The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  Given this perception, many French see English as an escape hatch from their own purist language culture. The French consider the use of an anglicism as less of a faute than bad French. Even respected French editors tow this line. Jean-Benoît was writing back-cover copy for a book we published in France and wanted to use the term mondialisateur (globalizer, as a noun). The editor refused outright. “You can’t say mondialisateur, it’s not French,” she declared. She proposed using an English borrowing, globalisateur, instead. Jean-Benoît replied that the French term mondialisation (globalization) had been accepted in French dictionaries, as had mondialiser (the verb to globalize). But the editor countered that the form mondialisateur had not yet been accepted in dictionaries, so readers would consider it a faute. And that was the end of the discussion. (Mondialisateur has since come into use—though not without a fight—and no one would regard it as un-French today.)

  For that matter, class is a driving factor in the rising popularity of English in France. It is the exact opposite of the situation in Quebec. In Quebec, traditionally, less educated people speckle their French with English words, mainly out of ignorance. Historically, Quebec’s industry was so strongly dominated by English speakers that the largely francophone working class was often forced to speak English to their bosses, not to mention that they were deprived of proper schooling. (The stigma is still there today, even though educated Quebeckers certainly recognize the utility of speaking proper English.)

  It’s the opposite dynamic in France. English pops up in French speech because the French think it makes them sound worldly, sophisticated, or cool, as in the case of our friend François. The French speak much less English, on average, than Quebeckers do. But to them, English sends a signal of modernity. That’s the best explanation we can come up with as to why the French version of the televised singing competition The Voice is called The Voice (pronounced “zee voyiss” with a heavy French accent). Quebec just translated the show as La Voix, as Hispanic TV did with La Voz.8

  To their credit, the French do put English to good use and manage to come up with some creative linguistic innovations in the form of puns and witty combinations of English and French vocabulary and syntax. The newspaper Libération published a profile of a thirty-six-year-old female butcher who had gone into the business against her parents’ will at the age of fourteen. They called the piece “Very Good Tripes” (the French word tripes, for pork chitterlings, is pronounced exactly like “trip” in English). France’s Limousin region had an advertising campaign in the Paris subway with the slogan “Are You Lim?” (Are you in?), which was rather cute. Elle published an article about the Australian actress Naomi Watts with the title “Watt’s Happening?” Libération even used English to make fun of a French acronym: “Don’t Worry, Be HADOPI” was the title of an article about France’s Internet copyright protection agency, the Haute autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (HADOPI). In other words, the French are helping themselves to English like everyone else on the planet, and having a lot of fun with it.

  The controversy erupts, and purists’ feathers consequently get ruffled, when the French maladroitly conscript English to substitute for perfectly good French words. We saw a French ad for a running-shoe brand describing the footwear as “sneakers casual et trendy,” using the English words “casual” and “trendy” even though the French equivalents, décontractés and tendances, mean exactly the same thing. In an article about “le baby shower,” one clumsy reporter translated the phenomenon as a “douche de bébés” (a special type of shower for babies? Or a shower of babies?), not a shower of gifts for bébé. In 2012 France’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, developed a program to boost industrial promotion in France that he bizarrely dubbed “Made in France,” in English. Then there was the French press that dubbed the rampant criticism of President François Hollande le Hollande-bashing, and the business press that used the neo-English manageurs instead of gestionnaires or cadre (distinct French terms for two different types of manager) and trader instead of courtier. Of course, the French are still coming to terms with discussing business and money, so using pseudo-English might also be a way of subtly distancing themselves from a subject they don’t really like talking about anyway.

  French businesses themselves have a long love affair with make-believe English. Outstanding examples are the grocery chain Leader Price and the pizza chain Speed Rabbit Pizza. In recent years France’s famous retail chain, Monoprix, launched a catering service called “Monop Daily”—they tried “Mono Deli,” but “deli” wasn’t quite English enough, not to mention very close to the French word délit (offense), so French marketers went all the way and made it “daily.” For that matter, the French have adopted a number of English borrowings that English speakers would never even understand, like Recordman (French for record holder), babyfoot (table football), or the slang besta (children’s lingo for best ami, friend). Other English words have entirely separate careers in French, like zapping (channel surfing) or brushing (a blow dry for hair), destined exclusively for French consumption.

  But the main drive behind the rise in English borrowings and pseudo-English in French business is simple: English sells, or at least that’s what French marketers believe. Although coffee is marketed as “Italian” in France, its mother tongue is English. While we were in France, Nescafé ran a campaign with the English slogan “Coffee is not just black.” Nespresso ran commercials with the English slogan “What else?” in which George Clooney and Matt Damon delivered their lines without subtitles. In 2014 Nespresso even hired the French actor Jean Dujardin for the campaign, then had him speak English.

  The European Union is another factor behind the rise of English in French advertising. We discussed the issue with Catherine Grelier-Lenain, the director of ethics at the Autorité de régulation professionnelle de la publicité (ARPP), France’s regulatory agency for the publicity industry, and she confirmed our impression. As Grelier-Lenain explained, large European companies now produce pan-European advertising campaigns in English, then adapt them for each European market, so English is a convenient common tongue. “English also sells,” she told us.

