The Story of French (35 page)

In 1905 the Mission laïque began publishing the magazine
Revue de l’enseignement colonial
(
Colonial Teaching Review
), later renamed
Revue de l’enseignement français hors de France
(
Review of French Teaching Outside of France
). The organization opened schools in Greece in 1906 and in Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria in 1909. In 1902, in Paris
,
the agency opened the École normale Jules Ferry, a college for training language instructors to deal with cultural difference and adapt teaching techniques to foreign cultures and languages. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of French cultural diplomacy remained the work of private associations, but in 1906 the Mission laïque benefited from the first subsidies from the French government. The government was beginning to understand the political potential of cultural diplomacy. During the 1920s the Mission laïque opened more schools in the Middle East, Russia and Japan.

A third scheme to spread French had been in the making for two centuries by this time: foreign
collèges
and
lycées,
the oldest of which was the Collège français of Berlin, founded in 1689 by French Huguenots. However, the schools did not really form a network. Most of them were ad hoc creations of French expatriates who later opened them to non-French students—such as the
lycée
of Frankfurt, created in 1949 for children of the staff of the French consulate, but later opened to any locals who wanted their offspring educated in French. The history of this network prior to 1990 is sketchy because the schools were not organized as a common body; some of them operated under the aegis of France’s ministry of foreign affairs and others were run by the ministry of education; most were local organizations with some form of support from the French government. In 1990 France put them all under the authority of a single entity, the Agence pour l’enseignement du français à l’étranger (Agency for French Teaching Abroad).

There are now more than 430 French
collèges
and
lycées
in 125 countries, schooling 235,000 children, a third of them French. A quarter of the schools are in the United States, Morocco, Lebanon and Spain combined. The largest
lycée
is that of Madrid, with 3,700 students; the average has six hundred. Everywhere these colleges benefit from a reputation for offering high-end education—in Morocco the demand is so strong that kindergarten candidates have to take an admissions exam. Most of the schools are autonomous; only seventy-nine are directly managed by the Agence. The rest are run by locals, although programs have to conform to French education standards, and all or most of the teachers are of French origin. Famous former students of these
lycées
include former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; the president of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga; the architect Ricardo Bofill; and actors Jodie Foster and Robin Williams (who gives interviews in French).

France’s network of cultural diplomacy was nearly destroyed by the two world wars. The Alliance française, being entirely private, suffered badly from the First World War, particularly inside France, where many schools could not afford to operate after the war. In 1920 the Alliance opened the École pour étrangers (School for Foreigners) in Paris. Meanwhile the popularity of the schools was still growing where the war had not had much effect, especially in Latin America. By 1939 the AIU had doubled its enrolment to forty thousand students.

The Second World War was another setback for all the associations in the system. France’s Vichy government, which was strongly pro-Catholic, shut down the Mission laïque during the war. The occupying Germans were determined to get rid of an association devoted to the expansion of French civilization, so in 1940 they closed the Paris office of the Alliance française on Boulevard Raspail and removed the association’s archives (the archives were thought to have been lost until they resurfaced in 2001, in twenty-three boxes among Soviet archives). During the war the Alliance relocated its head office to London, and Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, was named honorary president. Meanwhile, though, the number of students across the world fell drastically.

But the Second World War turned out to be pivotal, and gave French cultural diplomacy new life. In 1945, when France was just emerging from the humiliating German occupation, France’s ministry of foreign affairs began looking for ways to resuscitate the country’s damaged morale and reassert its global presence. Language became its new tool. The network already existed, and the government believed it could use language and cultural promotion to prove to the world that French language and culture were still vital and important. For the first time the French government created a body to coordinate the different associations already in place: the Délégation générale des relations culturelles et des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger (Directorate General of French Foreign Cultural Relations).

Although the Alliance française had been hard hit by the Second World War, it rebounded swiftly in this new environment: By 1949 there were AF schools in 650 cities in France, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, North America and Latin America. By 1950 the Alliance had quadrupled its postwar figures, with a total of fifty-five thousand students; by 1967 that number had again quadrupled to two hundred thousand students. More than ever, Latin America became the AF’s stronghold. The schools were extremely popular in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, countries with some of the biggest schools in the AF network to this day. In 1967 the Alliance expanded inside France, renovated its office on Boulevard Raspail and built the seven-storey Centre Georges Duhamel to house the expanding activities of the École internationale de langue et de civilisation françaises (International School of French Language and Civilization). Founded in 1952, the school had students from 187 nationalities in teacher training and language classes by 1970.

After 1945 the
centres culturels
and
instituts culturels,
already strong in Europe, actively boosted their efforts in areas where the Alliance française was least present, notably in Germany (to this day Germany has more French cultural centres than any other country). In the 1960s the Mission laïque was also given a new vocation: to open schools for the children of managers of French companies running projects abroad. These
écoles d’entreprises
(company schools) were staffed by teachers certified by the French national education system. The first one opened in Calgary, Alberta, in the 1960s for children of French managers of the oil company Elf Aquitaine. The Mission laïque continued to open new company schools throughout the 1970s, and by 1985 was operating fifty-seven schools with 2,500 students. Today thirty of the Mission’s fifty-four schools are company schools. They span the globe from the École MLF–Aventis Pasteur (a pharmaceutical company) in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to the École MLF–Peugeot Citroën in Kaduna, Nigeria. In all, they school twenty thousand children, twenty percent of whom are not French.

