The Story of French (7 page)

As we read on the plaque, it was here, in August 1539, that François I signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. This document is often cited as a founding act of the French language. However, the Ordinance was not really
about
language. Its title,
Ordonn
nces royaulx sur le faict de iustice (Royal Ordinance on the Act of Justice
), makes that pretty clear: Its purpose was to give the monarchy more power to organize and administer French society. And it would do so by restricting the power of the clergy to religious matters.

At the time, the Catholic Church, under the central authority of the Pope, was better organized and in some ways more influential and more powerful than many states in Europe. The French king could muster an army and had six thousand civil servants working for him, but this was no match for the army of clerics that ran day-to-day affairs in France. The Church administered canon law, ran tribunals, even delivered the mail. Its clerics not only presided over moral issues, they also dictated the behaviour of kings. Kings would abide by the Church, and if they challenged it, the Church favoured their opponents.

François I understood the threat of the Church better than his predecessors. Absolutism had been a growing trend in France, but he took it to a new level. A mere week after he was crowned, he coined the motto that French kings would live by for the next three centuries:
Car tel est notre plaisir
(For such is our pleasure). François, the first king to be called
Votre majesté
(Your Majesty), was determined to push the State into the Church’s realm and to extend the State’s control over French territory. He established his own postal system and he created the Trésor de l’épargne (Royal Treasury), which centralized tax revenues and established a tax collection system throughout France that would help fill the royal coffers and, among other things, finance his campaigns in Italy.

For François, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was a way of reducing the power of the Church and increasing his own. For the first time the State would set the rules for how officials would be sworn in, how oaths would be made, how witnesses would be heard in court and how judgements would be ruled and enforced. According to the Ordinance, the Church could no longer challenge secular judges. The Ordinance allowed the clergy to keep registers of births, marriages and deaths, but it stipulated that all those documents had to be countersigned by a notary.

So how was language affected? Two of the 192 articles in the Ordinance, numbers 110 and 111, stated that from that moment, all rulings and administrative documents would be produced “
en langage maternel françoys et non autrement
” (“in the French mother tongue and not otherwise”). The “otherwise” referred primarily to Latin, the language of the Church. From here on, all magistrates, clerks and functionaries working in French lands were instructed to use French in official documents. Trials would be carried out and verdicts delivered in French, not Latin. This attack on Latin explains the use of the term
mother tongue
in reference to French. In sixteenth-century linguistics, “mother tongue” is the language spoken at home, as opposed to the
langage paternel
(father’s tongue), which here was Latin, the language of the Church (the term
vernacular
appeared in French only in 1765).

With the language articles François solved two problems. First, he reduced the use of Latin, and with it the influence of the Church in legal affairs. But he also put himself in a neutral position between the Protestants and the Catholics. Religious tensions were so acute in sixteenth-century France that subjects declared themselves Catholic or Protestant before any other allegiance. François knew that, to be king of all the French, he couldn’t just be king of the Catholics. A considerable part of the aristocracy was converting to Protestantism at the time—including two of his own kin. Protestants rejected Latin and encouraged vernacular languages, both as a refusal of Rome and to reach out to the lower classes. By rejecting Latin and encouraging the use of the French vernacular, François I knew, the Ordinance would appease them.

But Latin wasn’t the only target. The Ordinance was also directed at the galaxy of Romance and non-Romance languages that were still being spoken in France. By forbidding official procedures to be performed or official documents to be written in any other idiom than French, François boosted the power of his own functionaries and reduced the power of the counts, dukes and other nobles who were still running France.

The Ordinance did not include penalties for people who did not respect it—the King had no way of enforcing them all over his territory anyway. There certainly was some tacit resistance, but historians on the whole agree that the kingdom accepted it, even though it was never fully applied (as we show in chapter 6, administrators at the time of the French Revolution were still using local languages). The grammarian Pierre de la Ramée (1515–72), known as Petrus Ramus, recorded an amusing anecdote about a delegation of deputies from the Parliament of Provence who travelled to Paris to convince the King to let them keep using Provençal. The King refused to hear their case in any language other than French, so the delegates spent months learning enough French to make their case. When they came before the King again, he ridiculed them for arguing their case against French
in French,
and sent them back to Provence.

Did the Ordinance help the French language spread? Most historians say it probably didn’t have much impact. French had been the language of power for centuries by that time and was spreading on its own. In Brittany, courts had been using French since the eleventh century; it was declared the official language in 1260. In a study on the development of French, Professor Serge Lusignan of the Université de Montréal examined charters copied in France’s official registers between 1285 and 1380, and found an important shift in language use in the late 1320s. In 1328 eighty percent of charters were written in Latin. Two years later, eighty percent of them were written in French. (The process was not exactly linear. In 1350 charters were once again being written in Latin; then, ten years later, French returned and was used in the majority of charters copied. No one has an explanation for this, but the trend towards French continued.) The Toulouse Parlement began using French in the early 1400s. In Bordeaux, French replaced Gascon for notary acts in 1444. So by the time of François I, people who wanted power knew they needed French.

