The Story of French (10 page)

Most people assume that the French Academy created language purism, but it was actually the other way around. The term
puriste
first appeared in French in 1586, decades before the Academy’s creation. It referred essentially to morals and was a synonym for puritan. Those writers who chose French in the sixteenth century were free spirits who used the language creatively. But all this had started to change by 1625, when the French tongue was being curbed and
puriste
became associated with language correction. The French Academy was created a couple of years later.

The earliest champion of language purism was a poet whose work very few francophones actually read: François de Malherbe (1555–1628). While there are many cases of literary geniuses whose writing shaped entire cultures—Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, to name a few—there are very few instances of a single person influencing the way an entire people think about their language the way Malherbe did. Almost single-handedly he created a conception of language that fifteen generations of authors and readers, teachers and students, writers and speakers, francophones and francophiles have adhered to and wrestled with.

Malherbe was already a middle-aged lawyer when he gained notice on the French literary scene in the early 1600s. He became famous for his mastery of the alexandrine, the twelve-foot verse that was the standard of French poetry and theatre until the Romantic era. “
Et Rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les Roses, / l’espace d’un matin
” (“And Rose, she lived as live the roses, / the space of a morning”) is his most famous line of verse—and a favourite at funeral homes.

Although he became the official poet of King Henri IV in 1605, at age fifty, and retained that status under Louis XIII, it was Malherbe’s literary criticism, not his poetry, that gained him repute among his contemporaries and turned him into the French language’s first real guru. In his criticism Malherbe preached the values of clarity, precision and rigour. He argued that good writing had to be stripped of ornamentation, repetition, archaisms, regionalisms and hyperbole. Malherbe rejected the idea of synonyms; in his view each word should have a definition, and a definition should apply to only one word. Naturally he abhorred the baroque aesthetic of his predecessors, particularly the Pléiade poets Ronsard and Du Bellay. He considered their use of embellishment and flourishes nothing less than absurd. Above all, he detested the idea of creating new words for the sake of it. His famous follower, the grammarian Vaugelas, wrote, “It is not permitted to anyone to make up new words, not even the King!”

As a pastime, Malherbe edited Ronsard’s poetry, removing about half the words. His future biographer, Honorat de Racan, once asked him, “Does this mean you approve of the rest?” Malherbe responded by erasing what was left on the page. Most of his ideas about the French language had been penned by 1606, when he wrote his
Commentaires sur Desportes
(
Commentary on Desportes
), a scathing criticism of his contemporary, the poet Philippe Desportes. “Your soup is better than your psalms,” he said to poor Desportes. And to those who defended the poet, Malherbe replied, “Out of your mistakes, I will write books longer than your poetry.”

Malherbe was quite possibly the biggest and most brazen language snob the world has ever seen. Biographers describe him as a fretful fault-finder who spent his life attacking, both verbally and in writing, every mistake—or what he regarded as mistakes—he could find and anyone who made one. He wanted to banish the word
vent
(wind) because it was a synonym for fart, and
pouls
(pulse) because it sounded like
pou
(louse). He feared no one, and even reproached King Henri’s son, the future Louis XIII, for signing his name as “Loys” rather than “Louys,” an inconsistency that many courtiers would not have dared point out had they noticed it. Malherbe hated regionalisms to the point that, when asked whether the best word for “spent” was
dépensé
or
dépendu,
he replied that the former was more French, because
pendu
(which also means “hanged”) sounded like Gascon, a dialect of southern France. Malherbe once refused to be treated by a certain Doctor Guénebeau because “his name sounded like a dog’s name.” On his deathbed he was still correcting the language of the woman who was looking after him.

There’s no doubt that Malherbe was a tyrant, especially when it came to vocabulary. But where grammar was concerned he was more moderate, seeking a common ground between principles and the reality of how French was being used. It was Malherbe who imposed the idea that the French negative
ne
should be followed by
pas
or
point.
And his ideal of clarity was not just snobbery: Malherbe rejected the hermeticism that Ronsard and his school fostered, on the grounds that poets used a jargon that was accessible only to other poets. He argued that writers should use plain language so they could be more easily understood by a larger number of readers.

