The Story of French (42 page)

While French remains largely a language of the elite, many Africans don’t think of it as a foreign language. At the cinema near our hotel in Dakar, Senegalese were going to see American films, but dubbed in French, not Wolof (the same is true in Algiers, Beirut, Yaoundé, Abidjan and Libreville). Though few children make it through the school system, most get some schooling and experience of French culture. The media expose them to French cultural references—radio is important everywhere. Since French is the language of everything from banking to industry and government, even poorly schooled children have good reasons for learning it—the life of our tour guide Ibrahima Kouyaté shows this well. As Coulibayi told us, “Links are so strong with France, francophones and French that it would take a strong, concerted and uncontested government policy to make even a small change here. I simply don’t see it happening at present.”

In Lebanon, however, English is definitely on the rise. Historically, Lebanese Muslims have tended to speak English and pursue university studies at the American University in Muslim West Beirut. English is slowly taking over as the language of science, and increasingly as the language of business among both Muslims and Christians, and this trend will continue. But for the moment French is still firmly established as the language of intellectual life; Arabic remains the language of culture and communication. As Fady Zein, the Lebanese consul in Montreal, told us, “So far, English is advancing, but not really hurting French.”

As in Lebanon, English is making progress in Morocco, but again not really at the expense of French. Mohammed Guerssel, a Moroccan linguist at the Université du Québec à Montreal who returns to Morocco regularly, told us he has noticed a definite increase in English in the past decade, particularly in advertising (we have noticed the same in France over the past six years). But he doesn’t feel it’s threatening the status of French. “For English to overtake French, the Moroccans would have to make a conscious effort, and for most people, switching to English and dropping French is just not worth the trouble,” he explained. “In the end, decision-makers always do things gradually, so they won’t do anything radical to change the status of French. French is free. As an international language, it still does the job.”

Chapter 15 ~

Rocking the Boat

After the long winter, the temperature in Quebec rises quickly in March as the days get longer and the National Hockey League begins its playoff season. Hockey has been an obsession of French Canadians since Radio-Canada started broadcasting Montreal Canadiens games in the 1940s. The hockey hero of the time—and for all time—was Maurice Richard, baptised Le Rocket in Quebec Frenglish. Quebeckers revered him for beating off his English opponents and reversing the odds of the game seconds before it ended. When the game wasn’t going his way, Richard would drop his gloves and hammer
les maudits Anglais
(the damned English) with his bare hands. This gumption made Richard virtually a cult figure. He could have become premier of Quebec if he had wanted to.

Without knowing it, Richard was the catalyst for a rage growing among French Canadians in the 1950s. When he was disqualified from the Stanley Cup playoffs for punching a referee in 1955, the National Hockey League’s decision provoked a riot, as hockey fans ransacked Montreal’s St. Catherine Street on St. Patrick’s Day. Though he was a rather humble fellow who never fully understood the symbolic burden that Quebeckers had loaded on his shoulders, Maurice Richard was in many ways the Cassius Clay of French Canadians. The Stanley Cup riot, the first major incident of French Canada’s political awakening, took place when black Americans and colonial Africans were demanding emancipation and looking for ways to gain power and affirm their rights. In Quebec the movement gained momentum in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) launched a terrorism campaign of bombing and kidnapping. (Some Quebec revolutionaries also nurtured friendships among the Black Panthers, and a few were even questioned regarding an attempt to bomb the Statue of Liberty, and other terrorist activities.)

The link with the cause of ethnic minorities and anti-colonial discourse was a powerful one. One prominent FLQ sympathizer (and terrorist), Pierre Vallières, wrote a book called
Les nègres blancs d’Amérique
(
White Niggers of America
). The title pretty much encapsulated the feelings growing among Quebeckers at the time. In 1968 Quebec poet Michèle Lalonde published a poem called “Speak White” that made a strong link between the two causes. “Here, language is the equivalent of the issue of colour for American Blacks,” she explained. “The French language is our black colour.” The title of the poem hit home with Quebeckers to the extent that now, forty years later, people still quote it, even if few have ever read any of her poetry.

Quebec was not an isolated case among North American francophone communities. The same resentment was simmering in New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and Louisiana. As in the European colonies in Africa, North American francophones had become fully conscious that they were subjects of political domination, and they were determined to do something about it. Their resentment took different forms and led to different results. In Quebec, francophones went as far as threatening secession. Their stance forced other Canadians to reconsider the foundation of their national identity, but also produced a prosperous francophone society within the Commonwealth, where it had been buried for two centuries. On the heels of Quebec, Cajuns, Acadians and French Canadians outside Quebec also organized to fight for their language and identity. Canadian francophones succeeded in reconfiguring the language policy of their entire country. Even in Louisiana, where French had almost disappeared, Cajuns mobilized their community and found a way to inject the French language back into their culture.

The target of the French-Canadian uprising was not simply English. By the 1920s French Canadians in Quebec were starting to feel alienated by the dominant political and religious discourse in their own province. The majority of francophones were living in cities by this time, but the Catholic Church still portrayed urban life as a source of temptation and a threat to the French language. Where language was concerned, the Church was not entirely wrong: Roughly eighty percent of the economy was owned by “the English” (who were in fact English, Scottish and Irish industrialists). As an urban proletariat, francophones had little power to refuse the bosses’ language. But with its increasingly out-of-touch idealization of traditional life on the farm, the Church was ignoring an important change: Quebec was quickly transforming itself from a rural to an industrial society. The urban French Canadians, well schooled and up to date, were about to modernize the province and transform it almost entirely over a two-decade period known as the Quiet Revolution.

