Other French values worked against colonialism. Like their fellow Europeans, the French were curious to hear stories of adventure from the New World, but an important segment of the elite was simply not interested in questions of industry, science, technology, money or markets—issues that were vital to the development of a trading empire. The French Academy, of course, completely ignored scientific and technical vocabulary (as well as new vocabulary from the colonies). Unlike the English Puritans, French settlers were not driven by the idea of building an ideal French society, except maybe as an afterthought. The French Crown instead created an absolutist society that did not encourage free enterprise or local initiative. In New France, colonists were forbidden to establish towns; only parishes were allowed, which is why so many towns in Quebec have saints’ names. Finally, France’s colonial adventure was a victim of France’s growing brilliance. When the very capable General Frontenac started showing some initiative in New France, Colbert reprimanded him: “Even if Canada may seem far from the Sun, nobody should undertake things without the King.” Indeed, who wanted to be so far from the Sun?
Contrary to what most North Americans have come to believe, France’s loss of America was not inevitable. At the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, demographics definitely favoured the British, at a ratio of twenty to one. By 1750 the New World held 1.5 million British, compared to about fifty-five thousand Canadiens, thirteen thousand Acadians and no more than a few thousand settlers in Louisiana. Yet militarily the French were much stronger, to the extent that it was the thirteen British colonies that felt threatened. Until the middle of the Seven Years War (1756–63) France invested proportionately more in military resources in New France than the British did in the Thirteen Colonies, and the French controlled the main waterways. The very organization of New France was fundamentally military. Many of its first settlers were former soldiers. Houses and farms were organized in a way that favoured defence and the mustering of forces—a layout that is still obvious today. France’s strong militia, seasoned in wilderness tactics and guerrilla warfare, fought and moved like the Natives, allowing the French to accomplish much more with far fewer people over a territory twenty times larger than that controlled by the English.
To compensate for their numeric inferiority, the French became exceedingly skilled at building alliances with the Natives. In some years the small colony could spend as much as eight to ten percent of its budget buying the loyalty of Native chiefs with guns, alcohol and lavish meals. Rare was the chief who did not possess a medallion of the King of France, the French “father.” In 1701 La Grande paix (Great Peace) of Montreal was signed by more than sixty First Nations. The thirteen British colonies, meanwhile, were suffering from infighting, lack of unity and poor military organization.
The wind might have continued to blow favourably for the French had it not been for the providential character of William Pitt the Elder (1708–78). Pitt became minister of war after the British suffered a series of military disasters in the early stages of the Seven Years War. Grandson of a former governor in India, he had colonialism in his blood. In Pitt’s view, Britain had spent too much energy on battles in Europe. He redirected England’s military objectives towards the seas, with the objective of destroying French trade and ousting the French from India and America. While France committed heavy resources to the battles in Europe—as many as a hundred thousand men—Pitt put all he had into America. He chose competent generals and admirals, and finally convinced the Thirteen Colonies to coordinate their efforts against Quebec.
For the first time, all of Britain’s advantages came together: huge American colonies, a massive navy, good naval policy and some good luck. The Royal Navy generally had better training, a better sense of the sea and more heavy ships of the line—although the differences were not as great as is generally assumed. In the summer of 1759 a quarter of the British fleet was anchored in front of Quebec City. The French lost the battle of the Plains of Abraham in September 1759, then actually won a lesser-known second battle of the Plains and retook Quebec City the following April. The exhausted French expected reinforcements that never came, and then had to abandon Quebec when more British sails appeared on the horizon.
Even then, however, America was not lost to France. An odd thing happened during the peace negotiations. In 1763 the British offered to let France keep either Canada or the Sugar Islands (Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe). The offer was surprising, given Britain’s victories in Canada and India. What did they have to gain from making concessions to France? In fact, their victory was fragile. Britain was exhausted from fighting the Seven Years War, and near bankruptcy. It could not really afford to destroy France’s overseas commerce, because in doing so it would have delivered a larger blow to the economy of Europe than Britain’s economy could withstand.
With what today seems like an absolutely stunning lack of foresight, the French chose the Sugar Islands over New France. They were able to hold on to their Caribbean islands and five trading posts in southeast India—in Pondicherry and Chandernagore, which they would keep until 1954—but abruptly ended their 160-year presence in America. France also kept the island of Gorée, off the coast of Senegal, which was still an essential slave-trading transfer point. We visited one of the former Sugar Islands, Guadeloupe, now a French overseas territory. Wandering past the tumbledown apartment blocks in its capital city, Pointe-à-Pitre, and gazing at the meagre remains of the island’s once-flourishing sugar and banana plantations, as Quebeckers we were stunned to think that the French had traded Canada for this place. Although it’s better off than many of its Caribbean neighbours, the island’s economy is largely dependent on mainland France.
