The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  The revolutionaries were bent on modernizing all aspects of French society. In 1795 the existing currency, the livre, became the franc, and was subdivided into a hundred centimes. God, whose existence had been temporarily denied, became the être suprême (supreme being). One of the revolutionaries’ most ambitious undertakings was to overhaul France’s chaotic weights and measures system. The British had succeeded in unifying their system in 1496, but the French had still not gotten around to it, partly because France was so big. Each region had its own system, so a pound of flour and a pound of bread were not the same from one region to another. Talleyrand first proposed unifying the system. In 1791 the Academy of Science (which had not yet been closed down) recommended the mètre (metre, from the Greek for “measure”) as the fundamental unit of measurement.

  The Academy of Science decreed that a metre would be one ten-millionth of a quarter of a meridian of the Earth. To determine this, they needed an exact measure of the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona in order to extrapolate the distance between the North Pole and the Equator (which they would then divide by ten million to get the metre). It took two teams of surveyors six years to finish the measurement, as their work was somewhat disrupted by civil unrest and war. The length of the metre was crucial because all the other measurements of volume, weight and surface area were derived from it. For example, a tonne was the weight of a cubic metre of water, consisting of a thousand litres, which each weighed precisely one kilogram. The system was decimal (that is, based on factors of ten). Prefixes denoting quantities were uniform for measures of mass, length and volume; kilo, meaning a thousand, was taken from Greek. The system became official in 1795, although with a temporary estimate of the metre, since they needed three more years to measure the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona (the surveyors ended up with an error of three kilometres). Then it took France another forty-five years to overcome entrenched customs and make the new system mandatory for daily life.

  This modernizing spirit was less successful with the Republican calendar. In their desire to blank-slate everything, the revolutionaries decided to get rid of the Gregorian calendar, with its religious undertones that included pagan and Christian names for days, months and celebrations. While they were at it, they decided to make the calendar decimal. The new calendar still had twelve months of thirty days each (plus five or six supplementary days at the end of the year), but the weeks had ten days and the days had ten hours of a hundred minutes each.

  The revolutionary government hired the poet Fabre d’Églantine—better known for his bedtime song “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère” (“It’s raining, it’s raining, shepherdess”)—to come up with new names for the days and months. D’Églantine was inspired by the weather and natural cycles, so he used different suffixes for each season, attached to Latin words that corresponded to the typical weather for each month. The fall months were Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire; the winter months were Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse; the spring months were Germinal, Floréal and Prairial; and the summer months were Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. D’Eglantine wanted to rename the days after vegetables, animals and farm tools, but the National Assembly probably realized that they were already pushing their luck by trying to name the days after Latin numbers (primedi, duodi, tridi and so on).

  This poetic approach had problems, the biggest being that the previous calendar worked (even if the revolutionaries didn’t like it) and everyone was used to it. In spite of its universal pretensions, the revolutionary calendar was based on the seasons around Paris, and it didn’t apply well to other areas of France such as the Alps. And the revolutionaries didn’t exactly make the calendar easy for people to use: Day 1 of Year I was September 22, 1792, the day the monarchy had officially ended. That meant that January 1 fell on 11 Nivôse. Robespierre, for instance, was ousted on 9 Thermidor An II (July 27, 1794)—which is why the episode is still known as Thermidor. The promoters also shot themselves in the foot by allowing only one day of rest in ten, rather than the one in seven of the old system. Napoleon abolished this impractical and unpopular calendar on 11 Nivôse An XIV—January 1, 1806. But French laws established while it was in use are still referred to by their republican date.

  The Revolution also contributed to the spreading of French outside of France. From the outset the revolutionaries were bent on exporting their ideas, by force if necessary. As Oxford University professor and author Theodore Zeldin put it in an interview, the English invented liberty for themselves while the French invented liberty for all of mankind. Although the American Revolution, like the French, was carried out in the name of freedom, American revolutionaries never tried to export their new political concepts, with the exception of Benedict Arnold’s foiled invasion of Canada in 1775–76. The French intended their new ideals about the rights of man to be universal, to apply to everyone. Although this campaign eventually evolved into a justification for imperial conquest, the French Revolution became the blueprint for all revolutions to come. It also inspired a generation of insurgents in the Spanish colonies, all of whom were francophiles, including South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar (1783–1830).

  The influence of the Revolution’s ideas was also important in Romania, which was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Romanian students who returned to their mother country came to be known as bonjouristes for their preference for French. Links between France and Romania became strong in this period, and even stronger when the French actively supported the creation of an independent Romania. At the same time, “La Marseillaise” became a hymn of freedom in Europe; it remains one of the best-known national anthems today.