It began in the 1960s, when a generation of “Young Turks” took power in Quebec with the singular goal of changing the society wholesale. They were led by a former federal civil servant, Jean Lesage. Within a few years Lesage’s “
équipe du tonnerre
” (thunder team) had created the French Language Board, the Ministry of Education, Quebec Hydro and the Quebec Pension Plan—institutions that were all necessary for economic development and the survival of French. Lesage’s successors made French the language of business and produced strict language laws to protect it (see chapter 18). They also created freestanding diplomatic services for Quebec, which sometimes operated in conflict with Canada’s.

In 1967 Montreal hosted the World’s Fair, Expo 67, which would turn out to be one of the most widely attended ever, with sixty million visitors, including seventy-five heads of state. One of these visitors, French president Charles de Gaulle, provoked a political earthquake in Canada when he concluded a speech from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall by declaring, “
Vive le Québec libre!
” (“Long live a free Quebec!”). De Gaulle’s words were a catalyst for the rising Quebec independence movement, and Canada is still feeling their effect today, as tensions persist over the question. The Parti Québécois, a political party created in 1968 with the specific goal of making Quebec an independent country, conducted two controversial referendums on Quebec separation, in 1980 and 1995. The first rejected separation solidly, with a fifty-nine percent majority, but in the second the separatists lost narrowly, by less than one percent of the popular vote.

Political activism was only one part of the picture. Quebec was also in a period of radical social change and going through a powerful cultural renaissance that would, in turn, create a vibrant, productive, modern society—the province of Quebec alone was the U.S.’s eighth-largest trade partner in 2005. Up until then French Canadians had devoted most of their energy to survival, and their contribution to the arts, industry, culture, technology and science in the French-speaking world had been nowhere near that of Belgium or Switzerland. The 1960s sparked a reversal of a two-hundred-year-old trend of isolation. French Canadians began to contribute to French intellectual and industrial production and even to export their own culture, to the point that, today, cultural exchange between Canada and France is actually a two-way street. Dozens of Quebec artists, writers, musicians and cultural figures—from Félix Leclerc and Robert Charlebois to Nelly Arcand—are celebrities in France. In recent years the French have had so much exposure to Quebec singers, actors and films that they have begun to think of them as their own. Quebec has six general-interest TV channels, ten daily newspapers and eighty radio stations. Quebec multinationals run by francophones are now active in sectors as varied as aviation, retail, transport, finance, the construction industry and printing.

The road to this cultural renaissance was a rocky one for all North American francophones. One of the great paradoxes of the Quiet Revolution is that, while it boosted Quebec’s presence in Canada and the world, it cut off other French Canadians and Acadians from Quebec, leaving them isolated inside Canada. In the 1960s Quebec appropriated all the symbols of French-Canadian nationalism for itself, from music to cuisine to the fleur-de-lys flag. French-Canadian culture became “Quebec culture” practically overnight. About a thousand associations inside Quebec replaced the “French-Canadian” in their name with “Quebec” for example, the Académie canadienne-française became the Académie des lettres du Québec (Quebec Literary Academy). French Canadians outside Quebec became cultural orphans and the “French-Canadian nation” splintered into
Franco-albertains
in Alberta,
Fransaskois
in Saskatchewan,
Franco-manitobains
in Manitoba and
Franco-ontariens
in Ontario.

At the same time, these “other” French Canadians continued to demand their rights in Canada, and more and more stridently. By the beginning of the 1960s there was no way to hide from the noise. Canada’s prime minister of the time, Lester Pearson, a former diplomat who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in defusing the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, was a strong believer in political compromise. In 1963 he created the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to investigate this so-called “French crisis” (a catchphrase used at the time for French Canadians’ dissatisfaction). Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the dashing forty-year-old fully bicultural patrician who followed Pearson, made decisive moves to help preserve French in Canada. The most important was the
Official Languages Act,
passed in 1969, which declared Canada officially bilingual and made it mandatory for the Canadian government, its institutions and its agencies to provide services in both French and English. It was a courageous move. A Belgian-style linguistic division of territory (French speakers and Flemish speakers each control half of the country, and minorities within these territories have no linguistic rights) would have been much easier to pull off. Instead, Trudeau applied a bilingual policy to the whole country, setting a national standard and reversing a century of assimilation policies in Canada. The new law stated that designated jobs in the federal civil service would have to be filled by bilingual candidates, and the move lent a distinct advantage to French Canadians, since they have always been more bilingual than English Canadians.

Some Canadian provinces embraced Trudeau’s policy willingly, but most refused to apply the changes that their own French-language minorities demanded. In reaction, Franco-Manitobans went as far as challenging the legality of their province’s English-only laws. In 1979 Canada’s Supreme Court declared all of Manitoba’s laws constitutionally invalid, since they were written only in English. On the other hand, Ontario and New Brunswick, the two provinces with the largest francophone minorities, reacted to official bilingualism by opening French schools or greatly improving the ones they already had. Surprisingly, Trudeau’s measures were not popular in Quebec. After centuries of assimilation efforts by English Canadians, Quebeckers resented the federal government’s telling them how to protect their English-speaking minority—who represent a tenth of Quebec’s population today—particularly since English Quebeckers had always had constitutional guarantees protecting education and health services in their language (and still do). Despite this controversy, Trudeau enshrined the rights of linguistic minorities when he repatriated Canada’s constitution with the
Constitution Act
of 1982. In 1988 his successor gave some sections of the
Official Languages Act
precedence over any other government act except the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Many problems have arisen in the application of official bilingualism in Canada. Resistance to this policy remains strong everywhere. The country’s capital city, Ottawa, simply refuses to declare itself a bilingual city. Many government jobs that are required by law to be reserved for bilingual staff are still given to unilingual anglophones. And the very large majority of universities of English Canada do not yet require a second language as a condition for graduation and still consider French a foreign language on a par with German, Spanish or Japanese.