The choice may now seem short-sighted, but at the time it was rational. The French Antilles represented twenty percent of France’s total external trade. The islands—in particular Saint-Domingue—were the richest colonies in the world. Canada, by comparison, was a money pit. The influential Encyclopedists of eighteenth-century France believed strongly that only trade, not conquest, could produce wealth. They were convinced France would be better off without America, and they convinced many others as well. In his philosophical tale Candide, Voltaire dismissed New France as “a few acres of snow,” not worth the money France had already spent on it.
Yet French didn’t disappear with France’s departure from America. It survived, largely thanks to the work of French colonial mastermind Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s naval minister (1761–66) and then war minister (1766–70). With his vision and sense of purpose, Choiseul was a match for Pitt. The French had begun settling in Greater Louisiana at the beginning of the eighteenth century, founding villages and building forts. Most of the settlers up the Mississippi were domesticated coureurs des bois who had turned to farming the rich land of the upper Illinois (now Missouri). At the time Louisiana encompassed what are now fifteen states west of the Mississippi, right up to the Canadian border. Choiseul knew the French were going to lose anyway, so in 1762 he secretly ceded Greater Louisiana to Spain, as payback for siding with France in the Seven Years War and as a way of keeping it out of British hands.
Spanish rule over Greater Louisiana turned out to be so mild that it hardly made a mark on the French culture there. French settlers moved over to the west bank of the Mississippi to avoid British rule. Over the next seventy-five years this group would be constantly reinforced by French Canadians from Quebec who joined in the fur trade—to the point that most of the early legends of the American frontier were French (more on this in chapter 10). Even in the state of Louisiana, French was sheltered. The Spanish regime was not anti-French and not interested in assimilating the different groups that lived under its rule. The Spanish even invited Catholic Acadian colonists to Louisiana to help them defend the west bank of the Mississippi against the British, and later against the Americans. French speakers were a resilient group in Louisiana; they were the assimilators, soaking up Spanish, German and Portuguese imm
igrants, whose cultures would be absorbed into the French-speaking Cajun culture, with its unique music, food and language.
With Louisiana safely in Spanish hands, Choiseul worked on improving the French navy. He modernized the French artillery, increased the number of warships, developed military engineering, created military academies and abolished the right to purchase military rank. Choiseul purchased Corsica from Genoa in order to give France a base in the Mediterranean. (Through that purchase, a certain Corsican family by the name of Buonaparte became French.) As a result, Britannia ruled the waves but was feeling the heat from France. In 1785 commerce over the Atlantic was thirty-four percent British and twenty-eight percent French. France had become a strong enough naval power that American insurgents sought its aid when they revolted against the British. In the end, the French spent more money helping the Americans than they had defending New France: one billion pounds. By 1781 the French had sent twelve thousand troops and thirty-two thousand sailors to America. In America, the French won a place in the heart of the people (or some of them, at least) that they had lost on the continent.
In Canada, as it turned out, the British couldn’t afford to wipe out the French language any more than they could afford to cut France out of global trade. In 1763, when France officially gave up New France, fifty-five thousand Canadiens were living there. The British simply didn’t have the manpower to assimilate them, even with the help of the six thousand Scottish merchants who came to Canada over the next ten years. These merchants tried to strip the French-speaking Catholics of their rights in any way they could. They refused to allow Catholics to occupy positions as civil servants and forbade contracts to be written in French or local justice to be administered in French; they were even against the French system of land allotment. But the Canadiens resisted, so much so that the British had to hire French Huguenots as administrators to deal with them. In the meantime, trouble had started brewing farther south, in the thirteen British colonies. The British just could not afford to bring in any more troops to deal with Canada.
So the British compromised. In 1774 they passed the Quebec Act, which allowed Catholics to hold positions in the civil service and in public office without renouncing their faith. The Act also kept the French civil justice system in place and preserved the seigneurial land tenure system, physical traces of which—such as close-together villages and narrow plots—can still be seen in Quebec today. The Quebec Act also allowed some Catholic involvement in the colonial council and promised that Quebec could have its own elected Parliament, which was created in 1791. The deal, of course, enraged the Scottish merchants of Quebec and Montreal—a small but powerful minority—as well as American colonists in Boston, who detested the French-speaking Catholics. But ultimately the Quebec Act ensured the survival of French.
Ironically, British North America (before it was Canada) turned out to be almost a sanctuary for French. The fifty-five thousand Canadiens would have had little chance of hanging on to their language if they had been thrown in with 1.5 million Americans. When American insurgents defeated the British in 1783 and the continent was divided, British North America protected French speakers from disappearing into the American melting pot. In Canada, French persevered, in spite of successive waves of immigration and in spite of being cut off from France. Part of the explanation is Canada’s smaller population. As early as the 1780s, some fifty thousand British Loyalists fleeing America arrived in Canada and nearly overwhelmed the Canadiens, but French speakers made up more than half of the population of Canada until the 1830s. Today they account for a quarter of the Canadian population. In Quebec and New Brunswick they respectively make up eighty-one percent and thirty-three percent of the population (more on how they survived in chapter 10). The proportion of French speakers in Canada in the eighteenth century was large enough to allow them to survive after being cut off from mainstream French, which happened just when French was about to become the universal language of Europe.