  Another part of the problem is ARPP itself. The ARPP is one of a group of agencies and associations officially mandated to enforce France’s Toubon law, which has the rather open-ended goal of making sure “French companies communicate to the French public in a way that is understandable to them.” But it is a self-regulating body composed of advertising professionals, so members cut each other a lot of slack. For that matter, the ARPP has very loose criteria for what constitutes a violation of the Toubon law. As Grelier-Lenain explained, words that have already become part of current French vocabulary are exempt. She cited the French slogan for the hotel chain Sofitel, “Life is magnifique,” as an example. “That respects the law,” she said. “The word ‘life’ is part of mainstream French vocabulary, so the Frenchness of the advertiser is made clear.”

  The only legal actions actually taken in France to counter “abusive” uses of English have come from the Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs, and Prevention of Fraud). However, with fraud investigations part of the organization’s mandate, English has never been a high priority. Another organization that has been mandated to monitor English, France’s Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (French Broadcasting Authority), took almost two decades to act. Jean-Benoît attended its first ever symposium about monitoring French, in December 2013, eighteen years after the CSA got its mandate. In short, stomping out English is not a high priority in France’s power circles.9

  Though a struggle against English seems increasingly futile, France has its qualified “resistors.” Most of them belong to one of fifty volunteer “language protection” associations scattered across the country. And curiously, almost all of them are volunteers. When it comes to language protection,
the French government itself is amazingly low-profile—or recalcitrant, the language protection groups would say. That’s because the government has only given five of these organizations any real power to do anything about protecting French. According to the Toubon law, these five, and only these five, can file formal complaints about language violations to the government on behalf of citizens. (That means citizens can only file complaints through these organizations.) The problem is, the associations rely almost entirely on volunteers and receive only tiny subsidies from the government. When Julie visited one of them, Avenir de la langue française (Future of the French Language), she found herself in a cramped, run-down office with a broken printer and barely enough space for her to sit down and take notes. At another meeting, she spoke to Marc Favre d’Echallens, the spokesman for the biggest of France’s private language defense groups, Défense de la langue française (Defense of the French Language). “A lot of people, especially in publicity, don’t even know there’s a law to protect French!” he told her, exasperated by the lack of interest in what he considered an urgent problem. But the French don’t see the emergency.10

  French multinationals, meanwhile, are pushing English down employees’ throats—in some cases they actually force French employees to use English terminology while serving French clients. At the French distribution giant Carrefour, employees in the TV department get training on le cross merchandising, le remodeling, la supply chain, le e-learning. Sometimes the training is actually in English. Language protection has long been designated as a right-wing issue in France, but that is changing as blue-collar and service-industry workers are starting to revolt in the face of what they see as unjustified requirements for English proficiency. “English is a job requirement for workers who only interact with French people,” complained Georges Gastaud, a Carrefour employee who launched a new language-defense association supported by none other than France’s Communist Party. Gastaud filed an official request to France’s National Assembly for the creation of a committee to examine “linguistic abuse.” “We are stuck fighting for the elementary right to work in French in France. Isn’t that crazy?”

  But French language purism will help fend off English even if it’s only subconsciously. The French are the first to say they are “bad” at learning foreign languages. One of our daughters’ principals (they had three over the course of a year) announced fatalistically, “It’s not worth teaching English to the French. They can’t learn second languages.” The French, of course, don’t suffer from some collective congenital language-learning handicap. What they have is a mental block due to their own purist culture. The French try to teach English the same way they teach French, with rule-oriented methods and a purist approach.11 They are, of course, missing the point. English is not purist in spirit, and English grammar and spelling rules have so many exceptions the language cannot really be mastered using a rote-learning approach. To obtain her aggregation (professorship) credentials, our friend Anne Dupont, a qualified English teacher, had to learn by heart some twelve hundred ways the English language represents forty-four different sounds. English-speaking teachers who teach English don’t even learn this. Aside from the fact that rule-based language teaching methods are not effective, they create a blind spot among the French when they are learning English. When François Hollande wrote to Barack Obama to congratulate him for his reelection in 2012, he added a handwritten “friendly” to his signature, thinking he was using an adverb (like “sincerely”), unaware that in English, the -ly ending can actually make an adjective.

  Purism will always have the last word in France. At our daughters’ school, the parents’ enthusiasm for English teaching had worn off like a back-to-school crush by November. There was only one qualified English teacher at the school, and parents literally chased him out of the school because of his unorthodox teaching methods, and the fact that he didn’t give enough French dictées to his class.

  The French government doesn’t need to pass more laws to fend off English. French parents are doing the job very well on their own.

  13

  Looking Out for France

  Fifteen years ago, anti-Americanism reared its head pretty much every day in France. The French press routinely blamed the United States for encouraging “rampant capitalism,” lambasting American leaders for their supposed “blind faith in the market economy.” Journalists made fun of America’s “puritanical culture” and penchant for political correctness, and of course, accused Americans of carrying out linguistic imperialism.

  We hardly heard these things in 2013.

