The Story of French (34 page)

It took Lesseps as much time to convince people his plan was feasible as it did to actually dig the canal. The British in particular were extremely critical of the scheme. They didn’t want France meddling in their naval domain, and they rightly saw the canal as a move to further French foreign interests by building a base for colonial expansion (which we discussed in chapter 10). In 1854 Lesseps, who spoke fluent Arabic, convinced the khedive of Egypt, who was a personal friend, to adopt the project. Then he spent the better part of the next fifteen years convincing shareholders to finance it.

Although this massive project was threatened with bankruptcy several times, it was a truly international enterprise—even the British public bought shares. When the canal finally opened in 1869, it was an immediate success, carrying fourteen percent of international sea traffic. The canal’s international convention of neutrality was respected until 1948. As an ultimate tribute to Lesseps’ idea, the British took a controlling share by buying back the khedive’s Suez Canal shares in 1875. But it was through this scheme that the giant French multinational Suez was created, allowing the French to make their mark in massive engineering projects, a field in which they remain world leaders today.

The Suez Canal also had the desired effect of raising the profile of French in the Middle East. From this date on, French was an important language among the Egyptian bourgeoisie and elite, even after Egypt became a British protectorate in 1914. So, not only did Lesseps embody the spirit of progress of nineteenth-century France, but his idea raised the profile of French everywhere, and in particular within the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

In the meantime, France—or, more properly speaking, the French—would put the incredible influence of their culture to use in deliberately spreading the French language in an entirely original way. French elites knew that geopolitically France was slipping, despite the achievements of the century. They decided to use the French language to compensate for this growing weakness. Between the 1860s and the Second World War, the French built a multi-tiered system of language associations, cultural centres and schools that would not only reinforce French where it was already present—in Europe, the Middle East and North America—but also carry it across the globe. This massive system was part of a new initiative called cultural diplomacy. And it succeeded largely because so many people across the planet already wanted to learn French.

Chapter 12 ~

The Invention of Cultural Diplomacy

In the summer of 2003, Julie spent two weeks in Lesotho, a tiny mountain enclave in the middle of South Africa. She was there to watch a friend conduct workshops aimed at reinforcing democracy at the local level. Democracy has had a hard time taking root in Africa since decolonization, but in fact Lesotho, with its population of two million, gained independence peacefully in 1966 and has a growing reputation as one of the few functioning democracies on the continent.

French missionaries were present in Lesotho in the early nineteenth century; they supported Lesotho’s king against attacks from neighbouring Boers, and they transcribed the language, Sesotho, into Roman letters. However, in 1868 Lesotho became a British protectorate. As a consequence, today English is the second language taught from the early years in Lesotho’s primary schools—and evidently with much success. Julie met teenage girls in the countryside who could carry on long conversations in fluent English.

Surprisingly, though, the French presence remains. Strolling through downtown Maseru, the country’s capital, Julie discovered that Lesotho’s single public library is, in fact, an Alliance française. A British couple donated the century-old sandstone building to the city in 1946 with instructions to turn it into a public library. When the library foundered in 1982, the Alliance française took it over and turned it into a combination city library, video rental store and language school. When Julie strolled in to take a peek, she saw that roughly half the shelves were stocked with English books and videos, while the other half had a good selection of French literature and films, encyclopedias, magazines and even some classic French comic-book series such as
Astérix
and
Tintin.

There was more. The director of Maseru’s Alliance française informed Julie that the French language school was actually rather busy. At the time of her visit some 250 students were enrolled in French classes. Julie asked the director what could possibly motivate people in this isolated, poverty-stricken former British colony to pay for French lessons. He quickly replied, “French is an African language.” The students, he explained, were mostly lawyers, doctors and members of the military. Over half the fifty-seven countries in Africa and around the Indian Ocean use French, many as an official language, and French is an official language of the Organization for African Unity. So upwardly mobile professionals in Africa need French to pursue an international career on the continent.

Maseru’s is one of 1,074 Alliances françaises now operating in 136 countries. The language schools, together with some thousand institutions that teach French abroad, form the backbone of an extensive international system of French cultural promotion established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The system, which came to be known as cultural diplomacy, marked a new stage in the history of language. For the first time the French realized that foreign demand for their language had to be cultivated and maintained. Almost spontaneously, individuals took on the task. Like missionaries, French men and women set out of their own accord to spread French language and culture, like a religion. The French government didn’t play an important role in the movement until forty years after it started.

The actual origins of the movement are not widely known. The Alliance française is such a well-known brand that even well-informed people tend to think it was the first French association to start opening language schools abroad, and is the only one that operates them now. In fact, twenty-three years before the foundation of the Alliance française in 1883, a group of eighteen French Jews founded the Alliance israélite universelle (Universal Israelite Alliance), which wanted to spread French for different reasons. This organization was the brainchild of a lawyer, Adolphe Crémieux, and seventeen doctors, teachers, lawyers and journalists, all fervent believers in the ideals and principles of the French Revolution. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when only a tenth of the world’s Jewish population enjoyed basic civil rights and most Jews lived in abject poverty, French Jews were allowed to vote, own property, live where they wanted, practise liberal professions and enter politics—rights they had enjoyed since 1791. Many French Jews had risen to become influential figures in the country. Crémieux himself, when he became minister of justice ten years later, would pass a law granting full citizenship to Algerian Jews in 1870. In short, although French Jews were still subject to unofficial persecution, they were considerably better off than the vast majority of Jews in the world. The founders of the Alliance israélite universelle aimed to help poor Jews by creating an educated Jewish middle class, specifically in Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

But Crémieux and the AIU’s founders did not believe that the situation of Jews would be improved by mass migration to France. They wanted to bring modernity to existing Jewish populations so they could integrate into the societies where they lived. Their first tactic was to attempt to influence the French government to put pressure on other European governments to grant rights to Jews. Within several years, however, they decided that the best way to bring modernity to Jews was to educate them. Crémieux and his followers were modernists who were convinced that the traditional teachings of Hebrew schools would do nothing to improve the condition of Jews. They aimed to create French language schools whose graduates would go on to work in the banks and civil administrations of the countries where they lived.

