The Story of French (56 page)

Of course, the castrating influence of conservative language purism doesn’t help. This is particularly strong in France, but in the back of the mind of most francophones is an academician who slaps their wrists for uttering new words or allowing new definitions for already existing words. English speakers are free of this hang-up. Many French speakers are attracted to the relaxed aspect of English and to the no-fuss way in which that language adapts to modernity. As we have seen, francophones are capable of dealing with modernity when they remain casual about their language and push aside the purist voices in their heads. But for many, it’s clearly easier to use English. In a way it feels like less of a betrayal of French.

A fifth cause for the disenchantment of some of the francophone elites is psychological; we call it
l’amour trahi
(betrayed love, in the sense of a spurned lover). Francophones, and particularly the French, have grown up believing in their language’s potential to be “universal,” to be used by everyone on the planet. As English makes further inroads (though it’s far from being truly universal), the French have become more disillusioned than ever about the failure of their language to deliver on its promise. The result is that many French speakers feel like jilted lovers: They resent the object of their pain as if it were the cause. With no small measure of extremism, many conclude that if French can’t be everything, then it can’t be anything. Francophones from outside of France tend to see the situation differently; as minorities constantly dealing with the presence of competing languages, they have never harboured illusions about the universality of French and have a more self-reliant approach to the language. In other words, they accept the idea that if French is to flourish, it’s up to them to act. They know no one else will do it for them, especially not the betrayed lovers in France.

In a closely related point, the French intellectual class seems to lack ambition. Until the Second World War, the francophone elites’ conviction that they wrote for the world drove the
rayonnement
of French culture. As we saw in chapter 5, there was a time when the French were so imbued with the ethic of their language’s clarity and purity that they were full of ambition to communicate to the whole world. Since the Second World War, it seems that in some ways they have turned inwards and become satisfied with writing and thinking only for themselves.

We could write an essay about this point, but two examples stand out. In the world of literary non-fiction and journalism, which we know well, French editorial practices often work against the goal of clarity. The French publish articles without indented paragraphs and books without indexes; they often write in long, windy sentences, to the point where great thinkers such as Michel Foucault are more readable in their English translation than in the French original. And what can explain the universal absence of indexes? Perhaps it’s either cost-cutting or an assumption that readers don’t need them. But researchers
do
need them. When faced with little time and a lot of material to cover, they will pitch the French books out the window and concentrate on the more accessible and user-friendly English ones. A comparison of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
with the
Encyclopédie universalis
speaks volumes on these different approaches (we used both in researching this book). It is true that
Universalis
articles are often geared to more specialized readers, but the writers make little effort to use plain language (this is all the more curious since, as we discuss in chapter 5, the original goal of encyclopedias was to make knowledge accessible to everyone!). Too often recently, intellectual productions in France have been imbued with a hermetic spirit. French intellectuals have evidently delegated the job of making sense of the world to other languages, and English has been waiting at the door, ready to work.

Another aspect of this lack of ambition is the complacency of the French university and post-secondary systems. French universities provide good instruction, but they do not capitalize on half the intellectual resources they have at their disposal. Their libraries are notoriously mediocre; faculties have no tolerance for hybrid specialities; universities are continually short of resources and fail to give students access to the most advanced research, because top research in France is done outside of universities in specialized centres. In all fairness, there are fields in which French research is cutting-edge, including mathematics, civil nuclear energy, oceanography, demography, the humanities and history. In those fields foreigners do read French journals—in French. But the competition is fierce and the French need to improve their universities in order to keep their competitive advantage. They have every right to leave their universities the way they are, but as education globalizes, France’s schools are not growing as fast as they could. Small may be beautiful, but it is also—well, small.

The debate over the relevance of French is normal. The same debate is taking place among speakers of the other international languages—with the exception of English. In our view the issue is less about reality than about perception. As we saw over the course of researching this book, the root of French’s problem is not that there is nothing going on in the language. The problem is one of spirit and attitude. The original domain of French seems to have lost its stamina, its fortitude, its spunk.

Francophone societies outside France also find France’s reluctance to defend and modernize the language insulting and alienating. Many North Africans now go to Quebec to pursue their studies, precisely because Quebec has no qualms about providing access to modernity in French. Furthermore, because their language is that of a minority where they live, francophones from Quebec, Belgium, Algeria and Senegal are accustomed to fighting for it. Listening to French defeatism simply appalls them. In the end, the global future of French depends on whether francophones, but particularly the French, decide that it matters, or not. And if the French won’t defend the place of French in French journals, who will?

If the French continue along the road they are on, they could miss a fantastic opportunity, the same way they did in America. The continent was up for grabs and they chose the slave islands instead of Canada and Greater Louisiana. The choice was not irrational at the time, but it lacked foresight, to put it mildly.

Basically the future of French boils down to a question of choice. Pro-English propaganda is
de bonne guerre
(fair enough) in a world where language has become an issue of power. But for francophones, believing that propaganda may amount to collective linguistic suicide. It is surprising to hear French people rationalize the success of English by arguing that English is more efficient than any other language for expressing certain concepts. It’s fair game for the anglophone media to make such a claim, but nobody is obliged to believe it. The French should know better, since they used the very same argument in the eighteenth century, when they claimed “what was not clear was not French.” No language is intrinsically more or less efficient or complicated than another. English is an extremely difficult language to master, primarily because there are so few rules and so many exceptions. Only a fool (or someone who speaks it poorly) would think it’s easy. But most of all, the French seem to forget that any language is the most efficient one for expressing its own ideas. Many words in French can be explained in English only through long definitions and clumsy paraphrases—
revendiquer, vie associative, nuire, abandon
and
rayonnement,
to name a few. The frequent and continual borrowings of French terms by English testifies to that. So why are the French so ready to sacrifice their mental universe?

