The Story of French (50 page)

In a way, it’s surprising these beliefs survived the nineteenth century at all, not to mention the twentieth. While French was spreading rapidly throughout France in the nineteenth century, the French were also in the process of transforming their predominantly agrarian society into a modern consumer and industrial society, open to the world. More people were using French in everyday business, so the language was no longer the exclusive property of an educated elite. As French spread into new segments of society, it needed new words to describe new realities. This called for the development of a modern vocabulary, a process that should have challenged the idea that language was fixed. But it didn’t. By 1945 France could finally be considered fully French, but since the school system continued to teach that French was immutable, the myth has remained as strong as ever. Throughout this process France’s
élites bien-parlantes
(well-spoken elites) never stopped complaining about the low quality of the French being spoken in France.

The other phenomenon that should have shaken purist dogma was a great shift in sources of standards, resulting from the change and expansion of the traditional language elite. The introduction of universal schooling in France broadened the traditional elite to include a new class of teachers and educated French. When they started to gain influence, it was they, not the French Academy, who decided what was French and what was not. Since the Second World War the mass media (newspapers, radio and TV, the Internet) have in turn competed against this elite (schools, teachers, the
lettrés
) in setting the standards of French. Since then, dictionaries have also multiplied, each with a different approach to the language.
Le Robert
and
Le Multi
(from Quebec) challenge the old certainties of
Larousse
and
Le Littré
. The result is that today, teachers, especially in France, still teach a very purist
norme,
but they must justify their position vis-à-vis the competing models provided by dictionaries and the media—which did not exist fifty years ago.

The other change has, of course, been in numbers. French has become the mother tongue of most French citizens, compared to a mere third at the time of the French Revolution. Since 1945 the population of France has increased by half, and the total number of native francophones, school-francophones or partial francophones in the world has grown to at least three times the population of France. The number of French-speaking countries has multiplied eightfold, each with its own sense of nationhood, which is often tied to language. By 2000 French was spoken by 175 million people in over fifty countries.

So the sources of standards for French have become even more diffuse. Every year new editions of dictionaries land on bookstore shelves in France, and French newspapers report on the new words and definitions at great length. The big surprise in 2006 was the entry in the
Larousse
dictionary of Quebec terms such as
trâlée
(a bunch) and
outarde
(Canada goose), and the addition of Quebec meanings for existing French terms such as
calotte
(in France, a skullcap or ice cap; in Quebec, a baseball cap) and
jambette
(in France, a small furniture leg; in Quebec, tripping someone). When Jean-Benoît went to school in the 1970s, the only dictionaries available were from France, with France-oriented references and examples. Today Quebec schoolchildren, teachers and parents have a choice between those dictionaries and half a dozen local dictionaries.

Yet despite all these new—and broadly accepted—sources of standards for French, and even though linguists and language historians have shown that belief in the
fixité
of the French language is pure superstition, the stance of conservative purists hasn’t changed. They still invoke the principle of
fixité
to reject new words and expressions, arguing that they don’t conform to the language used in the French classics. No institution has openly challenged them on this, which is strange, since French speakers everywhere use their language in a multitude of ways in everyday life and with a casualness that would make many academicians roll over in their graves. But francophones still believe in the
norme,
so instead of challenging purists, they have developed a kind of doublespeak about their language. Everyone knows that in real life variations occur and that people in different places use French differently, but they still pretend these variations don’t exist or dismiss them as illegitimate (since they don’t conform to the
norme
), at least in public.

While showdowns between the purists and the realists are ongoing, there is nothing black and white about the struggle over standards and who sets them. The lines between conservative purists and language realists shift constantly. The French Academy itself has played both sides. While to some extent the Academy operates as the head office of language purism, purism was once a progressive force (as we discuss in Chapter 8). But even in recent history the Academy has, from time to time, acted as a progressive force. For example, in 1901–5, the Academy proposed a significant spelling and grammar reform to the French government. The new elite of teachers and
lettrés
that was gaining influence at the time rejected the reform. When the Academy released its dictionary thirty years later, it didn’t include the very changes it had recommended earlier, again because of opposition from this group.

Nearly a century later, another group of language reformers took up the cause again and the Academy sided with them. In the late 1980s a group of linguists who were part of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française (High Council of the French Language) proposed a quite progressive spelling reform that would eliminate the circumflex accent in most words and rationalize the plurals of hyphenated words and anomalies in spelling and grammar. In all, it proposed modifying the spellings of some two thousand words, or about five percent of the Academy’s dictionary. The French government accepted the recommendations and promoted them as the new standard for government publications and exams. In 1990 the French Academy—some of whose members had been working with the Conseil and the government on the reforms—officially accepted the changes. Once again the Academy had been on the side of reform.

And once again public outrage killed the reform—outrage from the press, intellectuals and authors, but also opinionated members of the public, the amateur linguists we referred to earlier. Some journalists argued that the reform would make the classics unreadable (forgetting that the classics had been completely overhauled in the nineteenth century). One famous literary critic, who had actually been on the Academy’s reform committee, opposed the removal of the circumflex accent on the grounds that it would change the aesthetics of the language. But most of the protest boiled down to the fact that people were afraid that if they used the new spellings they would look as though they didn’t know how to write. In a culture where the spelling of
nénuphar
(water lily) with a
ph
had been driven into the heads of millions, who would dare be the first to spell it with an F?