Malherbe’s doctrine of clarity gained him support from Henri IV. Because of propaganda about Louis XIV (and later, the nineteenth-century French monarchy), people often associate the ideals of clarity, purity and symmetry with the reign of the Sun King. But it was Henri IV, Louis XIV’s grandfather, who started the trend. After fifty years of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, France was exhausted, and Henri wanted to make a strong break with the reigns of his predecessors. That meant a departure from the baroque aesthetics of Ronsard and the Pléiade poets, and Malherbe’s writing seemed to represent a new age.

By 1615 Malherbe was regarded as not only a master of poetry, but also a master of language. He had become so influential that people created their own academies and salons to either refute his ideas or spread them. As a result of his work and that of his disciples, entire segments of French vocabulary—regionalisms, archaisms, synonyms and duplicates—lost currency and virtually disappeared from the mouths of the well-read and the writing of most authors. As historian Ferdinand Brunot put it, before Malherbe it was common to borrow terms from other languages; because of him, it became a mark of ignorance. That standard would last for the next two centuries, and still remains at the root of the debate over anglicisms.

Not all the writers of Malherbe’s time agreed with his doctrine. Archaisms were a strong element in Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, and regionalisms were an important aspect of Molière’s humour. But almost all of the great writers of the time used plain language, making clarity and precision the “ethic” of French. The fables of La Fontaine and the tales of Charles Perrault (the original author of the
Mother Goose Tales, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard
and
Cinderella
) were plainly written and accessible. Racine’s language is concise almost to the point of being arid. Molière mocked language purism in his famous satire
Les précieuses ridicules,
but his own writing conformed to the new
norme
as Malherbe had articulated it. The power of purism was such that, by 1661, the new expression for good French usage was “
un français châtié
” (“a well-corrected French”), an expression that is still current in France.

How did Malherbe’s ideal of language purism become so influential while nothing of the sort ever happened in England? One reason was that few people in France actually spoke fluent French—less than fifteen percent of the population, by some estimates, and mostly among the urban elite. In comparison, English belonged to all classes of society, making it more difficult for an elitist doctrine of language to prevail. In a famous anecdote recounted to his friend the
fabuliste
Jean de La Fontaine, Jean Racine tells of his attempts to get by with French while travelling south. By the time he reached Valence, he wrote, nobody understood him at all. At an inn Racine asked for a chamber pot and was given a heater. “You can imagine,” he wrote, “what happens to a sleepy man who uses a heater for his nightly necessities.”

Another factor driving language purism was its “modernity.” Given how language purism became associated with stifling linguistic conservatism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is easy to forget that it was once considered progressive. Malherbe’s propaganda, with its powerful ethic of clarity and purity, made French the only living language in Europe, besides Italian, that had normative rules comparable to those of the classical languages, Latin and Greek. (The difference was that French was alive, while classical Latin and Greek were dead, and Italian was not nearly as influential as it had been in the previous century.)

The powerful salon culture that would help turn French into a coveted European language was just developing in France at this time. While it would ultimately help spread the language, purism was also an ideal vector for an elitist view of language. Malherbe spawned another lasting trend: the culture of
remarqueurs
or
remarquistes
(commentators). Alone or in groups, the
remarqueurs
made it their life’s cause to assess and comment on the quality of French being used in writing and speaking. The most influential of them, who regarded himself as Malherbe’s intellectual son, was the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1585–1650). For better or for worse, Vaugelas gave Malherbe’s quest for language purity an edge of elitism that has survived the past four centuries virtually intact and remains unique to francophones. Vaugelas’s view was that the language spoken “
par la plus saine partie de la Cour et de la ville
” (“by the best members of the Court and the city”) should become the standard. He coined the term
bon usage
(correct, or good, usage), which would become the credo of the soon-to-be-created French Academy.