Was the French language ready for such an important role? Interestingly, the original text of the Ordinance, as well as the works of other writers of the period, shows that French had taken on most of its modern characteristics by this time. Written examples of sixteenth-century French are hard to read because they use Gothic characters, but the syntax of the language was distinctly French, not Romance. People did not write
cort li roy,
but
la cour du roy
(the king’s court). Demonstrative articles such as
cette
or
celle
(this, that) were common—even if people still said
cestui
instead of
celui
(this one). Still, a few confusing matters remained; for example, plurals were indicated by both S and Z—people were still not sure which to use. As in Spanish, if the subject was obvious from the verb ending, pronouns were often dropped; so, for example,
nous voyons
(we see) appeared as just
voyons.
But otherwise, it was modern French–or at least a form intelligible to today’s readers.

In some ways the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was not as important to French as other things that François I did to promote the language. Charles de Gaulle’s obsession with France’s grandeur, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s vision of the Francophonie, Pierre Trudeau’s Canadian-style official bilingualism, René Lévesque’s French-language charter, Jacques Chirac’s incantations about the “cultural exception”—all of these contain echoes of François’s work. He was the first French king to create a policy for the promotion of culture and to link it specifically to the French language.

Making France a cultural leader in Europe was no small task. At the time France was known for its rich lands, strong military power and religious influence, but the French themselves were regarded as a rather crude and coarse lot. François I may have exhausted the French treasury with endless military campaigns in Italy, but through them he brought the Italian Renaissance to France—starting with Leonardo da Vinci and some of his paintings in 1516. By marrying his son Henri to the Florentine noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici, he also brought Italian cuisine to France; she brought her own cohort of Italian cooks, who set a new cooking standard for France. More than any king before him, François welcomed musicians, painters, writers and sculptors to his Court; he encouraged them to innovate, pretended to consult them on important matters and gave them lots of work. He launched an architectural frenzy in France by commissioning eight new castles along the Loire River. He renovated the Louvre palace, which had until then been just a fortress with a dungeon, and he built the Hôtel de ville (City Hall) in Paris. In one of his castles, Fontainebleau, he pushed artists to develop new styles and techniques, including the first erotic representations of the human body in French art, which were widely circulated, thanks to the printing press and the technique of engraving. Through that whole process he raised the profile of his countrymen immensely in Europe.

He also raised France’s intellectual stature. François was determined to impress the Humanists, a group of influential thinkers who were in the process of forming the first non-religious, pan-European intellectual elite. Inspired by Italian thinkers, who were in turn inspired by classical Greek literature, the Humanists emphasized human experience over religious and scientific dogma. François founded the Collège royal
—
today called the Collège de France
—
where six royal readers taught Greek, Hebrew and mathematics, disciplines the conservative Sorbonne refused to teach. And this teaching was free and open to all. The royal readers were independent of the University of Paris and sheltered from the religious tribunals that rejected everything new.

The Church was so hostile to novelty that it refused to teach Greek. So François I created the Imprimerie royale to publish Greek classics. He also unified his book collections in a royal library, which he opened to thinkers and writers. He even wrote some two hundred poems, beginning a line of artist-kings whose spiritual descendants would include everyone from Louis XIV, a ballet dancer, to Charles de Gaulle, a gifted writer, Georges Pompidou, a connoisseur of modern art, and Jacques Chirac, a collector of primitive art. Renowned novelist and essayist André Malraux was de Gaulle’s minister of cultural affairs. Before he became prime minister, foreign affairs minister Dominique de Villepin published an 822-page book of poetry while defending France’s position on Iraq at the United Nations (in the eyes of the American media, he’s never quite lived down either endeavour). In a way, all of them were merely following an old custom among French statesmen (and now women).

Although François’s interest in culture was sincere, he didn’t encourage art just for art’s sake. It was all part of a carefully designed strategy to influence nascent European public opinion and to compensate for France’s weakness compared to Spain, whose king controlled Flanders (Belgium and the Netherlands), the Holy Roman Empire (Italy, Germany and Austria) and colonies. Did it work? We can’t say, but Erasmus, one of the principal Humanist thinkers, often cited François I as an example of a
roi d’élite
(elite king). The English king Henry VIII tried to impress the Humanists with the same strategy.

Although Henry was much better read than François, he made the mistake of murdering Thomas More, the author of
Utopia,
after he opposed Henry’s break with the Catholic Church; the move was a public relations disaster that didn’t hurt the growing influence of French.

While François I ardently promoted French, he did nothing to regulate it. The French of the sixteenth century was not the orderly language it would become in the next century. Its vocabulary was expanding rapidly as French borrowed from other Latin-based vernaculars, including Spanish and, most important, Italian. French picked up and integrated as many as two thousand Italian words, such as
arcade, balcon
(balcony),
concert, cavalerie
(cavalry),
infanterie
(infantry) and
bizarre.
The result was a cornucopia of terms from regional and foreign languages.

For modern readers, the most surprising aspect of sixteenth-century French is its casualness. Most French speakers today, especially the purists, assume that French was born clear and uniform, but until the seventeenth century the language had none of the orderly precision for which it would be famous in centuries to come. During the baroque period, French was indeed baroque. Writers of François I’s era treated French like a buffet dinner, helping themselves to words from regional dialects and foreign languages, creating new words as it suited them, using verbs as nouns and basically serving up the language any way they pleased. This large-scale creativity and inventiveness gave writers a verve and a vigour that would never be matched once the cult of
bon usage
(correct usage) took hold in the next century.