Chapter 5 ~
The Language of Genius
“How has French become the world’s universal language?” There was nothing presumptuous about this question when the Berlin Academy chose it for an essay contest in 1782. By the late eighteenth century, no one in Europe would have challenged the idea that French was the world’s lingua franca. But to win, candidates in the essay contest had to go beyond merely stating the obvious. They had to explain why French had become pre-eminent in the first place and why it was maintaining this status, and to speculate on whether its supremacy would last.
The Academy received twenty-two entries and awarded two first prizes, one to Antoine de Rivarol, a Frenchman and a protégé of the famous writer Voltaire, and the other to Jean-Christ Schwab, a German professor at the Academy of Stuttgart.
The winners made radically different cases. While providing a good synthesis of the history of the French language’s development, Rivarol basically built his case around a foregone conclusion, that French had gained its status because it was clearer, simpler and more concise than any other language; he even argued that French was the best language for doing business. In a famous line he writes, “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français” (“If it’s not clear, it’s not French”). To contemporary readers, Antoine de Rivarol’s argument might sound strangely familiar—he said the same things about French that many commentators today say about English. In Rivarol’s view, no other language could even hope to compete with French, including Spanish, Italian and English.
While Rivarol is still widely quoted today, few recall his co-laureate, Jean-Christ Schwab (1743–1821). Yet Schwab’s analysis was far more penetrating. Like Rivarol, he argued that the prestige and popularity of French culture had helped make French the preferred language of theatre, poetry, essays, history and science. But in his view the popularity of French had nothing to do with a supposed “genius” of the language. According to Schwab, political conditions, not linguistic qualities, had made French the dominant language of Europe. France’s political superiority and spirit of conquest had made the language appealing to foreigners. French had “agents” spreading it through Europe and beyond, in the form of colonizers, diplomats and Protestant refugees who had fled France in the previous century.
In Schwab’s view, its linguistic features reinforced the supremacy of French. European nations needed a common language, because what Schwab called a “spirit of communication” had appeared among them in the eighteenth century. French was perfectly adapted to fill the need for a common language because, thanks to the work of the French Academy, it had been given a systematic grammar, making it what he called a “finished” language. That made it easier to learn. And that, in turn, explained why French had prevailed over other European vernaculars; Italian, for example, had the right civilization behind it, but the language had not yet been systematized.
In a way, both authors were right. But they had overlooked another important phenomenon. As with all of France’s successful exports, one of the secrets behind the spread of French was strong local consumption. The eighteenth century in France was a time of peace; for the first time in centuries the French weren’t using up their energy fighting one another. France was the biggest country in Europe, the central country in the European balance of power, and it had a huge army. Paris, with six hundred thousand inhabitants, was also the biggest European capital after London. The income of both aristocrats and bourgeois was on the rise, and life was good for the fortunate classes.
This prosperity had a curious effect on the language. As France’s middle class increased and the country became wealthier, the French aristocracy was no longer satisfied to distinguish itself strictly by status and title. It was looking for a new way to set itself apart from the masses. Slowly, manners and style, respect for culture, refinement and elevated ideas became the mark of the upper class. To shine in the salons one needed a sharp mind, a sharp tongue and a sharp quill. So language skill became a tool of social advancement.
The salons were not new. The Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665) created the first great French salon in the first decade of the seventeenth century. A young noblewoman, married at the age of twelve, she had grown tired of the intrigues and vulgarity of the Court of Henri IV. Before she turned twenty she had refused to go to the King’s receptions and had started hosting her own, inviting the best minds of France to her home, the Hôtel de Rambouillet (this was the salon Richelieu was hoping to stamp out by creating the French Academy, as discussed in chapter 3). She even had the house redesigned as a succession of small rooms that were ideal settings for intimate conversation. Being gifted in many art forms (though brilliant in none), the Marquise attracted the cream of the crop of princesses, nobles and men of letters. The Hôtel de Rambouillet quickly became the salon of choice for the French nobility and lettrés, and remained so, well into the 1650s.
The Marquise de Rambouillet’s salon is credited with raising conversation to the level of a fine art. She had countless imitators—Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de La Fayette and, later, Madame de Staël. By the eighteenth century even small provincial cities had salons to which women invited famous (or less than famous) writers, artists and thinkers to discuss ideas and practise the art of conversation. The salons had different formats—some were weekly dinners, some were held many times a week and some were sporadic. They could include singing, theatre, dancing, debates or lively verbal sparring. Some specialized in the arts, writing or philosophy; others had different nights for different types of entertainment—serious, entertaining or frankly libidinous. But no matter what their form, salons sought one feature: esprit, a difficult concept to translate that is a combination of wit, cleverness, eloquent rhetoric and liveliness. The art of conversation required speakers to be playful, to make witty comebacks and offer sudden and surprising insights. Under the influence of the salons, the French language became associated—both inside and outside France—with sociability in its highest form. Etiquette, a form of regulation within salon culture, became a prestigious art strictly associated with the French.
The Story of French Page 11
