The French Way (47 page)

For Toubon's detractors it was easy to make fun of the effort to find French equivalents of English words. Exchanging
le coussin gonflable de protection
for “airbag,” or
ma'is souffle
for “popcorn,” or
la puce
(flea) for “microchip,” or
restauration rapide
for “fast food” made the French flinch and Americans guffaw. The effort seemed doomed to fail because it was impossible to police language and the pressure for adopting American phrases was unstoppable. How could one persuade teenagers immersed in American pop culture from using slang like
cool
or stop the media from referring to
high tech
or
le marketing
or praising the multicultural composition of the French World Cup champions as
Black, Blanc, Beur?
Researchers who relied on communicating in English were baffled about what to do. Requiring summaries or translations of papers at conferences would close France as a site for international meetings. Opponents sneered at such cultural protectionism, arguing that French had always been enriched by importing foreign words such as
opera,pantalon
, or
valse.
One tabloid scoffed, “All proposals designed to legislate the use of language give off a stale smell.”
¹²⁴
Another paper satirized Jacques Toubon (“toubon” = “all good”) as “Jack Goodall, the
charge d'affaires
from the British Embassy” and ran a hilarious column in English laced with French words.
¹²⁵
And a
disque-jockey
from a popular radio station complained the law was “pas tres cool.”

The Constitutional Council intervened and in the name of freedom of speech struck down much of the law without overturning it. But conservatives led by Toubon were not to be deterred. Fines were levied. For example, government inspectors visiting an outlet of The Body Shop in an Alpine town found several products like bubble bath labeled in English. The local court fined the British cosmetic company 1,000 francs. The Disney store on the Champs-Elysees was called out for its labeling. In one year diligent officials carried out almost 8,000
inspections, issued over 600 warnings, and brought more than 200 cases before public prosecutors, of which half were successful.
¹²⁶

Transatlantic attacks on his efforts prompted Toubon to answer his critics directly in the American press. He insisted, “A foreign language…often becomes a tool of domination, uniformization, a factor of social exclusion, and, when used snobbishly, a language of contempt.”
¹²⁷
Reminding Americans that many of their states had also legislated the use of English he then condescended:

Admittedly, Americans may have some difficulty in understanding that a problem exists. Europeans would not assume that Americans, who are known for not being too open to foreign cultures and for pursuing their own cultural protectionism, understand foreign languages. Many Americans, on the contrary, often forget that one has the right in other countries not to understand their language and to speak another one What France does still generates interest in the entire world. It is probably because France defends a certain concept of freedom and diversity that some people are troubled. France remains, to paraphrase General Charles de Gaulle, the country that sometimes feels compelled to say “no,” not out of egotism but a sense of what is right.
¹²⁸

Once the socialists returned to power in 1997 the policing campaign relaxed somewhat. The party had abstained from voting for the Toubon Law, but declared support for its aims. Lionel Jospin continued the fight at the rhetorical level, making the link between language and foreign policy by stating, “French is no longer the language of a power (but) it could be a language of a counter power”
¹²⁹
While the Ministry of Finance banned many words imported from America, like “e-mail,” and insisted its officials employ French equivalents like
courrier electronique
, at the same time the core of the ministry, the Treasury Department, circulated drafts of new regulations in English because “they will be discussed in English in Brussels.”
¹³⁰
Jack Lang, who had recently served as minister of education and culture, though he disapproved
of Franglais thought the Toubon ban was absurd. Pragmatic administrators like Claude Allegre, who was a scientist and the minister of education, tried to tamp down the furor. He argued that protectionism in this case was ineffective and it would make more sense to encourage schoolchildren to learn English as their foreign language because this was eminently practical and would also help preserve the purity of French.
¹³¹

In the end the protectionist strategy could not stem the linguistic tide that surged across both the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. The reasons either to learn English or to incorporate American English words overwhelmed official efforts. Trying to find French equivalents for the flow of technical and scientific language and then force the French to use them was hopeless. Requiring French translations of every ad on the Paris metro was comical. Blocking the influence of American television was impossible: watching American detective shows prompted a number of adolescents appearing in court to address the judge as “Your Honor” rather than “Monsieur le Juge.” Policing language worked only fitfully in narrow realms like the bureaucracy, but not in wider venues like international conferences; thus the Institut Pasteur in 1996 held half its meetings in French and half in English. Despite the law, almost one-third of television commercials continued to feature some form of English.
¹³²

Linguistic traditionalists did not enjoy strong support for their actions. The socialists were unenthusiastic about the Toubon Law, dissenters outnumbered supporters, and the public took a more utilitarian stance than policy makers and cultural/media elites. A majority approved the use of Americanisms, calling it modern, useful, or amusing.
¹³³
Furthermore, France had to act alone on this issue; it could not strengthen the cause of “linguistic diversity” through the EU because other members like the United Kingdom and Germany worried that national linguistic rules would impede commerce.

