Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. France remained the richest and most populous country in Europe; its geographical advantages simply could not be challenged until the power base of European politics spread beyond western Europe. Certainly, the cultural predominance of French was shaken by the rise of the Italian city-states in the fifteenth-century Renaissance, and by the sixteenth-century Reformation, since the French king chose to associate France resolutely with the Catholic Church. France itself ceased to be the centre of the action for a time, yet the Reformation prompted many influential French speakers to flee eastward: Huguenots, the French Protestants, took up residence in the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, and there was an explosion of French-language publishing, especially just over the border in the Netherlands. The Reformation added to the French language’s eastward momentum as a language of culture.

  In the seventeenth century, French power and influence in Europe reached their height, during the long reigns of Louis XIII, 1610-43, and of Louis XIV, the famed Roi Soleil, ‘Sun King’, 1643-1715. Increasingly complacent, France began to reflect on its own cultural attributes. As all nations do when they enjoy pre-eminence, the French began to look for some particular virtues that could explain their success. Increasingly, they saw evidence of excellence in their language itself. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, founded the Académie Franαaise in 1635, with a concern that transcended the practical: by its statutes its principal function was ‘to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.

  This was a new step in language consciousness, the world’s first academy dedicated to the care of a language.* The particular concern of the French for accuracy and concision was crystallised at the time. In fact, the article of the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539 which enjoined the use of French had been immediately preceded by one that required clarity of expression in court judgments: they were to be ‘done and written so clearly that there would not be, nor could be, any ambiguity or uncertainty, nor place to ask for interpretation’. Now in 1637 the already famous philosopher René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode. One notable feature of this work was that it was written in French, rather than Latin, acting perhaps in the radical spirit of the academy’s statutes. Descartes was not willingly a revolutionary; indeed, one of his maxims in the Discours was to ‘follow the most moderate opinions and those most remote from excess as were commonly received in practice by the most sensible of those he lived with’, and ‘change his desires rather than the order of the world’.31 But here, at the heart of the European intellectual debate, he proposed that knowledge must be founded exclusively on clear and distinct ideas.32 Abolishing the need for divine revelation, this approach was new and radical, and came to be seen as quintessentially French.* It is often held to mark the beginning of modern philosophy and modern science, even if for Descartes, playing it safe as ever, it left all practical matters of faith and morals unchanged.

  And the French belief in their linguistic advantages soon came to be shared by others not so fortunate. Descartes’ great successor Leibniz (1646-1716), though a German from Leipzig, wrote all his major works in French. The intellectual superiority of French culture had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be read widely by the elite, one simply had in these days to write in French.

  In the late seventeenth century, French culture, especially its classic dramatists Corneille, Racine and Molière, enjoyed a vogue throughout Europe, and Versailles set the standard everywhere for court style and etiquette. Novels in French were everywhere a favourite amusement for rich young ladies. It was especially in the areas of Europe with least cultural self-confidence that the elite set a high value on fluency in French: Sweden, Poland and above all Russia, where starting in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) French became established as the language of polite society. Voltaire, the great wit of the age, rejoiced famously that there were French speakers in Astrakhan, and French language teachers in Moscow.33 In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel whose action is set in the following generation, substantial parts of the dialogue, including the opening lines,† are written—presumably for realism—not in Russian but in French.

  It was in this period that French also replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy, giving it another link with elegance and influence. By 1642 Richelieu’s government had been corresponding in French with most of their northerly neighbours: but Spain, Italy and Switzerland had kept up resistance to it, preferring their own languages. In the second half of that century, in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire (whose domestic language was German), the French gradually presuaded them to shift the language of communication from Latin to French. In the next century, from the Treaty of Rastatt in 1712, the two sides switched to French exclusively. Treaties came to be written in French, even by powers with no direct French connections. The Danes used it for their traité de commerce de Copenhague in 1691, and the Russians and Ottoman Turks in the terms of their 1774 peace made at Küαük Kainarca (now Kaynarja in Bulgaria).34 The general popularity of France itself evidently took a dive after Napoleon’s attempts in the early nineteenth century to conquer the whole of Europe, but French ceased to play its general intermediary role only in the twentieth century, ironically at Versailles itself, when during the 1919 peace conference held after the First World War the Americans and the British insisted on working in their own language, and so ensured that the treaty was drafted and published in both French and English.

  The first empire

  What of le franšais d’ outre-mer, French overseas? Developments here were very different from the steady, and sturdy, spread of French round Europe through which it became, almost by spontaneous acclaim, the prestige language for elites. The projection of French overseas was very much a result of royal policy.