  In its early years European monarchs greeted news of the Revolution favourably, partly because they expected it would weaken France, and partly because it was the first real-life application of the principles put forward by the universally acclaimed philosophes. Many writers, particularly in Germany and England, believed that the French had succeeded in creating an ideal society. German philosopher Immanuel Kant called France a nation of “superior organization.” Hegel congratulated France for “organizing reality around ideas.” In England the Revolution inspired Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Blake. The Portuguese government was spurred to implement reforms in imitation of France’s. As late as 1804 Ludwig van Beethoven was considering dedicating his Third Symphony to Napoleon (he changed his mind when Napoleon crowned himself emperor that year, and dedicated it merely to the “memory of a great man”). Reality sank in only later, as princes, dukes and all the privileged classes—in particular, the autocrats—woke up and realized how threatened they were by the ideas of the Revolution. Its neighbouring countries soon attacked France, starting with Austria and Prussia in 1792.

  Outside France, the mass exodus of some 250,000 French nobles, royalists and réfractaires (resisters) during the Revolution buttressed the exiled Huguenots in many parts of Europe, including England, Switzerland, northern Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. About forty percent of the émigrés later returned to France, but sixty percent stayed. Stripped of their privilege and income, many took to teaching or other vocations, opened bookstores or became printers. Many also occupied important positions in foreign countries and contributed to maintaining the influence of French among the elite there. The Revolution-and-Empire and even Napoleon’s ultimate defeat couldn’t make a dent in the status of French as Europe’s diplomatic language, at least immediately. The result was that many French émigrés ended up as administrators and diplomats for foreign governments.

  The language also spread as France’s territory expanded during the revolutionary wars—though not simply because conquered citizens were forced to speak it. Citizens of more than twenty nations fought in France’s armies and thus learned French. By 1803 France had integrated all of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium, most of Italy and a good half of Germany, and many reforms of the Revolution-and-Empire period took root there, particularly the Civil Code. At t
he height of the Empire, France had doubled in size and population; the new lands acquired were run under French law. And language was no obstacle to French designs in Europe—elites everywhere still spoke it.

  Ultimately, however, Napoleon’s conquests would work against French. In countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain the French Empire produced an anti-French backlash that would favour the development of national languages. Napoleon himself unified the patchwork of hundreds of German principalities, city states and kingdoms into a more rational thirty principalities. And this merely nourished a movement that had been underway among writers since the 1760s to create a national literature and culture of their own—in German. Some authors—for example, Goethe and Schiller—had tried to convince Germans that their own language was as good as or better than French. Such nationalist sentiments were still only tentative in the Europe of 1800; their full impact on the influence of French would be felt only in the 1870s.

  Meanwhile, the Revolution was about to have unforeseen but important side effects for French, both in Europe and beyond. By 1800 the ideal of liberty had spread like wildfire to Haiti and exploded into a full-scale revolt that would lead to the creation of a new French-speaking republic. And in the decades that followed, European powers would unwittingly create not one, but two new French-speaking nations.

  Chapter 7 ~

  New Sanctuaries

  When we met Bernard Pillonel, the Swiss consul in Montreal, to talk about his country’s place in the history of French, he strongly objected to the idea of discussing Switzerland and Belgium in the same chapter. He probably would have objected even more had he known we were including Haiti as well. But in the story of French the three histories are linked. Each in its own way is a by-product of the imperial wars that Napoleon waged after the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century the three countries became new foyers (centres) of French, and their citizens would go on to shape the fate of the language beyond French borders.

  After the French Revolution began, it didn’t take long for slaves in the plantation colonies of the Caribbean to pick up the cue and demand their own freedom. This put the National Assembly in a curious dilemma. Although they had passed the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, the new republic could hardly afford to destroy the economies of its extremely profitable slave-based colonies in the Caribbean. The revolutionaries decided against abolishing slavery, but revolutionary ideals were spreading beyond their control by this time. Within a year the French faced full-scale slave revolts in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue.

  Saint-Domingue in particular had been a ticking time bomb. The thirty-two thousand whites there made up only seven percent of the population—about the same number as the affranchis (free people of colour) and mulattos, who enjoyed no civil rights but could own slaves. The rest of the population, a huge majority of roughly half a million people, were slaves, and the colonial government often had to repress violent rebellions among them. The National Assembly took baby steps by granting citizenship to the wealthiest affranchis in May 1791, and then, a year later, to all affranchis. This alarmed the white planter class, who forced the French government to reverse its position. But the move backfired; capitalizing on yet another slave revolt, the affranchis and mulattos decided to join the slaves in a full-scale revolt the same year. The whites received support from the Spanish and the British, but when the French realized that the British were attempting to take advantage of the situation and take over the colony, they threw in the towel and granted civil rights to Saint-Domingue’s former slaves.

  At this point Saint-Domingue’s prospects as an independent nation were promising. It was a rich colony, the affranchis were running the show. One of them, a military genius, General Toussaint L’Ouverture—who knew how to read and write, a rarity—had assumed leadership. Before the revolution, Toussaint had run his master’s entire estate, worked twenty hectares of his own land and owned thirteen slaves. He turned out to be the most capable leader of the Haitian Revolution and by far the shrewdest, carefully manoeuvring among the European powers to push them out. By 1800 Saint-Domingue had a government. It wrote a new constitution in 1801 and proclaimed Toussaint L’Ouverture governor for life.

