The Story of French (9 page)

Besides, old habits die hard, and etymological spellings were already well-established among the
lettrés,
who were the primary consumers of books. Grammarians Jacques Peletier du Mans and Louis Maigret proposed making French spelling more phonetic in their respective books,
Dialogue de l’ortografe et de prononciations françoèze
(
Dialogue of French Spelling and Pronunciations
) and
Tretté de la grammere françoeze
(Treatise on
French Grammar
). While the innovations they proposed all made sense, they were never accepted. Over the next centuries there were several other attempts to make French spellings more phonetic, but they also failed. The reforms would perhaps have taken root if French had had fewer literate speakers and little tradition to speak of. But etymological spelling had already become the norm, and a
norme
is always very difficult to change. It took the Spanish language academy over a century and a half to make their language fully phonetic.

Grammar, previously the domain of monks and royal scribes, became a subject of study on its own during the sixteenth century. Like François I, grammarians (who were often printers) were obsessed with Latin; their chief motivation was not so much to define French as to show how French was distinct from Latin and Italian. The first real grammar of the French language was actually written by an Englishman, in Gothic letters. In 1530 John Palsgrave presented
Lesclarcissement de la langue Françoyse
—a book describing the multiple forms of French words and the grammatical structure of the language—to King Henry VIII and his daughter Mary, who was no doubt a victim of the Renaissance fashion for learning foreign languages. Twenty years later, Louis Maigret published the first grammar in France, his
Tretté de la grammere françoez
e. Dozens of grammars followed but, until the end of the century, spelling and grammar variation was still the rule in French. In fact, French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1522–90) used four different spellings for
à cette heure
(at this time):
à cett’heure, astheure, asteure
and
asture.

It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar (that is, popular) writing or for old medieval poetic forms such as rondeaux or madrigals, but not for “higher” forms of writing, higher learning or the sciences, which were still the exclusive domain of Latin. While François I didn’t regulate French in any way, his policies did legitimize the efforts of the many artists, poets, savants and printers who were trying to dump Latin and make French prestigious by inserting it into the language of state administration, universities and spheres of higher learning such as medicine and poetry.

In some ways writers led the way in this movement. The most militant anti-Latin lobby in France was a group of poets originally called the Brigade who were soon to choose a more poetic name: La Pléiade. They were up-and-coming writers who wanted to position themselves as a literary avant-garde. Their manifesto,
Déffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse
(
Defence and Illustration of the French Language
), was an indictment of Latin in favour of French. It was published in 1549, ten years after the publication of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Signed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay, it begged poets to use French for the new-found forms of classic Greek and Latin literature—the ode, the elegy, and comedy and tragedy (these were, of course, very old forms, but they were only just being rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a thousand years). In a chapter titled “Exhortation to Frenchmen,” Du Bellay wonders, “Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why do we use foreign languages as if we were ashamed to use our own?…Thou must not be ashamed of writing in thy own language.” The debate is surprisingly similar to the twentieth-century one in which French musicians wondered if it was possible to make rock ’n’ roll in their own language.

François I’s policies definitely added weight to the case made by Du Bellay and the Pléiade poets. While Du Bellay’s
Déffence
was in many ways a squabble between poets over their art, it also contained a program for the promotion of French in science and art. This influenced a generation of writers to seek originality in language rather than in style. As a result, metaphors and similes multiplied. Using Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, as a symbol for partying and high living was no longer enough. The historian Ferdinand Brunot, author of the monumental twenty-six-volume
Histoire de la langue française des origins à nos jours
(
History of the French Language from Its Origins to the Present Day
), written at the beginning of the twentieth century, found no fewer than a hundred far-fetched expressions that were being used at the time around the idea of Bacchus, including
triomphateur indien
(Indian victor),
cuissené
(thigh-born) and
beaucoup-formes
(many forms).

The professed leader of the Pléiade, Pierre de Ronsard, gained acclaim as “the prince of poets and the poet of princes.” Ronsard is famous for developing the alexandrine, a twelve-syllable verse form that became the canon of French poetry—French required longer verses because some of its features, such as the articles (which didn’t exist in Latin), added extra syllables. Another member of the Pléiade, Antoine de Baïf, went as far as creating a new, fifteen-foot verse form called the
baïfin.
The freedoms the Pléiade poets took were very similar to those that Rabelais employed in the lowly art of humorous prose. They spent the next thirty years applying their program, developing the language in sometimes very imaginative ways. From the noun
verve
(eloquence) they derived a verb,
verver,
and an adverb,
vervement.
They wanted people to use verbs as nouns—to write
l’aller
(going),
le chanter
(singing),
le vivre
(living),
le mourir
(dying).

In spite of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts and Du Bellay’s
Déffense,
Latin remained an important language in sixteenth-century France, especially in education and culture. But things were changing, as the career of Michel de Montaigne shows. Montaigne was the son of a fishmonger turned nobleman who lived in Périgord, east of Bordeaux, who wanted to consolidate his new rank through the proper education of baby Michel. Normally the younger Montaigne’s mother tongue would have been Gascon, a
langue d’oc
spoken in Aquitaine. But when he started to speak, his father hired a German tutor, giving him orders to speak to the child only in Latin—in fact, the whole household used Latin. As a result of his intensive immersion program, the young Michel de Montaigne spoke fluent Latin at age six—a skill that left him bored for the rest of his school years while his schoolmates struggled to catch up with him. While rare, Montaigne’s Latin immersion remained the ideal scenario, and it produced the desired result: social promotion. He grew up to become mayor of Bordeaux and a special agent to King Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV.