  The policy came in two fits of colonial expansion directed by the French king, punctuated by comprehensive defeat and deflation in the second half of the eighteenth century. These fits of expansion were both extremely ambitious—in 1714, and again in 1914, France held the second-largest colonial empire by land area in the world*—but, aside from the sugar barons’ domain in the Caribbean, each of them produced only one territory that was to attract substantial French immigration: Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Algeria in the nineteenth. In neither case was France, or its settlers, long able to retain political control; and so French imperialism has been more like Dutch in its linguistic effects than any of its other European competitors. That is to say, the French language has persisted only where its settlers have retained a solid identity and a large population, even under foreign (specifically British) domination: French has survived and grown in Canada, just as Dutch (of a kind) has remained strong in South Africa. The situation in Algeria is clouded by politics.* But in the other colonies the French language has survived, if at all, as a lingua franca for the elite.

  Although it was already a major power in the fifteenth century, France was not a player in the earliest voyages of exploration. Still, there was plenty of North America left to be claimed in the next few generations. Jacques Cartier, sent by the French king to discover a north-west passage to the East, discovered instead the St Lawrence river and explored it as far as Quebec and Montreal (then Stadacona and Hochelaga) in 1534-6.† Later, fur traders and missionaries enlarged the part of the new continent that could be claimed for France: in 1603-15 Samuel de Champlain entered the Great Lakes; in 1673 Père Marquette and Louis Jolliet broke out southward into the Mississippi; and in 1678-82 Robert Cavelier de la Salle charted its whole course down to the Gulf of Mexico. France had thereby outflanked and surrounded the English colonies, which were being strung out along the Atlantic coast.

  It was an unstable situation, however, since the English colonists heavily outnumbered the French, perhaps by forty to one in the mid-seventeenth century: they would still be twenty times more numerous a centur
y later, when the French settler population had multiplied by ten.35 Arguably, the expulsion of French Protestants in the Reformation and afterward was at the root of this imbalance between the two powers. As we have seen, their departure had seeded the spread of French, as the language of culture and high thinking, into central and eastern Europe. But by the same token, France had lost the mass of its population of willing emigrants, the kind of puritans, adventurers and Utopians who formed the backbone of Britain’s Thirteen Colonies. Nouvelle-France boasted a meteoric birth rate among those who came and stayed, but never became a magnet to immigrants equal to New England.

  In the same period, largely with Richelieu in charge at home, French settlements were also being planted on the Caribbean islands of Martinique (1625) and Guadeloupe (1635), and at Cayenne on the mainland in Guyana (1637); on the other side of the Atlantic, the French claimed Senegal on the west African coast (1639) and Madagascar in the east (1643). Farthest of all, a French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, made it in 1624 to southeastern Indo-China, then known as Cochin-China.*

  However, the only parts of the extensive territories claimed for France which received significant settlement by French-speaking colonists were the St Lawrence river area, known as la Nouvelle-France (New France), and Nova Scotia, then known as l’Acadie (originally la Cadie, derived from some Indian name).* Here the original French policy had been to hope that ‘our sons will marry your daughters and we will become one people’. Unfortunately, this did not happen in a way that suited the French, since the early tendency was for arriving male settlers to go native, and bring up their children in their sauvage mothers’ languages. In 1666, after three generations of French colonial presence, Louis XIV’s minister for the colonies, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, complained that Frenchmen who wanted to trade—mostly for furs—still had to communicate in the natives’ language.36

  Part of the solution to this was to send out well-brought-up French girls, filles à marier, to marry the settlers and create French-speaking homes. Among them were the famous filles du Roy, ‘king’s daughters’, mostly orphans from bourgeois families, whose travel and subsistence costs—and in some cases dowries—were borne by the Treasury. Some nine hundred of them were sent out between 1665 and 1673, to boost the population (3215 according to the census of 1665), and improve the sex ratio (2:1 male to female). Although the intendant of the colony, Jean Talon, told Colbert that he would have preferred village girls, ready to work like men, rather than these delicate young ladies, they seem to have been a good investment. The population of Nouvelle-France reached 20,000 in 1713 and 55,000 in 1755. The fertility rate averaged a whopping 7.8 children per woman. Although only some 40 per cent of the immigrants spoke un bon français, over half of the women did, and the variant dialects of the immigrant families seem to have been levelled out in the seventeenth century, in favour of standard French learnt at Mother’s knee. In 1698 the Controller-General of the navy remarked: ‘People speak here perfectly well without any bad accent. Although there is a mixture from almost all the provinces in France, none of their dialects can be distinguished in the Canadian provinces.’37

  And the marquess of Montcalm, the French general who was to lose the city of Quebec to the British in 1759, had previously admitted: ‘The Canadian peasants speak French very well.’38

  The Treaty of Paris in 1763 spelt the end of France’s empire in North America. American France yielded to the overpowering numbers in the British colonies, even if the coup de gršce had come from the dominance of the British navy in the Atlantic* The French defeat did not, however, put paid to French-speaking in the north-east. Even though Canada soon became the destination for large numbers of English-speaking loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, unwilling to live in an independent United States of America,† the French were still vastly preponderant, approximately by a factor of seven, in the settled areas of what was still a territory with a small European population. It is estimated that in 1791 there were 140,000 francophones and 20,000 anglophones in Canada.§ The French have since put up a redoubtable defence of their community’s existence, polarised around the Catholic Church, French civil law and the continued use of their language.

