When in French

by Lauren Collins

  Technically, the academy’s job is to produce a dictionary. Historically, it has not shone at this task, publishing nine editions over the course of four centuries. Its true role is custodial rather than creative. It acts as an overprotective guardian to the French language, fretting over who she’s gone out with, when she’s coming home, how she’ll navigate a crude world without compromising her dignity. The academy can be reactionary: in 1997 it rejected the adoption of feminine versions of professional titles, arguing that la ministre and la juge belonged properly not to female ministers and judges but to the wives of their male colleagues. Even though the grammatical principles behind the position were sound—all French nouns are either masculine or feminine, denotations that have nothing to do with their referents’ genitalia—the academy’s stand confirmed its reputation as a bastion of crusty hauteur. The goal, it was clear, was to preserve the purity of the language—less a French well punished than one hardly touched.

  The chief debaucher of French, of course is English, a loudmouthed vulgarian who made his fortune selling cola and computers. French and English have coexisted and crossbred for as long as they’ve been spoken. But after World War II—as French lost its sinecure as the language of diplomacy and was forced to concede to English in the realms of film and aviation—English morphed from acquaintance to antagonist. “As befits a hard-working people, the French have no word for ‘week end,’” the International Herald Tribune reported in 1959. (An editorial writer, perpetuating the they-don’t-have-a-word-for fallacy today, could just as easily claim that the French are so lazy that, to them, there’s no difference between a weekend and a workday.) The paper continued, “So they have taken it over bodily from English, pronouncing it in English and enjoying it just as much as anyone else. Similar examples come to mind readily—‘bifteck’ for beefsteak, for instance, and ‘gongstair’ for gangster. But the English flavoring of French has begun to get out of hand, apparently, and in some Parisian circles is even becoming quite chic, or, as we say here, chick.”

  Five years later the critic René Étiemble published Parlez-vous franglais?, a polemic against the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture, “that air-conditioned nightmare.” It aimed to combat the vogue for English through ridicule: the entire first chapter was written in a hideous pastiche of “cette variété new look du babélien.” The book helped to galvanize the feeling that language was a zero-sum game, that gains by English were a loss for French. Even as linguists thrilled to the ingenuity with which French speakers assimilated English—and, in the postcolonial era, languages such as Arabic and Wolof—and made it their own, eminences fretted that the dilution of the language would lead irretrievably to the deterioration of the culture, to which it was so dearly linked.

  The central control of a pure French by Parisian authorities is a myth: Kinshasa is the world’s second-largest French-speaking city. But it is a powerful one in France, with its tendency to privilege consistency over innovation. At the time of the French Revolution, only half of France’s population spoke French fluently. Of the other half, 25 percent—speakers of regional languages such as Provençal and Breton—had no French whatsoever. (Even by the beginning of World War II, one out of two French people still claimed a regional language as their mother tongue.) In the nineteenth century, the government established universal education. It went on a standardization spree, purging the language of variations in grammar and spelling. Publishers joined in, issuing scrubbed versions of the French classics. “This linguistic revisionism fed (and still feeds) a quasi-religious belief among francophones that the French language had been fixé (set) since the time of Louis XIV,” Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau write. Charles de Gaulle was drawing on this heritage when, in 1966, citing “the bastardization of French vocabulary,” he created the Haut Comité Pour la Défense et l’Expansion de la Langue Française. The Bas-Lauriol law of 1975 restricted the use of foreign words in business and advertising. By the time a more muscular version of it was enacted in 1994, famously dictating that 40 percent of the music played on the radio be sung in French, the battle against English represented a major front in France’s culture wars, reliably bolstering political careers and launching best sellers.

  Something about French is embarrassing to English speakers. Its sounds are too sensually mouth-contorting, its constructions too pompously fervid, with all those loopy clauses and long words. If we approach the language with a sense of abashment—P. G. Wodehouse immortalized “the shifty hangdog look of an Englishman about to speak French”—French speakers treat English with the sort of high-flown outrage that we most love to mock. The protests are both so indignant and so quixotic. It’s hard to suppress a smirk upon reading the demand of a group of striking Air France pilots: “Stopper toute propagation abusive de l’anglais.” (Stopper not exactly being a canonical French verb.) Then there are the petitioning employees of the Carrefour supermarket of Nîmes-Sud, fuming, “Why this orgy of English words? Would we be under an Anglo-American protectorate?” all because they have to sell products called Bootstore, Top Bike, and Tex Fashion Express. Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going to trade out sexting for sending textos pornographiques?

  It’s easy to caricature the French as language hypochondriacs, but they are closer to hemophiliacs—a population that is especially sensitive to a genuine threat. French sees itself as not only an alternative to English but the most viable conduit of a competing value system. Calling on his compatriots in 2013 to boycott businesses that advertised in English, the philosopher Michel Serres argued that the increasing ubiquity of English was a cause of inequality: “Now the dominant class speaks English and French has become the language of the poor.”