When Montaigne began his literary career, he chose to write neither in Latin nor in Gascon, but in French, creating a whole new genre of literature. Considered one of the leading lights of Renaissance writing, on a par with Machiavelli and Erasmus, Montaigne invented the personal essay. He is the first example of a writer using literary introspection to create a mental portrait of himself. In
Les Essais
(
Essays
), which he published in 1580 at the age of forty-eight, he describes his feelings, his physical appearance, even his bowel movements, and speculates about the merits of love “in the manner of the Greeks.” His famous phrase explaining his friendship with the scholar La Boétie—“
Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi
” (“Because it was him, because it was me”)—emphasized the new centrality of human experience, and is still frequently quoted. Shakespeare quoted one of his essays (“On Cannibals”) in
The Tempest.
Montaigne’s approach and writing are so contemporary in style that it is possible to read them in the original without annotations.

But Latin remained the language of scholarly domains such as theology and philosophy. Students caught speaking French at the University of Paris in the 1620s were flogged. In 1637, nearly a century after Du Bellay’s manifesto and the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, philosopher René Descartes (1596–1659) was the first to publish a philosophical treatise in French, the famous
Discours de la méthode
(
Discourse on Method
). Descartes sought to unify all knowledge under a single mathematical principle. He invented coordinate geometry, and his contributions to physics methodology and metaphysics were invaluable. The extended preface of his book, which explains his method—based on doubt—is a classic of philosophy; that’s where his famous formula “
Je pense donc je suis
” (“I think, therefore I am”) appears. Yet, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, Descartes felt he needed to justify his choice of French over Latin, since many erudite circles still regarded French as too vulgar for science:

If I write in French, which is the tongue of my country, rather than Latin, which is the tongue of my preceptors, it is because I hope that those who use their natural and pure sense of reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who only believe old books; and to those who join good sense with study, whom I prefer to have as judges, they will not be, I hope, so partial to Latin that they will refuse to hear my reasonings because they are expressed in popular language.

Although Descartes switched back to Latin for his next two philosophical books,
Metaphysical Meditations
and
The Principles of Philosophy,
he had broken the ice by using French. In fact, he and his contemporaries had made a major contribution to the language. They had done the groundwork that prepared for the next stage in the evolution of French: the creation of the Académie française, the French Academy.

Chapter 3 ~

The Dawn of Purism

In the summer of 2004 we headed out on a three-week road trip down the Mississippi River basin to study the history of French colonialism in the area. On our way back from Louisiana, we stopped in Atlanta, Georgia, to attend a convention of the International Federation of Teachers of French. It was a big event, with 1,300 delegates from 115 countries, including government representatives from France, Canada, Quebec and Belgium. To top it all off, the opening lecture of the conference was given by no less than the
secrétaire perpétuel
(permanent secretary) of the French Academy, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse.

In a Chanel-style skirt suit, with a professorial air, Madame Carrère d’Encausse spoke at great length about the continuing urgency of upholding language standards in France. She discussed the Academy’s effort to rid the French of
mots mal faits
(poorly made words) and explained recent attempts to reform spelling in France. At least three-quarters of the conference participants came to hear her—a huge turnout—and she flattered her international public by calling them “pioneers of the French language.”

The
secrétaire perpétuel
had her detractors, though. She staunchly opposes feminizing titles, a stance that many in the (largely female) audience found hard to swallow. In French there is no neutral gender, and titles are generally masculine. Carrère d’Encausse herself pointedly insists on being called Madame
LE secrétaire perpétuel
rather than
LA secrétaire perpétuelle.
Still, the furrowed brows in the audience didn’t discourage the barrage of praise she received after her speech. When she stepped down from the podium, dozens of teachers—people from as far away as Korea, central Asia and Africa—flocked to have their pictures taken in Carrère d’Encausse’s presence. Her star status had nothing to do with her long career, illustrious though it was (she is a specialist of Russian, not French); people were simply thrilled to be in the presence of the head of the French Academy.

This admiration for the French Academy is very old. The seven hundred or so members the Academy has elected over the past four centuries are still referred to as “immortals,” even after they are dead. In France the election of a new member of the French Academy—two per year, on average—is covered on the evening news. France has four other academies, for sciences, fine arts, history and humanities, but only the language academy provokes this lasting fascination, both inside and outside France.

Francophones are not the only ones who cherish their language, but among international languages their attitude is unique (except maybe for the case of classical Arabic, to which many Muslims attribute a sacred value). French speakers not only accept the idea that their language should adhere to grammar and spelling standards, but many francophones even refer to their language as a “monument” or a “work of art.” Debates about grammar rules and acceptable vocabulary are part of the intellectual landscape and a regular topic of small talk among francophones of all classes and origins—a bit like movies in Anglo-American culture. The French language does evolve, but it’s always against the background of this deeply entrenched idea that some French is good and some is not. “
C’est une faute
” (“It’s a mistake”) and “
Dit-on ceci ou cela?
” (“Should we say this or that?”) are such common remarks that few really stop to think of this attitude towards language as a peculiar cultural trait. It all boils down to norms, or, as francophones say, the
norme.
In the back of any francophone’s mind is the idea that an ideal, pure French exists somewhere. And that somewhere is, at least symbolically, the French Academy.