The Story of French (22 page)

Thomas-Alexandre, as a mulatto, was denied a noble title, so he assumed his mother’s name, Dumas, instead. He started out as a soldier in France and rose to become a general in the revolutionary army in 1793. Nine years later he fathered Alexandre, and died shortly after. This romantic family history certainly fed Dumas’s love of historical literature. Of the 250 books he wrote, the historical novels are by far the best, displaying an inimitable flair in the writing, especially the Three Musketeers’ famous rallying cry, “One for all, and all for one.”

Like Haiti, Belgium and Switzerland both owe their existence to Napoleon’s military failures. Napoleon’s stunning victories and powerful propaganda overshadowed the fact that his battles were getting costlier and costlier as time went on. By 1805 he had lost command of the sea. Because of diplomatic blunders, his allies had turned against him. He lost the Russian campaign in 1812 and his final battle, at Waterloo (in what would become Belgium), three years later. At the 1815 Congress of Vienna that followed his defeat, European nations looked for a way to ensure general peace in Europe. They settled on the idea of creating a new buffer states (the Netherlands) and strengthening a new one (Switzerland). The idea behind this original plan was to keep France in check as well as guarantee its safety along its most exposed borders.

Belgium was never meant to be. The region, known as Flanders or the southern United Provinces, had been hotly disputed by France, Holland, Austria, Spain and England over the centuries, but the locals had proven themselves remarkably resilient by remaining autonomous. At the Congress of Vienna Belgium was simply handed over to the northern United Provinces (the leading one being Holland). The problem was that the population of Flanders was not willing to be traded so easily. The francophones along the French border and the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north were all Catholics, and they fiercely opposed the idea of being ruled by Protestants from Amsterdam, especially since they were more numerous, at four million, than the three million people in Holland.

In 1830 the Belgians rebelled and founded their own state. The British, thwarted in their scheme to create a strong buffer nation north of France, reacted somewhat as the French did towards Haiti. They recognized the new state but saddled it with harsh conditions, including a large chunk of the Netherlands’ debt. They also forced Belgium to be neutral so it could fulfil the original objective of the Congress of Vienna—to form a buffer state against the French. The British went as far as refusing to allow a French prince to become King of the Belgians; instead they imposed a German-British prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who would become Leopold I.

The French language fared surprisingly well in newly created Belgium. At the outset French speakers made up about half the population. But thanks to the enduring prestige of the language in Europe, the Flemish nobility, bourgeoisie and prosperous classes all spoke French, tipping the linguistic balance of power. Belgium’s constitution was written in French. The French-speaking Belgians even hoped to turn Belgium into a unilingual French state, but the plan failed. Contrary to the situation in France, where French competed with a dozen regional languages, in Belgium it had to compete with a single language whose speakers formed a united bloc. The Flemish were embarking on a linguistic revival at the time, similar to the Occitan revival that was happening about the same time in France. Oblivious, the francophone elite pushed their linguistic agenda anyway. Their intransigence was the main factor in transforming the Flemish renaissance into a separatist movement that has lasted to this day.

But for the first 120 years of the state of Belgium, French remained politically dominant. In 1832, against the wishes of the British, King Leopold I married a French princess, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the daughter of the King of France. French was so powerful, politically and economically, that the population of the capital city of Brussels slowly adopted it. Brussels was only fifteen percent French in 1830, but it is now thought to be eighty-five percent French, although the statistics are unreliable (since 1947 the Flemish have refused to conduct language surveys, still believing that Brussels is their city, and the lack of reliable data to the contrary keeps their argument alive). To this day, many more Flemish learn French as a second language than French-speaking Belgians learn Flemish. The famous Belgian accent, much derided in France, is often the accent of Flemish Belgians speaking French as a second language rather than that of native francophone Belgians.