  In the meantime, the French had begun to think twice about letting their profitable colony go. In 1802 Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with thirty-five thousand men and ninety-six ships. It was France’s biggest expeditionary force ever. The same year Napoleon decided to re-establish slavery—some say at the insistence of his wife, Josephine, who came from the planter class of Martinique. But in reality he had more strategic considerations: Napoleon wanted to regain control of the island’s sugar production and turn Saint-Domingue into a base for the development of Greater Louisiana, which Spain had promised to return to France. Toussaint L’Ouverture was captured and died in a French jail. Although General Leclerc later died of yellow fever, along with most of his men, and the French were routed, the loss of Toussaint stripped the nascent republic of its most capable leader.

  Haiti (the name means “mountainous country” in Arawak, the local Native language) proclaimed its independence in 1804. And from then on it was on its own, quite literally. No country would support it, and the French crippled the new country’s economy by demanding 150 million francs in reparations. France didn’t recognize Haiti until 1838, and the American government did so only in 1862, when the United States decided that the Civil War was really about slavery. Haiti would remain the only “negro republic” (as it was often called then) during that century, but it went on to be run by a series of emperors, kings and dictators, each more corrupt and incompetent than the last, and it remained bogged down by rampant racism between the black and mulatto classes.

  The creation of Haiti had an immediate impact on the future of French. Some ten thousand refugees (planters and free people of colour alike) fled from Haiti to Cuba and then to New Orleans after 1804, where they strengthened the local French culture for another two generations, bringing new blood, new money, know-how and cultural artifacts such as vaudou (voodoo). But France, which had got Louisiana back from Spain, couldn’t make a go of this vast territory without the rich colony of Saint-Domingue to supply it with men and money and serve as a base, so Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana to the American government. President Jefferson had asked only for New Orleans and Florida, and his negotiators were much surprised when Napoleon decided to throw in the rest of Louisiana for fifteen million dollars. The price sounds ridiculously low today, but at the time it amounted to a large part of the entire annual revenue of the United States government.

  Economically the Haitian people made slow progress after independence. And since the population had no tradition of industry and literacy, things went from bad to worse. Yet Haiti became a vibrant centre for painters, writers and poets. The country also adopted French as an official language—a phenomenon that would prove crucial when the United Nations was created in the next century. (Haiti would also give Canada its present Governor General, former journalist Michaëlle Jean.) Creole would not be regarded as a legitimate language until the beginning of the twentieth century, and Haiti did not make Creole an official language until 1987.

  The Haitian elite have always been strongly francophone. Haitian writers have a strict sense of correctness in their use of French, but Creole grassroots add a flair to their language use, and an unbridled creativity, particularly in the use of metaphors. One of Quebec’s greatest contemporary authors, Haitian writer Dany Laferrière, told us, “The French language is notre butin de guerre. C’est à nous, on en fait ce qu’on veut” (“…our war booty. It’s ours, and we do what we want with it”).

  The most famous writer of Haitian origin was Alexandre Dumas, who was a quarter black. His life was as dramatic as his novels. His grandfather, Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, ran a slave plantation in Saint-Domingue near a place called Montecristo (the origin of Dumas’s famous novel’s title was a
mystery until his background became known). De la Pailleterie’s wife, Cézette du Mas, was a slave who bore him four sons (her surname means “of the house” in Occitan, although some claim it was a Frenchified version of dûma, which means “dignity” in Fang, a language of Gabon). In 1770 de la Pailleterie ran into financial trouble and sold his wife and sons; later he bought back his favourite, Thomas-Alexandre, the father of Alexandre Dumas.

  Thomas-Alexandre, as a mulatto, was denied a noble title, so he assumed his mother’s name, Dumas, instead. He started out as a soldier in France and rose to become a general in the revolutionary army in 1793. Nine years later he fathered Alexandre, and died shortly after. This romantic family history certainly fed Dumas’s love of historical literature. Of the 250 books he wrote, the historical novels are by far the best, displaying an inimitable flair in the writing, especially the Three Musketeers’ famous rallying cry, “One for all, and all for one.”

  Like Haiti, Belgium and Switzerland both owe their existence to Napoleon’s military failures. Napoleon’s stunning victories and powerful propaganda overshadowed the fact that his battles were getting costlier and costlier as time went on. By 1805 he had lost command of the sea. Because of diplomatic blunders, his allies had turned against him. He lost the Russian campaign in 1812 and his final battle, at Waterloo (in what would become Belgium), three years later. At the 1815 Congress of Vienna that followed his defeat, European nations looked for a way to ensure general peace in Europe. They settled on the idea of creating a new buffer states (the Netherlands) and strengthening a new one (Switzerland). The idea behind this original plan was to keep France in check as well as guarantee its safety along its most exposed borders.