The Story of French (11 page)

The early founders also chose a brilliant motto:
à l’immortalité
(to immortality). The expression originally referred to the immortal and divine power of the king, but it long outlived the monarchy. In 1833 the public began to speak of members of the Academy as “immortals,” a title still used today. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is the Academy’s thirty-seventh leader, a position designated in the Academy’s charter as
secrétaire perpétuel
. Grandiose as it now sounds, the title simply reflected the fact that the members elected the secretary for life, but it helped contribute to the special aura the Academy took on. Conrart, appointed at thirty-two years old, was both the youngest and the longest-lasting perpetual of them all—he spent forty-one years on the job (the average has been twelve).

The French Academy was one of the first democratic institutions of the
ancien régime.
One needed neither noble origins nor endorsement from a university to be admitted. It was meant to be a company of cultivated men—lords or commoners, religious or lay—who had an interest in language; literary talent was not a prerequisite. The members were authors and poets but also scientists, generals, politicians, bishops and priests. Early members ranged from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s prime minister, to François Timoléon de Choisy, an abbot who wrote a history of Christianity (but who was more famous among his contemporaries as a transvestite).

The founding of the Academy raised suspicions in the Parlement de Paris (the high tribunal). The
Parlement
was the turf of the old nobility, who resented Richelieu and feared he was creating a competing form of political representation that would reduce their influence. The Academy’s literary mission seemed bizarre to them; they were sure Richelieu had a hidden agenda. After the King had approved the French Academy’s charter,
Parlement
refused to register it for two and a half years. According to Paul Pellisson, the Academy’s earliest historian, Richelieu decided to stage a publicity stunt to convince
Parlement
that his Academy was strictly about language and literature, nothing else. He convinced the Academy to prove his point by publicly criticizing the most famous theatrical hit of the time,
Le Cid,
by Pierre Corneille. That did the trick, and
Parlement
registered the Academy a month later, though on the condition that Richelieu’s creature would never meddle in anything but language.

So, beyond embracing purism, what was the Academy’s actual job? The founders gave themselves a mandate to produce a dictionary of “common usage useful in trades and science” as well as a grammar, a rhetoric and a poetic. These were meant to establish standards for vocabulary, grammar, eloquence and rhyming in the French language. Even before the original members began their work in 1639, they realized that the mandate was too ambitious, so they focused their efforts exclusively on the dictionary. But even that objective was quickly watered down when they realized what they were facing. Their original plan had been to define the rules of usage by quoting authors—an onerous task. So instead of tackling the task of reading and studying the important works of the day, they decided just to make up the rules and invent their own examples. They skipped etymology altogether and decided to drop technical and scientific words, focusing on
le bon usage
as defined by Vaugelas. In other words, they defined only the words used by the “best of society.” That’s how the Academy’s dictionary became a dictionary of an ideal sort of French, not the actual language being used. And so it has remained.

One defect of the Academy’s membership criteria was that, opinionated though they were, very few academicians were qualified to accomplish their self-proclaimed mandate of cleaning the French language of its filth. The majority of members has never been made up of authors, and real experts such as grammarians (and later, linguists) have always been a rarity. From the beginning the academicians were in essence a bunch of amateurs, and they have always remained so. This has had huge implications for how the Academy operates and what it has been able to achieve.

All through its history the Academy’s work on the dictionary has been plagued by incompetence and delays. In 1642 the Academy decided to pay one of its members, Vaugelas himself, to work full-time on the dictionary, hoping to speed up its pace. He knew his business, reaching the letter I before he died in 1650. During the next twenty years the Academy managed to review what Vaugelas had done but did not move ahead. Colbert, who had no tolerance for their slow pace, instructed his chancellor, Charles Perrault, to pay salaries to all the members, hoping to stimulate their work. The rule was that Academy members who were present at the stroke of the meeting hour would be paid. That led to members spending the first half-hour of meetings debating whether the clock was right. Perrault tried to solve that problem by supplying the Academy with a state-of-the-art clock, but the prolonged, sometimes senseless debates persisted and became a staple of Academy folklore. As an example, early Academy member Antoine Furetière recounted an occasion when two members threw books at each other because they couldn’t agree about who should belong to a particular committee.

The task of defining a language in a rational way and setting its standards is enormous. It involves choosing words and deciding on their spelling. In some cases words had competing spellings that reflected different pronunciations. The Academy decided that the proper spelling for “asparagus” would be
asperge,
as some people said, rather than
asparge,
as others did; “to heal” would be
guérir
rather than
guarir
; and “cheese” became
fromage
rather than
formage.
However, in other cases, spelling didn’t match pronunciation at all. For instance, the S in
beste
(beast) and
teste
(head)—later to be spelled
bête
and
tête
—was not even pronounced.

The Academy’s choices tended to be conservative on the whole; it generally opted for etymology over pronunciation. Why? According to historian Ferdinand Brunot, members of the Academy steered away from phonetic spellings because they were afraid of looking ignorant of the historical roots of a word. But this orientation was also the expression of a class struggle. The lettered class promoted complicated spellings as a way of holding on to power; by making it hard to learn French, they made it harder for anyone outside their class to enter the circles of power.