Belgium went on to become an impressive industrial powerhouse. Jean Chrétien, the former prime minister of Canada, was fond of reminding everyone of his modest origins in the Quebec town of Shawinigan, located between Montreal and Quebec City. During the first half of the twentieth century the town became famous as a centre for high-tech research in hydroelectric power and paper production. Few people recall that the city’s first paper plant was Belgo-Canadian Pulp and Paper, the creation of a Belgian engineer and industrialist, Ferdinand-Charles de Bruyssels.

It was in Belgium that the Industrial Revolution started on the Continent. Among other things, the Belgians were renowned for building roads and railways, which they needed to move their abundant stocks of coal and steel. When coal production dropped, the Belgians simply enlarged their ports to handle new types of trade. Faced with a tiny domestic market, they decided to export their talent for engineering, and went on to build turnkey projects all over the world, especially railways. Their industrialists invested in raw materials from as far away as the Americas, Asia and Russia. They built trains for France, Austria and Germany, and later for Spain, South America, the British Indies, Russia and China. The Belgian industrial baron Édouard Empain was responsible for digging the first Paris subway line and was the first to build high-risk turnkey steel plants in Russia. In fact, Belgium was the most dynamic industrial power on the Continent throughout the nineteenth century and until 1914.

Belgian scientists and inventors stood at the forefront of research and participated in the great wave of discoveries in the nineteenth century (more on this in chapter 11). They were particularly active in fields such as mechanics, optometry and engineering, and one inventor of note, Adolphe Sax, patented a new musical instrument—the saxophone.

Belgium owed much of its economic dynamism to its colony in the Congo. In fact, this tiny country probably benefited more from the second wave of colonialism than any other power in Europe, all things considered. Though the methods of Belgian explorers and colonists are alleged to have been among the most brutal, racist and exploitive ever used, there’s no disputing the fact that Belgium was an effective colonial power, much more so than Germany (some of whose African colonies Belgium inherited after the First World War). Ultimately, Belgium contributed greatly to the spread of French in equatorial Africa, particularly around the Congo River basin.

Like the rest of the world, the Belgians became interested in equatorial Africa after hearing stories of the legendary Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who was famous for his exploration of vast swaths of central Africa. When Livingstone disappeared in 1866, an ambitious New York reporter, Henry Morgan Stanley, was sent to find him. He finally discovered him at Lake Tanganyika in 1871. His first question, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” became the most famous line from the whole African colonial era. In a curious twist of history, explorations by the Welsh-American Stanley would help the French language establish a large and permanent presence in equatorial Africa.

After discovering the Congo, Stanley couldn’t find a country willing to finance further explorations, so he accepted offers from the eccentric (and, as it would later turn out, monstrous) King of the Belgians. Leopold II (ruled 1865–1909) never set foot in Africa, but from the beginning of his reign he had been bent on purchasing some exotic foreign territory to create a personal domain and then get rich extracting priceless treasures from it. Thanks to Stanley, he settled on Africa. Deranged as he was, Leopold II knew he needed to establish an appearance of legitimacy in order to explore Africa, so he created the Association internationale africaine (International African Association) and camouflaged it with supposedly humanitarian objectives. In fact, all he wanted to do was strip Africa of all the wealth he could get his hands on.

Stanley worked for Leopold from 1879 to 1884, signing treaties with chiefs on the left bank of the Congo, constructing roads and forts and organizing river navigation. By the turn of the century Europeans had heard about what Leopold and Stanley were really doing: forcing Africans to work in appalling conditions, often under torture, to hunt for ivory and later to harvest rubber. But until the word got out, Leopold II managed to convince Europe’s leaders that he was bringing “civilization” to Africa. And the argument worked; in 1885 they handed over to him part of the territory south of the Congo River, which he cynically named the Congo Free State. Millions of Africans died under the rule of Leopold II. Joseph Conrad based his novel
Heart of Darkness
(published in 1902) on the Belgian Congo; it tells the story of a search for a deranged company agent whose dealings with the locals have become savagely abusive.

