The Story of French (8 page)

François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) is perhaps the best example of the unbridled creativity of this period. Rabelais, who signed his first books with the anagram Alcofribas Nasier, was a doctor and a former monk who devoted his life to humorous writing—his motto was “
Le rire est le propre de l’homme
” (“Laughter is unique to man”). A true Renaissance man, Rabelais hated superstition and the rigid scholastic teaching of universities, especially the Sorbonne. He published his thoughts in the vernacular so he could reach the greatest possible number of readers. His five-book cycle of the “very horrifying” adventures of the giant Gargantua and his no less “terrible” son Pantagruel is in great part a thinly disguised attack on the Church and the university. As he writes in chapter 8 of
Pantagruel,
“
Je voys les brigans, les boureaulx, les avanturiers, les palefreniers de maintenant plus doctes que les docteurs et prescheurs de mon temps.
(I see brigands, executioners, adventurers and grooms who are more learned than the savants and the preachers of my time.)” He thought the basic rule for monks should be “
Fais ce que voudras
” (“Do what you will”). No surprisingly, his five books were all condemned by the Sorbonne.

Though Rabelais’s works became classics of French literature, there was nothing classical about them. He freely invented vocabulary, experimented with sentence structure and new phrases, and adopted foreign words into his writing. In the scope of his vocabulary and the liberties he took, Rabelais had more in common with Shakespeare than with later French writers such as Corneille and Racine. Like Shakespeare, Rabelais can be difficult to read, not only because his writing is vulgar even by the standards of the time, but also because his inventiveness knows no bounds. The fourth book of the adventures of Pantagruel, for example, tells about battles against
andouilles
(sausages). The overall effect is just short of psychedelic. Like Shakespeare, Rabelais coined or popularized a number of words and lasting expressions, from
quintessence
and
dive bouteille
(“divine bottle”), to the racy “
faire la bête à deux dos
” (“make the beast with two backs,” or copulate).

Rabelais owed his success in part to a new technological innovation that was fuelling the literary activity of his day: the printing press, invented in Strasbourg in the 1430s. The invention of printing coincided with an abrupt increase in the urban elites of France, and the relative prosperity of the Renaissance spawned a middle-class hunger for books that grew throughout the century. Previously, knowledge could only be acquired by studying in a monastery or (if you were rich) by hiring a preceptor who had been trained in one. The availability of books created a kind of nouveau riche attitude towards the written word: People didn’t need to learn Latin anymore; they could acquire knowledge by buying books. Naturally this boosted the use of French. In 1501 only one in ten books published in France was written in French; by 1575, almost half were.

The rise of the printing press also coincided with the rise of Protestantism. As a rule, Protestants preferred vernacular languages to Latin, the language of the Catholic Church. Unlike the Church, they encouraged people to read the Bible, which was translated into French in 1530 and 1541. Protestant theologian Jean Calvin wrote religious treatises in French. Many Lutheran books were translated into French between 1520 and 1540, and after 1550, French was considered the language of the Protestant Church in France. Geneva, Amsterdam and cities in Flanders that were beyond the reach of religious or royal censorship became refuges for French-language printers. Over the next two centuries a considerable proportion of the French urban elite flirted with Protestantism—a phenomenon that would one day spread French across Europe.

All this activity had an impact on spelling and grammar. It was printers who drove the sixteenth-century effort to give French rules and standards. The business of turning sounds into written words in French was still relatively new, and spelling and grammar were progressing by trial and error. Apostrophes were seldom marked and the article was not separated from the word; for example,
l’esclaircissement
(the explanation) was written
lesclaircissement.
J and U were so novel that most people had not yet decided whether they were new letters in their own right or just fancy ways of writing I and V: A word such as
ajouter
(to add) was written
adiouter.
And most writers used U and V indiscriminately, so that
oeuvre
(work) read
oeuure.
Until well into the seventeenth century there were half a dozen different spellings for the verb “to know”:
connoistre, connaistre, cognoistre, cognaitre, congoitre
and
congnaitre.

Printers sought concise forms as a means of cost reduction. In the 1530s Geoffroy Tory, France’s royal printer, became famous for his work in systematizing the French language. In his book
Champfleury
he promoted the use of accents and the apostrophe. Keeping costs in mind, he also worked to replace Gothic characters with roman letters, which were more compact, using up less space on the printed page. The process did not happen overnight. The S was written as
well into the seventeenth century. Accents were beginning to be introduced into the texts of that time, and Tory promoted the
accent aigu,
as in é (first used in 1530), the
tréma
(as in ë, ï and ö) and the
cedilla,
as in
ça
(it).
Boutique
was written
bouti
. There were still wide graphical variations from text to text, and even within texts; for example, e sometimes appeared as ¢. If one added in all the possible variations, the sentence “
Je suis le sieur
” (“I am the sire”) could have been written “
I¢
vi
l¢
i¢vr
.”

This movement towards systematizing language obviously called for spelling rules. And this forced the question, Would French have phonetic or etymological spelling? In some modern languages today, such as Spanish and Arabic, spellings are phonetic. English and French are both notable for having maintained etymological spellings (that is, based on historic forms of the words), a trend that dates back to the twelfth century in the case of French. In some cases spellings conform to sounds; in others, they reflect the history of the word. This explains why, as writer Bill Bryson points out in
The Mother Tongue,
there are fourteen ways to write the sound
sh
in English. Phonetically,
sure
and
attention
would be spelled
shur
and
aten-shun,
but English speakers like to see the history of the word in its spelling. This is why French spellings, like English spellings, make little sense. Even German, with its complex grammar, is much more phonetic than either French or English.

When French printers started attacking the problem of spelling, they had very few models to follow; the only defined languages at the time were Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. Some printers represented the sounds
in, an, on
and
un
as
and
—not a bad idea. The word
champs
(field) was written
cha¯.
It could have worked if printers had agreed on standards. But they tended to stick to their own coding systems and used accents in extremely varied ways. One can only assume that each printer’s readers got accustomed to his system and that the printers then feared alienating their customers and losing business if they changed (somewhat like early computer makers, who developed languages and operating systems that could be used only by their specific machines, a problem that for some reason took forty years to solve). It took French printers roughly the entire sixteenth century to get rid of variations in spelling and accents, and it wasn’t until French grammar books started appearing that real standards took shape.