notable for being the Caribbean island with the highest concentration of slaves relative to planters, as the white people called themselves (most of the land was controlled by absentee landowners, so few of the planters owned their land; the majority were artisans, overseers, administrators and the like). This imbalance would have important consequences for the history of French (as we discuss in chapter 7).
This early form of globalization spawned new words, and the effect on the French language was immediate. The Spanish borrowed from the South American Tupi people the word boucan (a meat-smoking process), which became the French word boucanier (buccaneer)—Quebeckers still use boucane colloquially for smoke. Other words, such as igname (yam) and macaque (a kind of monkey) came through Portuguese, whereas tomate and chocolat came from the Aztecs via the Spanish language. The word maringouin (a type of mosquito), which French Canadians swear was coined in Canada, is in fact a borrowing from the Tupi and Guarani languages of South America that was first adopted in the Antilles (French Caribbean), where it is still used today. Hundreds of similar terms from Peru or Brazil came into French via Spanish—for example, chinchilla, caïman (cayman)—or Portuguese—caramel, fétiche (fetish), marmalade, ananas (pineapple). There were also borrowings from Africa, such as zèbre (zebra), which entered French via the Spanish cebra (meaning a wild donkey, as Spanish explorers couldn’t think of a better word for these strange striped horses). Banane (banana) is a Bantu word that became French via Portuguese. And vaudou (voodoo) is a word from Benin that became French—and was later borrowed by English through Louisiana French.
The new industries of the time generated terms that were copied freely into all languages. Sucre gave sucrier (sugar bowl or sugar maker) and sucrerie (sugar mill). Nègre, borrowed from the Spanish negro (black) in 1529, produced négresse (black woman), négrillon (black child), négrerie (a place where slaves were held) and négrier (slave trader); racist policies also spawned terms such as quarteron (quadroon) for mulattos.
But the Caribbean colonies’ main impact on the French language was the creation, almost overnight, of French Creole. The term créole came from the Portuguese crioulo, which referred to Brazil-born mulattos. No one knows exactly how the term came to refer to the language of the slaves (there are many widely divergent theories). The term travelled to the New World on slave ships leaving Senegal, which had been a Portuguese colony before the French occupied it. The Spanish, and later the French, used the term for anyone born in the colonies. It generally referred to whites, but later became the name for the jargon that developed among slaves.
A Creole language is born when populations of different origins combine elements of their languages to form a new one. Properly speaking, it becomes a Creole when it evolves into a mother tongue, transmitted from parents to children—that’s what distinguishes it from a lingua franca or a pidgin (trade jargon). Of the world’s 127 Creoles, thirty-five are English-based and fourteen are French-based. There are more speakers of French-based Creoles than all other Creoles combined (including English), thanks mostly to Haiti, the biggest Creole-speaking nation in the world, with a population of seven million (where both Creole and French are official languages), but also Mauritius, with a population of one million. The four other main centres of French-based Creole are Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique
and French Guiana, which account for another million speakers. Together, the population of these lands is larger than the two biggest centres of English-based Creoles—Jamaica and Suriname—combined.
All French-based Creoles were created during the slave trade, when African slaves communicated among themselves by using colonial French terms with a simplified grammar. Most Creoles were strictly oral languages until recently and evolved without a fixed grammar system for two or three centuries. Words are very often similar to the French spoken in France at the end of the seventeenth century, but spelled phonetically, which blurs the resemblance. The Creole word for étudiant (student), for instance, is étidyan. Many terms can be understood if they are sounded out, but it sometimes takes a bit of imagination—comprendre (to understand), for example, is konprann.
The Story of French Page 9