  The complaint is not just a French one. “English is not a language. It is a class,” Aatish Taseer recalls a Hindi-speaking friend—an aspiring Bollywood actor, refused work for his lack of English—telling him, in an essay called “How English Ruined Indian Literature.” The argument is powerful. It applies easily to the rest of the world, with globalization creating a caste of linguistic have-nots. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former United Nations secretary general, has said that “much in the way democracy within a state is based on pluralism, democracy between states must be based on pluralingualism.” Linguistic diversity, then, is a check on political monoculture. It is as unhealthy for the global community to rely too heavily on one language as it is to mass-cultivate a single crop.

  In The Search for a Perfect Language, Umberto Eco makes a moving account of man’s efforts, over the course of two millennia, to “heal the wound of Babel.” They have been legion, running from the brilliant to the crackpot: Dante’s illustrious vernacular, the ars magna of the Majorcan martyr Raymond Llull, the steganographers’ codes, the Rosicrucians’ “magick writing,” Volapük, Interlingua. The quest to rediscover or to create a universal language has most often been a utopian project, but it is not without darker possibilities. In 1966 Leslie Stevens shot Incubus, a black-and-white Esperanto horror movie. Starring William Shatner—he would soon confront the Klingon language as Captain Kirk—as a soldier seduced by a succubus, the film premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival, where a group of Esperanto speakers showed up at the screening. “Anytime they thought things were not pronounced correctly,” one of the producers recalled, “they screamed and laughed and carried on like maniacs and no one else could understand why.” As Orwell knew, cooperation is not possible without communication, but neither is totalitarianism. One wonders what form global terrorism would take without global English as its vector.

  In 1984—this really was the year—the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation hired the linguist Thomas A. Sebeok to try to solve the problem of “nuclear semiotics”: how to warn the humans ten thousand years in the future that they would be treading on radioactive wastelands. Sebeok produced a report titled Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. In it, he rejected electrical si
gnals (they needed an uninterrupted power supply), olfactory messages (they wouldn’t last long enough), pictograms (they would be as ambiguous as cave paintings are to us), and simply rendering the message in every known language and sign system (even if one of them managed to survive, it would have decayed beyond comprehensibility). The best hope, he concluded, would be to initiate an “atomic priesthood” of storytellers, charged with perpetuating over three hundred generations a folklore of danger that would last as long as uranium.

  • • •

  TO GET TO THE WORD FACTORY, you cross the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, wade through the Jardin des Tuileries—gravel gone porridgy in the late-fall dank—and take a right at the Louvre onto rue Saint-Honoré. Number 182 is the Ministry of Culture and Communication, situated in a former warehouse clad in a silvery mesh that recalls a cross between chain mail and fishnet stockings. On a November morning, blown-up photographs of the soldiers of 1914 filled the ground-floor windows, advertising the launch of an online archive that would allow citizens to search for their forebears among the dead of France. Public bikes serried near the entrance. Passing under a tumid tricolore, I went in and approached the information desk, explaining to the officer behind it that I was there for a 9:45 meeting. When he asked for a piece of identification, I produced a card that read “Füherausweis—Permis de conduire—Licenza di condurre—Permiss da manischar—Driving Licence.” It featured my face, overlaid by holographic Swiss crosses. My last name was Irish. My middle name was German. I was speaking French, a language in which people often thought Lauren—easily confusable with Laurent—referred to a man.

  It was always a strange thing, handing over my Swiss permit. All it technically said was that I was authorized to drive a motor vehicle in any of Switzerland’s twenty-six cantons, with or without a trailer, but it seemed to mean much more. I wondered why passports and drivers’ licenses are objects of such fascination; why we are apt to pass them around, giggling at one another’s expressions, scrutinizing birthdates, rapt at such banalities as eye color and height; why a friend’s headshot and some fine print are a source of sure entertainment, when no one ever begs to see another vacation slide. Something about identity cards is summary—your life on a slab of plastic, a quick-reference tabulation of who you are. I had chosen the Swiss license from my growing collection, leaving its American and British counterparts in their leather slots. Its air of mystery seemed appropriate to my mission. I felt like a spy.

  I took an elevator, got off, and proceeded to a glassed-in conference room, where a quartet of long tables had been arranged in a rectangle. I found my name card—COLLINS capitalized in that insistently classificatory French way—and sat down in a chair upholstered in nubby purple fabric. The room began to fill with people: a mustachioed man wearing a tweed blazer, flowered socks, and cat’s-eye glasses; a woman in a navy blue pussycat-bow blouse and a hat that looked like a cake. At 9:45 sharp, the chairman called the meeting to order, welcoming the members and guests of the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française’s Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie.