Delays in the Academy’s dictionary project were such that, in 1674, the Academy was given a monopoly from the King for producing a dictionary of
bon usage,
for they feared that more enterprising lexicographers (dictionary makers) might be working behind their backs. And they were right. In 1680 César-Pierre Richelet managed to publish his
Dictionnaire françoys contenant les mots et les choses
(
French Dictionary of Words and Things
).
Le Richelet,
as it came to be known, was the first monolingual French dictionary without references in Latin. A previous landmark in the field, Jean Nicot’s
Trésor de la langue française,
published in 1606, still defined one word in ten by using Latin. With twenty-five thousand entries, Richelet’s dictionary stands as the prototype of the general dictionary. It included the Court’s best language, but also the language spoken by common people, as well as terms taken from science, the trades and technology, and quotations from authors.
Le Richelet
was a great success and became the standard French dictionary of its time—six editions had appeared by 1735. Strangely, the Academy didn’t protest Richelet’s stepping onto their turf; he had an excellent reputation, since he had created the first dictionary of French rhymes in 1667. And Richelet was sly enough to print his dictionary in Geneva, out of the King’s reach.

Another competitor was less fortunate. Antoine Furetière probably began working on his
Dictionnaire universel
in the 1660s, behind the Academy’s back, while attending its dictionary meetings the whole time. Furetière disagreed with the Academy’s overall approach for a prescriptive dictionary. In his opinion, the French needed a good general
descriptive
dictionary of French as it was used, not a dictionary of ideal French. But instead of trying to change his colleagues’ approach, Furetière went underground. Word got out only because he went to the King to get a monopoly to write a dictionary of scientific and technical terms, with a promise that it would exclude
bon usage,
the Academy’s turf. This provoked a rift, especially when it was discovered that Furetière planned to include definitions of
bon usage
after all. The Academy accused him of plagiarism and dragged him into court. Furetière argued, quite sensibly, that he couldn’t possibly define technical terms of navigation or chemistry without defining words such as “sea” and “fire,” which were part of the vocabulary of
bon usage.
In the end he lost his privilege and the Academy even expelled him, a very rare case. Ostracized and ill, Furetière sold his work to a Dutch publisher; he died in 1688, two years before his dictionary was printed.

Furetière’s
Dictionnaire universel
was far superior to that of the Academy. It was one of the greatest achievements of seventeenth-century lexicography and one of the most remarkable intellectual accomplishments of its time. Working alone, he produced the world’s first encyclopedic dictionary, with forty-five thousand entries—in less than twenty years. (Compare the achievement of Samuel Johnson, who wrote his English dictionary, published in 1755, with the help of seven lexicographers over a period of seven years.) While many spelling variations remained from the previous century—
français
was still spelled
françoys—
the language of Furetière’s dictionary was modern. The definitions are clear, objective and rarely judgemental. He defines the sexual organs in graphic terms, and his definitions of words such as
cul
(ass) and
merde
(shit) have none of the prudishness one would expect from the priest he was. Furetière was interested in all aspects of human activity, including anatomy, medicine, agriculture, the navy and the sciences. His definition of
sucrerie
(sugar mill) distinguishes those of the West Indies from those in Europe. The author even included a novelty: a thematic index that listed words by trade, for readers who were seeking definitions of specific terms used by, say, butchers or shoemakers. But Furetière’s reputation was destroyed by the Academy, and no one ever spoke of
Le Furetière
as they did of
Le Richelet
or would later of dictionaries such as
Le Robert
and
Le Larousse.
Furetière’s
Dictionnaire universel
did, however, suffer the ultimate tribute of greatness—it was copied, pillaged and imitated, and it ultimately inspired the work of the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists.

Spurred on by the controversy and the looming prospect of ridicule, the Academy finally published
Le dictionnaire de l’Académie française
in 1694, after fifty-five years of work. Even the King could not quite hide his disappointment when it was presented to him. “
Messieurs, voici un ouvrage attendu depuis fort longtemps
” (“Gentlemen, this is a long-awaited work”) was all he had to say. The dictionary impressed no one in France. It had only thirteen thousand definitions. Spellings in the Academy dictionary were similar to Furetière’s, but definitions were concise to the point of being curt. Man, for instance, was defined as
animal raisonnable
(animal with reason). Woman was “
la femelle de l’homme
” (“the female of man”). The order of entries was generally alphabetical, but many words were classified etymologically, so that
matrice
(women’s reproductive organs) came right below
mère
(mother). The Academy’s dictionary was sharper on normative comments, including long discussions of usage, such as the proper use of
moy
(me) and
je
(I). It condemned archaic terms with the comment “
Il est vieux
” (“It’s old”) after the definition. But the omissions were glaring—the Academy almost forgot to include the word
académie,
and left out the word
françoys
until the third edition, in 1740.

Some of the Academy’s choices were frankly bizarre. The word
anglais
(English) was missing from every edition, but is expected to appear in the latest edition, slated for the 2010s. This absence is all the more puzzling since
anglais
is the root of accepted terms such as
anglaise
(a dance),
anglican, anglicanisme, angliciser, anglicisme, anglomane, anglophilie, anglophile, anglophobe
and
anglophobie
—all present in the 1935 edition. But it could have been worse: The word
allemand
(German) was actually removed from the 1935 edition (after being included in the 1835 and 1878 editions), though
allemande
(a dance) remained. The real purpose of the Academy’s dictionary was to define an ideal French, and even in this it fell short. The purest of the purists regarded it as extremely vulgar because it contained words in bad taste that were used in the marketplace.

One of the oddest decisions made by the Academy was to exclude technical or scientific terms from its main dictionary. In effect, it subcontracted the job to one Thomas Corneille, the brother of the famous playwright Pierre Corneille, who published the
Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences
in the same year. While it would be false to pretend that it completely neglected its original mandate, this part of the job was clearly regarded as secondary.