The status of French continued to sag as an international language. French, among the number of speakers worldwide, ranked only eleventh
as a first language, behind even German in 2005.
¹³⁴
In the global arena one study estimated that 85 percent of international organizations were using English as one of their working languages, as opposed to less than half for French.
¹³⁵
By the end of the decade virtually every child chose English as either his or her first or second foreign language; only one in ten elected German as a first choice.
¹³⁶
And despite what officials proclaimed about the soul of France residing in its language, almost two-thirds agreed with the proposition “Everyone should be able to speak English.”
¹³⁷
One should not, however, despair about the language since French remains the only other truly global language and it is spoken in more countries than any other language except English. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the French had to come on board the global transporter where the passengers spoke American English or risked being left behind.

The Cultural Exception

If halting the linguistic intrusion of America succeeded in only a few specific areas and otherwise failed, the Republic fared better in the culture wars over audiovisual products.

Defiance has been a historic feature of the Gallic response to Hollywood. Leading the resistance has been the cinema industry, its praetorian guard of intellectuals, and republican officials. Apprehension about an American takeover of the French screen dates back to the days of the silent movie and persisted after the Second World War. But concern intensified in the 1980s. Box office for American films ballooned from 35 percent to 54 percent between 1980 and 1993, with the sharpest rise coming after 1985, while the share of the domestic market for French films fell in almost the same proportion.
¹³⁸
During the 1990s the American share of the market oscillated between 54 and 63 percent.
¹³⁹
Films like
Basic Instinct
and
Terminator 2
were runaway hits, outdistancing any French competition. The crowning blow came in October
1993 when Steven Spielberg's
Jurassic Park
sold two million tickets in its first week, leaving Claude Berri's film version of Emile Zola's classic novel
Germinal
far behind. Minister of Culture Jacques Toubon declared the dinosaur film a threat to national identity and set off a wild debate.
¹⁴⁰
The reasons for this loss of market were complex; they involved a younger audience, the appeal of Hollywood blockbusters, the advent of the multiplex, and fewer ticket sales. Some argued the cinema had also lost its creativity. So many French film professionals moved to California seeking a better place to make films that they formed an informal Hollywood circle.
¹⁴¹
Or as some grumbled, French taste in films had descended to the infantile level of Hollywood productions. One prominent film producer observed, “What works in Chattanooga now works in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. It's a little sad.”
¹⁴²
Whatever the cause, the industry was once again in trouble.

Hollywood movies, as well as other kinds of American programming, also came to dominate French television screens. By 1993 American TV shows accounted for about half of French broadcast time.
¹⁴³
And in the fall of that year the Turner Broadcasting Company launched a new European satellite channel combining programs from Turner Network Television and the Cartoon Network that threatened to subvert the prevailing quota system. Among the reasons for this saturation of American images were deregulation, which came in the 1980s; the proliferation of private stations, many of which depended on cheap imports of American programs and films; and the sale of vid-eocassettes. In the audio world American music outsold local recordings and Michael Jackson sold more CDs than Jacques Brel.

The European Community, as we saw in chapter 2, adopted a directive in 1989 to curb foreign (that is, American) television imports largely at the behest of France.
¹⁴⁴
The misnamed Television without Frontiers ruling required Europeans to reserve a minimum of 50 percent of TV programming, including broadcast of films, for European productions. Individual nations could, if they wanted, raise the ante—and France did. It reserved 60 percent of broadcast time, including
prime time, for European works and 40 percent for French programming. Music, meanwhile, broadcast by radio stations fell under quotas set by French legislation in 1993. There was flexibility in the television quota system to the extent that the directive stipulated application was limited to where it was “practicable.” In fact the EC directive changed little since most programming was already below the limit. The Americans protested, but the French managed to get most of the EC to rally to its side. The row over the 1989 directive was only a prelude to even stormier negotiations over the audiovisual sector.

Figure 12. Theaters on the Champs-Elysees showing Hollywood movies, including
Jurassic Park
; Wednesday, December 8, 1993. Courtesy AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere.

Washington and Hollywood objected strongly to quotas and other barriers sheltering the rich European entertainment market. Together politicians and lobbyists attempted to use the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations, which aimed at a broad reduction of trade
restrictions, as a way of gaining access to the continent. The Americans wanted free entry to the audiovisual market, which meant reducing subsidies to film producers, lifting fees on movie tickets and video cassettes, and easing limits on television programming especially quotas that might apply to new technologies like satellite transmission and cable. But the French refused. They, with some support from their fellow Europeans, insisted on a “cultural exception.” Unless culture was exempt, the French argued, European cinema and television would not survive. They warned of the danger of standardizing the world's taste for entertainment at the level of
Jurassic Park.
Subjecting the audiovisual sector to free trade would mean the end of the subsidy system that had sustained the cinema and would turn television programming over to the Americans. The French government levied an 11 percent tax on all film tickets and it collected fees from the profits of television networks and the sale of blank video-and audiocassettes. This revenue, which amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, was used in turn to finance the production, distribution, and exhibition of French films.