The Story of French (16 page)

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.

In the 1680s a famous French publisher based in Holland, Pierre Bayle—he would print Furetière’s
Dictionnaire universel—
published a magazine called
Les nouvelles de la république des lettres
(
News from the Republic of Letters
). The name described perfectly what salons were all about: a sort of intellectual community where class origins mattered less than skilful use of language. One of the reasons for the success of salons in France was that they managed to mix the best literary minds—commoners, for the most part—with the highest nobility. Military men, bourgeois and even women were welcome if they could display some wit. Women enjoyed much greater freedom in the salons than they could outside them; they were allowed to broach any topic they wanted, and if they had
esprit
they were considered to be on equal footing with men. Only verbal dexterity, not social status, secured reputations in the salons. So, in a way, language acted as a great equalizer in French society, a role it still plays in modern France. (This intellectual intermingling of men and women led many to believe that salons were places of licentiousness and scandal. In fact, they were a new form of entertainment that had its stars, its public and even a tabloid press, in the form of gazettes that reported debates, controversies, findings and trivia.)

By the eighteenth century, French salons were being imitated all over Europe—in French. They were considered the epitome of the French nobility’s
art de vivre
and the height of fashion—the word
mode
(fashion) appeared in French at this time. The hostesses of salons were usually dressed in the latest styles and their houses were sumptuously decorated—again following the example of the Marquise de Rambouillet, who was famous for provocatively painting her bedroom blue rather than the usual red or light brown. Nobles all over Europe were attracted by the festive spirit—sometimes veering towards debauchery—that reigned among the French aristocracy, and the mystique of the salons lasted well into the nineteenth century.

The effect on French? It came to be considered the
entrée
to everything the salons represented, much the same way that English is considered today’s door to the future. French became a desired commodity that was indispensable for practising the art of communication—whether spoken or written—and the undisputed medium of culture and refinement. As French historian and member of the French Academy Marc Fumaroli put it in
Quand l’Europe parlait français
(
When Europe Spoke French
), in the eighteenth century the French language, with its trappings of prosperity and leisure, represented all the happiness that could be had.

There was much more to the growing reputation of French than fluff and
petits-fours.
Behind the window dressing of the salons, France was making important scientific, intellectual, cultural and industrial achievements. In the eighteenth century France was already famous for producing crystal, mirrors, fine foods, perfumes and wines. Although England was a major contributor to scientific and intellectual production, the French also made significant advances, as the creation of the
Journal des savants
in 1665 suggests. As early as the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal had created the first calculating machine. Another technical genius, Denis Papin, invented the pressure cooker in 1679, demonstrated the power of steam in 1687, dived in the first submarine in 1691 and built the first paddleboat on the Rhine River in 1707 (competitors later destroyed the machine). Inventor Jacques de Vaucanson stunned his contemporaries in 1737 with his automatons, or mechanical toys: a flute player, and a duck that could eat, drink and swim. In 1746 Vaucanson invented the automatic loom, which was operated with a system of punch cards and powered by the force of water (nobody cared much about it until it was rediscovered by Jacquard at the beginning of the nineteenth century and became a main feature of the Industrial Revolution). The crowning technical achievement of the French was the
montgolfière
(hot-air balloon), named after its inventors, the brothers Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier. After a series of experiments, the brothers amazed the Court in 1783 when they sent a sheep, a rooster and a duck on a short flight in a paper balloon. People were stunned; they hadn’t thought it was possible to breathe up in the sky. Two months later François Pilâtre de Rozier boarded a Mongolfier balloon and made a twenty-minute trip across Paris’s Left Bank, the first human flight in the world.