  They were, however, increasingly joined by immigrants who either spoke or adopted English, and certainly by the midpoint of the next century, when the European population was about 1.5 million, French speakers had ceased to be the majority. And the population movements had not yet peaked. Another 2.3 million were admitted between 1821 and 1910.39 In 1998 the country’s population had reached 30.5 million, of whom 6.7 million or 22 per cent spoke French natively, as against 60 per cent brought up to speak English.

  Despite this disappointing finale, Canada is the main success story of French as transplanted overseas. But it is certainly not the only story. France had also had a major piece of the action in the sugar business, and throughout the seventeenth century the most populous francophone colony had in fact been the French Antilles, Guadeloupe and Martinique: by 1700 they were home to 25,000 French and 70,000 black slaves.40 Their descendants are still there, with a population now of just over a million, all speaking French, or French creoles. Haiti too, becoming French in 1697 through the action of pirates (filibusters), became prosperous in the same business, although the French owners’ term was ended violently by slave revolution in 1804. There too French and French creoles are spoken to this day, by some 7.5 million. The other colonies of the French Crown were either trading posts in highly populated regions (Chandernagore, Yanam, Pondicherry, Kāraikāl and Mahe along the coast of India), way-stations on naval routes to India (Senegal, the islands of Réunion and Mauritius, and (briefly) Madagascar) or the rumps of larger-scale conquests that never worked out (French Guiana).* None of them ever attracted major settlement from Europe, though almost all of them host small francophone communities to this day, notably 40,000 still in Pondicherry; and 160,500 can speak French in Réunion, amid half a million (90 per cent of the island’s population) who speak a French creole.41

  The French Revolution ushered in a new phase of imperial wars, but with the exception of Napoleon’s somewhat romantic foray to Egypt in 1798-9, they were all waged within the continent of Europe; and they all amounted, in less than a generation, to nothing at all. Ironically, the great claims to fame of France in the early modern period, the Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, contributed little if anything to the spread of the French language, even if they sent French-speaking soldiers all over Europe.

  But then, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, the French entered on a new bout of overseas imperialism.†

  The second empire

  Their motives were mixed. In one important case, France acted like ancient Rome, when in 1830 an attempt to rid the Mediterranean of pirates ended up with the full-scale invasion of Algeria, detaching what had been a province of the Ottoman empire. Still in accord with the Roman model, this was followed by an influx of settlers (colōnī for the Romans, colons for the French), in fairly large numbers: there were already 110,000 of them in 1847, and their numbers rose to just under a million in the next century.42 But this was an exceptional case, even though it loomed largest in French conceptions of their new empire. In many other cases, French action was led by missionary compassion or zeal, as with the protectorates claimed in the Indian Ocean (Comores, 1840) and in the Pacific (in les īCles de la Société, 1843, Tahiti, 1846, Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1853). Similar motives, at some level, seem to have led to the expansion of French control from its ancient base in Senegal in the fifty years from 1817, training native infantry (tirailleurs) and priests and then taking action against malaria, and building schools and roads. It was persecution of Christian missions that gave France its justification for invading Cochin-China in 1859: by 1887 a French Union indochinoise controlled the whole of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

  But these colonial acquisitions came at a time when Europeans were beginning to be highly impressed by their own technical superior
ity over people anywhere else in the world. Once again France began to look for explanations of its success: characteristically, it came to see itself as a power that could make a difference to the world for the better, spreading not just Catholic Christianity and respect for law, but also freemasonry, Saint-Simonian industrial policy, and in short la civilisation franαaise. It was easy to combine this with an ambition to do well while doing good, and so there were few reservations felt when France, and Belgium too, joined in ’la course aux colonies’, what Britain knew as ‘the scramble for Africa’.

  The French and the British were the big winners in the sheer scale of territory acquired: both empires grew massively in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The French expanded from their existing possessions in Algeria and Senegal, but they also established new bridgeheads in Côte d’Ivoire (1842) and Gabon (1843). First, from 1876 to 1885, Afrique-Équatoriale Franαaise (French Equatorial Africa) was carved out from the Gabon shore, including what were to become Gabon, Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad; then from 1883 to 1894 Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) was taken from the west and south-west, comprising the modern Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin.

  And the French were not the only francophones in the race. In 1877-9, Belgium’s King Léopold, adopting as his personal agent the British explorer Sir Henry Stanley, had brazenly claimed the area now known as the Congo, a claim accepted by the other European powers in 1885. Then, in 1896, the French went on to depose the queen of Madagascar, justifying their action by the immediate abolition of slavery in her old domains. And on top of it all, France was also claiming protectorates among Algeria’s neighbours along the Mediterranean coast, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912.