The schools of the Alliance israélite universelle flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, but lost much of their clientele during the war as the Nazis systematically destroyed Europe’s Jewish population. By the end of the war the organization had also lost its raison d’être; the dream of creating a Jewish middle class had to some extent been achieved. With massive emigration to Palestine and the Americas after 1946, the AIU shifted its focus and energy to the state of Israel, where it opened schools that would downplay French culture and reinforce Jewish religious education, which was not stressed in Israel’s new secular school system. In 1949 the AIU opened
lycées
in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, where most AIU students are concentrated to this day.

From the inception of the Alliance israélite universelle in 1860 to the creation of the Délégation générale des relations culturelles in 1945, it had taken the French government nearly a century to wake up to the tremendous potential these private initiatives represented. Since then the government has fully co-opted the entire network, to the extent that today no country in the world is as actively engaged in cultural diplomacy as France.

In a world of instantaneous global communications, the idea that a country’s reputation depends on its ability to represent itself through artistic and educational programs has become familiar. In his book
Soft Power
, which explores the phenomenon of cultural diplomacy, Joseph Nye argues that diplomats today achieve as much by capitalizing on the attractions of their country as they do by using coercion or offering financial aid. Most nations—especially the large ones—have systems of cultural diplomacy in place, which the Americans also call “public diplomacy.” The United States practises cultural diplomacy through the American Cultural Exchange and Fulbright programs. Britain has 151 British Councils. Germany runs 128 Goethe Institutes. Spain has 58 Institutos Cervantes. These institutions are important tools of foreign policy. But Nye acknowledges that France is still exceptional in the field, spending close to a billion dollars a year to spread its civilization around the world—at least as much as the U.S. spends on “public diplomacy,” and much more per capita than the U.S. spends on overseas development projects. The budget for France’s cultural centres is considerably inferior to that of the British Council, but France compensates by pulling its Alliances françaises, Missions laïques,
collèges
and
lycées
into the effort.

France also has a type of individual outreach program. When Julie went to Lesotho she was accompanying Edy Kaufman, an Israeli professor of Argentine origin who is himself a product of France’s cultural diplomacy. In the 1960s he was president of the National Union of Israeli Students when he was asked to apply for a scholarship to do his PhD in France. Edy’s French was sketchy at the time, to put it mildly, but the French were interested in candidates they thought would go on to have a political career—this was one of the main criteria for selection. Edy ended up spending two years in Paris, wishing he could join in the May 1968 riots (he risked losing his student visa if he got caught protesting). In the end he turned out not to be an Israeli leader but rather a researcher and director of a peace institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Of course he was not the only intellectual the French government bet on—there were thousands like him, including Samir Kader, an Iraqi who did his university studies in France and Geneva and later became editor-in-chief of the Qatari TV broadcaster Aljazeera.

Language is still the linchpin of France’s cultural diplomacy effort. In 1999 the French government created the organization Edufrance to bring more foreign students to France. There are 250,000 foreign students in France, compared to 600,000 in the U.S., a considerable number when you compare the size of the countries. France distributes twenty thousand scholarships to foreign students and supports 26 research centres and 176 archaeological missions abroad. In addition to direct education initiatives, France sponsors a host of cultural, media and artistic organizations that either use or promote French abroad. The Association française d’action artistique helps French artists exhibit and perform in foreign countries while welcoming foreign artists to France. The French embassy in the United States recently created French American Culture Exchange (FACE) to promote French culture (films, dance, visual arts) on the campuses of American universities. Since 1949 Unifrance has promoted French cinema in fifty-five countries—which is why foreign sales of French films are equivalent to sales at home, a performance matched by no other country except the U.S. France’s international radio network RFI has forty-five million listeners. France distributes a million books and pays for six hundred translations per year, and the French government has been an important funder of cinema in the developing world since 1985. And that’s not counting the efforts of the French ministries of education and research, which each run their own exchange programs. In 2004 France’s 270 embassies, consulates and foreign representatives participated in the organization of ten thousand cultural events across the world—814 in Germany alone—including the Sounds French festival in New York, the May in France festival in Hong Kong, Printemps Français (French Spring) in Manila and France Dances in Japan. And to top that off, France spends 6.4 billion euros on foreign aid, three times more per capita than the U.S. does. These initiatives don’t even include the efforts of the Francophonie and other French-speaking countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and Canada.

The cultural diplomacy activities of Switzerland and Belgium are not as impressive as they could be, largely because language has always been a contentious issue in these countries. In Switzerland the federal government has a hands-off approach to the issue and leaves it up to the initiative of lesser jurisdictions, but Swiss cantons do not have enough resources. Nonetheless, cultural diplomacy is one of the functions of the Swiss arts council, Pro Helvetia, which runs five cultural centres (in Paris, New York, Rome, Milan and Venice), eight bureaus (in Eastern Europe) and three liaison offices (in Cairo, Capetown and Warsaw). As for the
communauté française de Belgique
(French community of Belgium), it has been wrestling with chronic unemployment and severe restructuring of its economy since the 1960s, which has left it poorer than the Flemish half of the country—a major reversal of fortune. The
communauté
is not doing as much as it wishes it were, but it does manage to achieve a fair bit through the Francophonie (discussed in chapter 16). Outside of France, Canada and Quebec are the most openly active, because both levels of government are actually competing for recognition and prestige abroad (Quebec has its own network of overseas bureaus and delegations). For instance, each supports its network of Canadian or Quebec studies; the International Association of Quebec Studies has an assortment of 2,600 experts in fifty fields of research in sixty-five countries.