The AIU’s first target country was Russia. When the Russian czar objected to the project, the association redirected its efforts towards Sephardic Jews living in Morocco, who were not as poor as Jews in Europe but more cut off from modernity. The AIU established its first French school in Tétouan, Morocco, in 1862, followed by a school in Tangier in 1865. The association created a teacher training school, the École normale israélite orientale, in Paris in 1867 to train teachers who would return to their countries of origin. The schools were strictly secular, and not always well accepted by the local Jewish leadership. Yet they soon spread to North Africa, Turkey and Europe; fourteen had been opened by 1870, and by 1900 there were a hundred schools with twenty-six thousand students. Those numbers had doubled again by 1914.

Crémieux and his successor, Narcisse Leven, did not glorify the French language itself so much as embrace its potential as a tool. Over the decades, however, the AIU’s success drew the attention of the cultural leaders in France, especially in diplomatic circles. Despite the fact that the world’s elites still gravitated towards French as both a prestigious and an important international language, France’s rank on the world stage was slipping rather quickly by that time. The efforts of the Alliance israélite universelle showed that by exporting French culture, secular, missionary-like activists could create a new sphere of influence for France that went beyond foreign policy, instead reaching out directly to individual sensibilities.

Inspired by the model of the AIU, a group of members of the Société historique Saint-Simon met in Paris in 1883 and founded the Alliance française. One of these founders, Paul Cambon, who was French ambassador to the protectorate of Tunisia, had been impressed by the results of Catholic religious schools and the local AIU organization there, although the goal of the Allliance française founders was as much humanitarian as propagandist. The AF decided to create a network of “support committees” in France and abroad that would raise money to open and manage language schools, organize lecture tours and provide a forum for French personalities travelling abroad. However, the eight founding members realized immediately that, as a rather anonymous group of diplomats and civil servants, they didn’t have the clout to get such a movement off the ground. So they decided to rally influential figures such as the former governor of Senegal, General Louis de Faidherbe, Suez Canal–digger Ferdinand de Lesseps and the famed microbiologist Louis Pasteur to their cause.

Like the AIU, the Alliance française was immediately successful because the demand for French at the time was very high, and because abroad it relied on local committees that operated without interference from Paris (still the basic organizational structure today). In the first three years after its creation, the AF had twelve thousand students. As a result of local initiatives, many of these founding committees morphed into schools, and by 1900, 250 schools were operating in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The first North American school opened in Montreal in 1902, followed by Toronto in 1903, then Winnipeg and Kingston. In the United States the first schools opened in the early 1900s in Boston, Baltimore, Lafayette, Detroit, Providence and Philadelphia. Support committees were formed in the first decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru, and quickly became popular. The biggest Alliance française school during the 1920s was in Buenos Aires; in 1924 it had ten thousand members and offered eighty-one different language courses.

At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900 the Alliance française ran one of the most popular pavilions. The exhibit featured a model classroom decorated with maps of France’s colonies and with students’ written exercises pinned to the walls. From May to November visitors flocked there from all over the world to watch
La leçon de français
: a teacher delivering a French lesson to a group of men, women and children from as far away as Madagascar, Indonesia, Senegal and Norway. The Alliance française had asked foreign governments to send a class for the event but few could afford it, so it borrowed foreign students from Paris’s Berlitz language school for the duration of the Fair. This slight misrepresentation didn’t detract from the exhibit’s appeal; the World’s Fair organizers awarded the Alliance française pavilion a gold medal.

Meanwhile, other projects to promote French in the world quickly sprang up on the AF’s heels. French universities in Grenoble and Toulouse struck up partnerships with universities in Prague, Milan and Barcelona to organize conferences and courses on French language and culture. Within several years these “feelers” from the French universities had developed into establishments known as cultural centres or institutes. The idea was not to compete with the Alliances françaises but to complement them by offering information and documentation on France and French culture, organizing colloquiums and events, and inviting French artists. This initiative also caught on quickly and the cultural centres flourished, especially in areas where the Alliances françaises weren’t strong, such as in Europe outside of France. Cultural centres opened in Florence in 1908, in London in 1910, in Lisbon in 1928 and in Stockholm in 1937. By the end of the 1930s most of them were independent from the universities where they had started. There are now 153
centres culturels
or
instituts français,
but unlike the Alliances françaises, they belong to the French government, whereas the Alliance remains a private organization.

The Mission laïque française (French secular mission) was created in 1902 by a group of French teachers and university professors who shared an almost evangelical desire to spread the French language and culture throughout the world. They chose the term
laïque
to distinguish themselves from the Catholic and Protestant missions, which were still very active, especially in the French colonies and the Middle East (as discussed in chapter 9). The program of the Mission laïque was to train teachers and to refine teaching methods so that teachers could overcome cultural differences; the ultimate goal, of course, was to open more French schools outside of France.