  Another thing had changed. French newspapers used to constantly use the expression “Anglo-Saxon.” With its strange, nineteenth-century undertones, this quasi-ethnological term was a derogatory catchall for anything Anglo-American, Protestant, British, or just English-speaking (East Indians were Anglo-Saxons, too). The French even lumped Quebeckers into the so-called Anglo-Saxon world, and that despite the fact that the majority of Quebeckers are French-speaking and Catholic. Anglo-Saxon just served as a convenient tool to dismiss values foreign to the French. The term is still kicking around, but it has almost disappeared from newspapers.

  Another word has practically disappeared from public discourse: universalité (universality). Fifteen years ago, French journalists and politicians referred to the “universality” of the French political and social model, le modèle français, as though it was self-evident, the implication being that French values—liberté, égalité, fraternité, social security, and political centralization—do, could, or should apply anywhere. That discourse has also waned.

  We noticed yet another change when we arrived in France in 2013: there was a new tolerance for accents, especially our own. When we lived in Paris fifteen years earlier, people routinely greeted us with a uniform salutation at once warm and patronizing: “Cousins!” (in the sense of “our long lost cousins”). We weren’t fooled. Back then the North American branch of the French-speaking family was still considered something like country cousins. For that matter, strangers openly mocked our Quebec accents on more than one occasion, laughing or feigning incomprehension to amused onlookers.

  The condescending attitude toward Quebeckers has almost disappeared. Most people who greeted us in 2013 with the “cousins!” salutation knew they were spouting a cliché, or were being ironic. Far from mocking us, the French tried to impress us with a show of their familiarity about our homeland. They would ask, for instance, “Which part of Quebec are you from?” Jean-Benoît used to answer Montreal, because it was simply too complicated to say the name of his real hometown, Sherbrooke. The French thought he was saying Cherbourg or Tobruk. But now he said Sherbrooke and some French asked, “Which neighborhood?” The question would be followed by an anecdote about some Quebec friend, or a French friend’s Quebec friend, or someone who took holidays in Quebec, or who lived there, or wanted to live there—anything to demonstrate they had some general knowledge about Quebec. A North African baker outside the Porte Maillot metro station heard our accents and told us, “Continuez d’être vous-mêmes” (Keep being yourselves). Then he threw in an extra chocolate croissant for our girls.

  Quebec’s newly won celebrity status seemed sudden to us in 2013, but even we knew it had been increasing gradually over the last sixty years. The French started thinking positively about Quebec during World War II when part of the Parisian cultural elite—including many publishers—fled there. In 1950, the Quebec folk singer Félix Leclerc became a sensation in Paris, a first for a Quebec artist. In 1961, the Quebec government opened an official office in Paris, with quasi-diplomatic status. Its sustained efforts in cultural promotion played an important role in what followed. A new generation of Quebec musicians entered the French musical scene in 1969, starting with Robert Charlebois, and culminating with the famous Quebec rock opera Starmania, which debuted in Paris in 1979. In the 1990s, there was a bona fide Quebec cultural invasion with Celine Dion and musicians like Garou, Lynda Lemay, and Isabe
lle Boulay. A decade later, another cohort of Quebec artists, including Cœur de Pirate and Ariane Moffat, made breakthroughs in France. In 2014, the status of Quebec culture rose a notch again when the Haïtian-born Quebec writer Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy.

  Yet despite all this, a slightly condescending attitude toward Quebec culture prevailed until recently. What changed things? One factor, no doubt, is the upswing in French tourism in Canada and Quebec. It’s pretty rare to meet a French person today who has absolutely no connection to Quebec, either through travel, or through friends or relatives who have lived there. Studies among France’s 2 million expatriates also show that Canada is the sixth most popular destination, and the second outside of Europe.1 You can even hear the Quebec influence in French speech. The French used to snicker—some still do—at Quebec’s policy of feminizing titles and functions (Quebeckers say “Madame LA Première ministre” (prime minister), while the French say “Madame LE Premier ministre.” This Quebec custom, while still hotly debated, is actually becoming the norm in France. French translators, terminologists, and lexicographers also closely follow the work of the Quebec Office of the French Language.2

  The idea that Quebec represents something modern can be traced back to 1967, during President Charles de Gaulle’s famous trip to Quebec. In Quebec, de Gaulle’s visit is remembered for the French president’s famous “Vive le Quebec libre” (long live free Quebec) declaration, which catalyzed Quebec’s growing independence movement. But footage of the visit reveals a change in French thinking about Quebec too: the president is constantly commenting on how modern Quebec is, and how Quebec is leading the way.3 Five decades later we heard echoes of this in remarks from French people who commented on how Quebec was dans le coup (in the know), en phase avec le monde (in tune with the world), and even en avance sur son temps (ahead of its time). As Quebeckers, we know our society has its own strengths and weaknesses. But for the French right now, Quebec represents everything France is not. The French talk about their country as “out of sync with the world” and dépassée (falling behind the times). Then they turn around and hold up Quebec and Canada as models for everything from university financing to public finances, language policy, and even gender relations. Quebec, it seems, can do no wrong.