This point was driven home to us by Stéphane Lopez, who runs the Francophonie’s program for promotion of French in the European Union. Part of Lopez’s job is to wrestle with people who argue that a single language (by which they mean English) is more efficient and less costly for translation. A single language is efficient only for those who master it. English has made remarkable progress in the European Union in the past ten years because non-anglophone diplomats accepted it. However, Lopez discovered that some European agencies have begun to reserve jobs for native English speakers only, on the grounds that they are more fluent in the extremely subtle word game of international diplomacy. “French, German or Italian diplomats have made concessions to English on the basis of courtesy, and also as a cheap means to further their career, but by doing so they have condemned their successors and their children to play second fiddle.”

Meanwhile, CEOs of French multinationals pride themselves on posting their communiqués in English, when they could at least post them in two versions. By the same token, it is remarkable that French scientists are not required to publish their studies in French as well as in English, as the Japanese are, as a condition of public funding. As one famous example has shown, it might even be to French scientists’ advantage. It took more than a decade for Pasteur Institute professor Luc Montaignier to prove that he had first identified the AIDS virus in 1983 and that the American scientist Robert Gallo had plagiarized his work, falsely claiming to have discovered the virus himself. Gallo had done the peer review for the English journal to which Montaignier had submitted his original findings. Had he published in French, Gallo would not have been able to claim paternity of Montaignier’s discovery. In fact, Gallo might even have had to learn French to stay up to date on research in the field. But as Professor Bernard Lecherbonnier puts it in his authoritative book
Pourquoi veulent-ils tuer le français?
(
Why Do They Want to Kill French?
), many French scientists have concluded that it is safer to join U.S. teams of scientists than try to make their name in the field in French.

It is useful to remember that the fundamental reason why English is where it is today is that the British and the Americans never lost their pride, even when they spoke a small language that nobody wanted to learn. As we saw in chapter 5, in the eighteenth century, when no one questioned the supremacy of French, the British recognized its usefulness and took what they needed from it, but never bought into arguments about its inherent value. In the end, it all boils down to choice.

Too much emphasis on how some francophones are surrendering to English might cast a shadow on the reasons for hope. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, not all francophones have thrown in the towel on French. Some actions now being taken to defend French even suggest that the momentum against French is reversible. In diplomacy, the Francophonie countries scored a major victory with the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity. At the European Union, the stellar rise in attendance for the French-language programs is promising. So far, few people are conscious of the fact that eleven of the twenty-five members of the European Union (soon to be thirteen out of twenty-seven, when Hungary and Romania join) are also members of the Francophonie. But if these countries play their cards skilfully on the issue of plurilingualism, the balance could tip in favour of the French geocultural sphere.

After years of pussyfooting and refusing to change their ways, French academic circles have begun merging universities and
grandes écoles
to make larger and more competitive institutions. This started when the first international ranking of universities produced by the University of Shanghai ranked only four French universities in the top hundred; some of the most prestigious
écoles,
such as the engineering Polytechnique, didn’t even place in the top two hundred! While a slap in the face to the French, the survey sent shock waves through the system and wiped out long-standing resistance to the idea of merging certain institutions. Since 2003 French institutions of higher learning have been undergoing a gigantic reorganization process. The
grandes écoles
have realized they are not so grand after all, and have accepted the idea of merging with universities.

And French literature is changing. Even if French authors are not as widely read as they used to be, France is finding ways to remain an important literary centre. In particular, French publishers are becoming more and more open to authors from languages other than French and English (the opposite trend is happening in the United States). In fact, many authors enter the international book trade when they are discovered by French publishers. Some have gone on to build considerable careers in French. Milan Kundera fled Czechoslovakia for Paris in 1975, wrote in Czech until 1989 and then switched to French. Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, originally from Calgary, learned French as a teenager in New Hampshire and then studied French literature at Harvard. She moved to Paris in the seventies, where she became part of a circle of left-wing intellectuals and began publishing in French. Spanish author Jorge Semprun fled Franco’s regime and moved to Paris in the 1940s. He began publishing in French in 1963 and published his first novel in Spanish only in 2003. Award-winning author André Makine left his native Russia and moved to France in 1987, where he began writing in French. And François Cheng, who studied French in China, became a naturalized French citizen in 1971 (that’s when he chose the name François). He was the first Asian to enter the French Academy, in 2002. And there are dozens of similar examples, not only in France, but also in Belgium and Quebec, not to mention the many francophone African authors who are now being studied in U.S. universities.

While French business people and CEOs may show a marked preference for English, they are still French, with the clout that carries. At the turn of the millennium 160 French companies opened shop in Slovenia. Overnight, registration for language classes doubled at the country’s French cultural centre. Evidently a number of ambitious Slovenians thought learning French would further their careers. The same thing happens wherever French companies and multinationals are active, whether it is Greenville, South Carolina, or Porto Alegre, Brazil.