  The Académie Française, contrary to widespread belief, does not actually come up with the thousands of new words that ascend to the status of official French every year. Instead, the task falls to the CGTN, a governmental body whose sole purpose is to contrive French replacements for foreign interlopers. (They are almost always English.) The process begins in small committees, where lay experts generate alternatives to whatever terms have recently become popular or necessary in their fields. They make their suggestions to the CGTN, which assesses them and sends them to the Académie Française for a preliminary opinion. The words that survive then undergo a second round of vetting in committee, which culminates in the academy’s approval, usually pro forma, upon which the Ministry of Culture and Communication publishes them in an annual report. A constitutional court ruled in 1994 that the state couldn’t force private citizens or media organizations to say façonneur d’image for “spin doctor,” or beuverie express instead of “binge drinking,” but the terms are binding for public employees. Most languages evolve in a haphazard way. France, however, expends a great deal of money and manpower in an attempt to rationalize the process. Where English is a disinterested capitalist system—may the best word win, be it bodega or feng shui—French is a proudly dirigiste state.

  The agenda for the day was the second-round discussion of words relating to the economy and to chemistry.

  “We’ll start with the list of economic terms,” the chairman said, speaking into a small microphone.

  The first term, acteur planétaire, a calque for “global player,” passed without much objection. Next up was comme si de rien n’était—literally, “as if nothing was”—which was being proposed as a substitute for “business as usual.” The phrase yielded 479,000 hits on Google, excluding mentions, a handout noted in all seriousness, of the album by Men at Work.

  “What do we think, members of the General Commission?” the chairman began. “The question we have been asked is to decide whether or not, in all contexts, comme si rien n’était is the best translation possible.”

  Seventeen hands went up.

  “Comme si rien n’était doesn’t seem very flexible,” the first speaker said.

  “Comme si rien n’était is too informal,” the man in the fun socks added. “It’s not at the same syntactical level as ‘business as usual,’ nor is it in the same register.”

  He continued to speak, twirling a nub of a pencil. “We have to find a translation that’s more stable, and if we don’t, it will become habit in the French language to say ‘business as usual.’ I worry that the pronunciation for francophones is particularly difficult.” He spoke the phrase in English, bombinating the s’s like a honeybee on a bloom. “So we have to find something else, and maybe it should be comme d’habitude, because that’s the exact expression. It’s a little more neutral, and a little more likable, and a little more familiar for this type of discourse.”

  “He’s the star of French lexicography,” the man on my right whispered. “You know that, right?”

  I did not. But I thought that the celebrity lexicographer made a wise point. Comme si rien n’était was clunky. Worse, it was literal. It missed the cynicism, the very faint whiff of distrust, that presumably made “business as usual” a favorite idiom of the world of commerce. The point of the phrase, it seemed to me, was that it often implied the perpetuation of an abnormal, or at least unattractive, situation.

  Curiously, the committee didn’t seem to include many people who had a more than scholastic fluency in English. I was dying to interject, being in possession—merely by birth—of information that others in the room lacked. My national status (I didn’t want to look like a rude American) dueled with my linguistic one (French was a language I was going to have to speak). There, in the forge of French language, words were being purpose-built. Was I going to sit by as the committee signed off on faulty prototypes that would soon be flogged to the world’s 220 million French speakers?

  To watch words get made was to bear witness to an elemental mystery, a moment whose aftermath was as imposing as its origins were supposed to be invisible—the sarsens going up at Stonehenge, the legend taking shape around the campfire. The pedants were also sorcerers, practitioners of a hieratic art. Everything could already be said, but it hadn’t been said in the style of their sect, which was why they had to exist. Comme si rien n’était was a joke being told for the very first time.

  The discussion continued, voices rising. Somebody said that no one even used “business as usual.” The next speaker countered that people, especially at big law firms, used it all the time. One woman proposed dans la continuité; another liked sans changement; another said that since comme si rien n’était couldn’t be deployed as an adjectival phrase, as “business as usual” often was in English—“a business-as-usual attitude” was the example given—it pr
esented “a singular complication.” It didn’t occur to the committee members that no one was stopping them from using it as an adjectival phrase if they felt like it. Their extravagant authority coupled with their creative austerity, their reluctance to wield it boldly, seemed to pose as fundamental a French paradox as gorging on foie gras and not getting fat.

  • • •

  THERE IS A FLAWED YET persistent idea in French, dating to the foundation of the Académie Française, that every word has a single definition, and that every definition corresponds to a single word. The rigorous Cartesian education that is the birthright of the citoyen makes itself felt not only in the language but also in the way it’s wielded, as though there were no problem that the correct application of logic, the proper progression of steps, cannot solve. Watching the committee trying to bend an English phrase to fit the strictures of French—“If it’s not French, it’s not clear,” they seemed to be saying, inverting Rivarol—I apprehended, at last, the structural underpinnings of the impasses at which Olivier and I often stalled. In English, I was seeking consensus—mirroring Olivier’s concerns, wanting to meet in the middle. He was pursuing the right answer, in the conviction that there always was one. If I was performing a close reading, he was solving a proof.