The Belgians reappear in different episodes of the story of French. Whether in Africa or Europe, Belgium was a dynamic centre, quite autonomous from France and the British, and it played an important role in spreading the French language and fostering its international influence. In the twentieth century Belgium would become a founding member of the United Nations, and later Brussels would become the capital of a new form of internationalism: the European Union. An early sign of this trend was the creation, in 1913, of the Union of International Associations, still active today.

Belgium has always been part of the original domain of French. The language is as native to Belgium as it is to France. Some parts of Belgium could even make fair claim to being epicentres of the melting-pot process by which Romance dialects evolved into modern French. Belgium was the centre of the kingdom of the Franks before they moved their capital to Paris. The Frankish king Charlemagne, who became Holy Roman Emperor, was born in the Belgian city of Liège in 742. He spoke Frankish, not Romance, but he certainly played a part in the political rise of northern France and, consequently, of the
langues d’oïl.
Although the oldest original document written in Romance, the poem of St. Eulalie, is stored in an abbey in Valenciennes, on the French side of the Belgian border, it was probably written on the Belgian side, between Liège and Tournai. Two
langues d’oïl,
Picard and especially Walloon, were firmly established, and they both went into the historical melting pot that created French, although the extent of this contribution is debated among scholars. The great Belgian linguist Jean-Marie Klinkenberg characterizes Belgium as a linguistic suburb of France, a satellite. Indeed, the symbol of Brussels was, and remains, the same as that of the kingdom of France—the fleur-de-lys—even though, historically, Brussels has more often been outside the kingdom than within it.

“
Vous êtes Belge?
” (“You’re Belgian?”) is a question Jean-Benoît is often asked in France, though more often in the south than in the north. He knows enough not to be flattered. For some reason the French love to laugh at Belgians. Belgian jokes are like Newfie jokes in Canada or Vermont jokes in New England (we can testify that the same cookie-cutter stories circulate freely between languages). But there is at least one legitimate reason why some French confuse Belgians and Quebeckers: Both produce diphthongs (combinations of two vowel sounds) for certain vowels and drag other vowels out in a way that Parisian French no longer does. The pronunciations of Belgians and Quebeckers are actually quite different, but years of language purism have dulled French ears to the nuances that distinguish Belgian and Quebec diphthongs. Typically, Belgians add an I after the sound É so that
aller
(to go) sounds like
alleï.
In words like
bière
(beer) they stretch the E (
bee-ehr
). Quebeckers typically stretch the E
and
the diphthong, which results in a pronunciation something like
bee-ah-air.
Belgians also tend to use the resources of French differently from French people, distinguishing between words that the French pronounce the same way, like
brun
(brown) and
brin
(twig) or
bout
(end) and
boue
(mud).

Belgians themselves disagree on what exactly constitutes the so-called Belgian accent. The strongest examples come from either native Flemish speakers who use French as a second language, or citizens of Brussels, where the Flemish influence is by far the strongest. Elsewhere, native Belgians speak very normative French under the influence of Picard and Walloon, two dialects spoken on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border and therefore not specifically Belgian. The universally distinct trait of Belgian French is found in its vocabulary, a result of the influences of Flemish, Picard and Walloon. Belgians have different terms for institutions; they do not speak of the
maire
(mayor) and
lycée
(college) but of the
bourgmestre
and
athénée.
They use terms such as
wassingue
(floor cloth) and
drache
(heavy rain). Germanic influence has led Belgians to use terms such as
une fois
(once), which is a calque, or loan translation, of the Flemish
eenmaal.

Belgians also count differently. Whereas the French have come to say
soixante-dix
(literally “sixty and ten,” for seventy),
quatre-vingts
(“four twenties,” for eighty) and
quatre-vingt-dix
(“four twenties and ten,” for ninety), the Belgians kept the more sensible
septante, huitante
and
nonante,
which are calqued on the French
quarante
(forty),
cinquante
(fifty) and
soixante
(sixty). For
eighty
some Belgians say
octante,
but more prefer,
quatre-vingts.
Although it sounds more modern to say
septante
or
nonante,
the terms actually come from an older system of counting.