The French Academy was both a creature of Malherbe’s purist ideal and the product of a political power struggle going on at the time. The Academy started out as one of dozens of informal clubs in Paris in the early seventeenth century, where small groups of men and women—many of whom were disciples of Malherbe—gathered regularly to discuss language and read their own poetry. The club hosted by Valentin Conrart, a Protestant financier, bookworm and patron of poets, would eventually evolve into the French Academy, but very little is known about its beginnings. The meetings were secret, and no record was kept of them. Conrart’s club of nine friends would probably have faded into obscurity if it hadn’t attracted the eye of Louis XIII’s prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, in 1634.

Much of the immediate glory of the French Academy is owed to the character of Cardinal Richelieu. Born Armand Jean du Plessis, into a family of high-ranking civil servants, he distinguished himself early by becoming France’s youngest bishop—at twenty-two. By age thirty-nine he was Louis XIII’s right-hand man, and he would go on to become one of the most powerful and notorious statesmen in French history. Obsessed with building a powerful French state, Richelieu showed a determination, a sense of purpose and an energy that stunned his contemporaries. He dedicated much of his considerable resources to controlling and eliminating anyone or anything that posed a threat to the power of the French monarch, whether inside France or abroad, including Protestants, aristocrats, foreign powers of all faiths, and even the Papacy. He became the very embodiment of a novel concept formulated in 1609:
la raison d’état
(reasons of state), according to which the State is the ultimate good—justifying many acts from repression of its own citizens to war. Richelieu was taking François I’s Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts one step farther, and it was a mighty step.

Richelieu was a follower of Malherbe, sincerely committed to the French language and genuinely interested in the literary and linguistic undertakings of the time; his close circle of advisors was composed of writers. The first theologian known to have written in French, Richelieu believed strongly in the innate power of words and eloquence. Early in his career he decided he wanted to imitate the Accademia della crusca of Florence, which had defined clear rules for the literary language of Florentine writers. But according to Louis-Bernard Robitaille, author of one of the rare books on the French Academy, the creation of the Academy had more to do with Richelieu’s political ambitions. He wanted to stamp out the literary gatherings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris, a notorious hotbed of aristocratic dissidence that he considered a threat to the regime of Louis XIII. Instead of closing down the Hôtel, Richelieu decided to kill off the gatherings by founding a competing salon, giving it the King’s stamp of official approval and, in effect, headhunting the best participants from all the other clubs.

Richelieu heard about Conrart’s club from an acquaintance in 1634, but no one knows exactly why he chose it from among the others. He immediately proposed turning the association into a public institution. Conrart and his friends were not particularly enthusiastic about the idea, but they eventually came around (it was never easy to say no to the Cardinal). Although the French Academy is almost always presented as Richelieu’s brainchild, Conrart and his friends actually drafted its charter on their own. True to the spirit of Malherbe, they defined its purpose as “
nettoyer la langue des ordures qu’elle avait contractées, ou dans la bouche du peuple, ou dans la foule du palais et dans les impuretés de la chicane, ou par le mauvais usage des courtisans
” (“to clean the language of all the filth it has caught, either from the mouth of the people or in the crowd of the court and tribunal or in the bad speech of ignorant courtiers”). Article 24 of the charter stated: “The main function of the Academy will be to work with all possible care and diligence to give clear rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences.”

Other inspired decisions helped build the institution’s prestige. Thinking along the lines of the existing Accademia della crusca in Florence (its name literally means “academy of pure bran,” an allusion to separating the wheat from the chaff), Conrart’s group considered calling their new creation Académie de l’éloquence (Academy of Eloquence). However, they settled on Académie française. The name was both ambiguous and ambitious—it could mean “Academy of French” or “Academy of France.” This ambiguity helped give the Academy an aura of authority unrivalled by any other European language academy. That reputation has lasted to this day, to the extent that many people believe it is the only language academy in the world. In fact, it was one of the world’s earliest—and greatest—successes in branding.