In the end, the reform was implemented by some, not by others.
Le Robert
dictionary accepted it, but not
Le Larousse.
It was adopted in France, but never widely taught. (A similar reform of German spelling and grammar took place at about the same time and was sunk after a very similar controversy.) In all fairness, some of the opposition came from the fact that the reform was too timid—a
réformette,
really—and should have instead attacked some of the major stumbling blocks in French grammar. Nevertheless, the Academy had been at the forefront of reform, challenging the reactionary purists.

However, seven years later, in a more typical gesture of conservatism, the Academy refused a proposal from politicians to officially feminize all job titles. Since French has no neutral gender and the role of neutrality falls to the masculine gender without exception, women ministers, judges, professors and captains are not called
la ministre, la juge, la professeure
or
la capitaine.
These titles are reserved for the
wives
of ministers, judges, professors or captains. A female minister in France is
Madame LE ministre.
As part of the women’s movement, Quebeckers began feminizing all titles in the late 1970s. So today in Quebec, people use
auteure, écrivaine, ingénieure, professeure
and
avocate
for female authors, writers, engineers, professors and lawyers.

In 1986 a French political commission studied the feminization of some five thousand job titles and made proposals along the lines of those adopted in Quebec. But they ran into a brick wall at the Academy, whose members categorically rejected the idea on grounds that the reform would “attack the neutrality of the functions.” (Actually, they didn’t mind if trades like butchers took a feminine form, but feminizing functions like “minister” was another matter.) The issue resurfaced in 1997 when a new socialist government appointed a number of female ministers who took the title
la ministre.
Once again the French Academy rose to the defence of
le bon français
and officially opposed the new titles, even though they were widely used.

The Academy has not budged on the issue since 2000, despite the fact that the new permanent secretary is a woman. As we mentioned in chapter 3, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse refuses to be called
Madame la secrétaire perpétuelle
and adamantly maintains that she is
le secrétaire perpétuel.
When we heard her explain her position to French teachers during the conference in Atlanta, we saw many heads shaking in disagreement. Yet most French teachers are under the sway of purism, and we suspect that many of them would actually have rejected the spelling reform Carrère d’Encausse’s predecessor had pushed for in 1990.

At the end of her speech we asked Carrère d’Encausse to explain her rationale for opposing feminization of titles. She told us that the Academy’s job was to “consecrate usage” and that the feminization of titles was not in usage. In reality, the French Academy and the French administration stand as the last bastions of resistance to this change, because most French media (not to mention most French people) already feminize titles in everyday speech and use
la ministre
and
la juge
when referring to the women who hold these titles (they are not talking about the minister’s or the judge’s wife). Following the Quebec practice, more and more francophones everywhere feminize titles spontaneously. Switzerland even made it an official practice in 2002.

What francophones don’t seem to understand is how discourse on the decadence of French is used to camouflage the real motives of the most extreme purists. In the opinion of famous linguist Claude Hagège, this insistence on the decadence of French is, more than anything, the expression of a class struggle over who gets to set the standard. Most purists’ rants about declining French are simply cleverly disguised criticisms of what they regard as bad taste or unacceptable styles of speech. In Atlanta, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse railed against declining French by citing examples of contemporary creation such as
je positive,
literally, “I positivate.” The use of the word
positive
as a verb may be offensive to good taste, but it is more a style of speech than an example of the corruption of the French language. Carrère d’Encausse was, in fact, using a common rhetorical tactic among language purists: She packaged her own personal distaste for certain expressions (rather dramatically) as an objective observation of the corruption of the French language.

In fact, many purists are amateur linguists and have no real leg to stand on when it comes to making claims about the decline of French. Permanent secretary and self-proclaimed guardian of the French language though she is, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is a Russia expert of note, not a linguist, so her judgement on such matters is questionable. For that matter, in the past 130 years only two members of the French Academy, Emile Littré and Gaston Paris, have been trained linguists, and they died in 1881 and 1903 respectively.

Will French speakers someday overthrow the reign of purism and block out the cacophony of amateur linguists? Having had the doctrine driven into their heads for over a century, the idea that there are
many ways of writing French
is not an easy one for French speakers to accept, at least openly. At the same time, modern forms of French show that
speakers
are using the language more casually than they have since the Renaissance. Like French writers prior to the seventeenth century, many modern speakers are fearless about exploring the potential of the language. And more and more, they just don’t care about the judgement calls of the purists.

Shocking as this may be to purists, there is not much they can really do to stem the change. Their influence is, in reality, limited to the sphere of beliefs. Of course, francophones still believe in the
norme.
But as they demonstrated with the
passé simple,
if the language doesn’t suit them, they won’t wait for anyone’s permission to change the rules. And as the sources for standards in French continue to multiply, purists will have a harder and harder time maintaining order in their own ranks, let alone pretending to dictate the rules.

Chapter 18 ~

Protecting the Future

Why has French remained influential even though it has slipped to ninth or twelfth place among the world’s languages in number of speakers? One reason, without a doubt, is that francophones have been effective in devising and applying measures to protect their language and culture. But there are many myths and misconceptions about language protection, especially where it concerns French. In fact, few people actually understand the point of language protection, let alone how it works.