The spillover effect of this burgeoning internationalism was almost immediate. In 1865 Geneva was made the headquarters of the International Telegraphic Union. Berne became host of the Universal Postal Union in 1874 and the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1886. In 1915, as the First World War was raging, Pierre de Coubertin moved his International Olympic Committee from Paris to Lausanne, where it enjoyed the protection of Swiss neutrality. Geneva has gone on to attract some 250 other international organizations of all sizes.
All Swiss francophones—a fifth of the population, known as Suisses Romands—are spread over half a dozen cantons, and there is not really a unified Swiss Romand dialect. Historically their cantons belonged to a dialectal area known as Franco-Provençal, a Romance dialect spoken in a pocket around Geneva, but stretching into Besançon, Lyon, Grenoble and Val d’Aoste. (Franco-Provençal is in a category of its own, neither langue d’oc nor langue d’oïl.) For instance, Genevans spoke a Franco-Provençal dialect related to the dialect spoken in Savoy. Language purism is strong among Swiss francophones to the extent that many outsiders believe the Romand dialect is dead. In fact, the Swiss tend to present a very standardized French to the outside world while maintaining their dialectal variations among themselves, especially in rural areas.
Like the issue of the Belgian accent, that of the Suisse accent is complicated. Many French people swear that there is a typical Swiss accent. In fact, what is assumed to be a typical Swiss accent is actually the accent of a German Swiss speaking French as a second language. As for the Suisses Romands, they have roughly the same accent that one would hear in France near the Swiss border. They have a reputation for speaking slowly, but the real difference is where they put the emphasis in their words and sentences. Whereas standard French stresses the last syllable of words and sentences, Swiss French stresses the penultimate (second-last) syllable. This produces a musicality that is instantly recognizable, though it is more typically Franco-Provençal than Swiss per se. Like Belgians and Quebeckers, Swiss francophones also pronounce vowels in a way that distinguishes homonyms (Belgians and Quebeckers distinguish vowels sounds too, but different vowels). Words like peau (skin) and pot (pot) sound the same in Paris, but in Switzerland they are differentiated as po and pah.
Features that are more genuinely Swiss than French are primarily in vocabulary. The German influence is obvious although not as great as one might expect. The Swiss say chlaguer (from schlagen, to smack) and poutser (from putzen, to clean). They say rösti for the grated-potato pancake and foehn to describe a warm wind, and also a hairdryer. Swiss purists decried the use of Germanisms in the early twentieth century, blaming constructions like “Il a aidé à sa mère” (“He helped his mother”) on Germanic influence. In reality, the use of the preposition à is merely an old form of French. As we saw in the case of pronunciation, the Swiss, like the Belgians, use resources that the French have forgotten. For instance, they say “Il veut pleuvoir” (“It wants to rain”) to mean “It’s about to rain.” Like Belgians, they use a specific verb tense called passé surcomposé (the equivalent of the past perfect) to mark a past action that has ended, as in “Il a eu neigé” (“It had snowed”); Parisians regard this construction as weird. Rousseau sometimes pointed out the Swiss French “mistakes” in his own writing, though in The New Eloise he came to the conclusion “Qu’aurait-on à gagner à faire parler un Suisse comme un académicien?” (“What have we got to gain from making a Swiss speak like an academician?”).
Because they use some of the same vocabulary to talk about very different political systems, political conversations between Belgians and Swiss (not to mention Quebeckers and French) are minefields for misunderstanding. Fédéralisme doesn’t have the same meaning in Switzerland as it does in France, Belgium or Canada. For the French it evokes medieval anarchy; for Belgians it describes the separation of powers between the Walloons and the Flemish. For the Swiss it refers to the integration of different parts into a whole. There are less confusing examples of Swiss institutional terminology. In Switzerland a vote is votation instead of vote, as in France and Quebec. Rescuers are called samaritains rather than secouristes. Lycées (the equivalent of grades eleven to thirteen) are called gymnases, like the German gymnasium. And the diploma given at the end of high school is not a baccalauréat but a maturité.
The Swiss have preserved a number of old French expressions, such as dent-de-lion (dandelion), long replaced in France by pissenlit. One of their most endearing regionalisms (except to Parisians) is the Swiss term for Parisian French: françouillon, a derogatory term that evokes Belgian expressions such as Franskillon and Francillon. They also count the way Belgians do; in fact, they have fully rationalized their numbers and more commonly say huitante instead of quatre-vingts for eighty.
In spite of the ways in which the Swiss, the Belgians and even the Haitians have shaped the story of French, it’s surprising that they have been able to hold on to their own idiosyncratic pronunciations and vocabulary. The same century that saw the birth of these new homes for French also saw the birth of a powerful new home for language purism: France’s national education system. Through the education system, language purism would reach new heights and gain new influence, beyond anything the seventeenth-century purists could have dreamed of—to the extent that virtually no francophone on the planet today can escape its influence.
Chapter 8 ~
French without Faute
During our stay in Paris we decorated our offices with cheap artifacts of French culture. The most interesting were a series of large colour posters we purchased in Lyon. These quaint illustrations of episodes from French history were at least fifty years old and had been created to hang in schoolrooms. Each contained a moral and was clearly designed to drive a principle of the French Republic into young minds.
Our favourite was called “A School before Jules Ferry.” It depicts a group of children of various ages receiving a math lesson. The classroom is a shack and the scene is one of disorder and chaos, with chickens and dogs running around among the students. In the foreground a schoolmaster appears to have been carving wooden clogs while delivering the day’s lesson. He is swinging a stick at a child who is trying to perform an addition exercise at the blackboard, either as punishment for getting the wrong answer or, more likely, because he is irritated at being interrupted in his work. At any rate, the message of the poster is clear: School before 1880 in France was a disorganized, unprofessional business, and French children should be thankful for the work of France’s first minister of national education, Jules Ferry, revered for putting in place France’s public school system.
Education had been one of the great obsessions of the revolutionary period, but because of lack of teachers, resources and interest, many projects fell flat, and teaching effectively remained in the hands of the Church in the decades that followed. In addition, France was still predominantly an agrarian society where children were required to work, so few could be spared for studies. Under Jules Ferry, teaching became “universal” in 1881. The national education system would be the greatest tool for spreading French inside France. Yet its approach was anything but neutral; France’s education system was put in place during a return to the ideals of classicism and language purism, and French would bear the imprint of this influence from then on. Under national education, purism entered the schools and spread throughout the French populace. That’s why French writer André Gide (1869–1951) would later write, “En chaque Français, il y a un Vaugelas qui sommeille” (“There is a dormant Vaugelas within every Frenchman”), referring to the famous seventeenth-century grammarian who created the central doctrines of purism and bon usage (see chapter 3).
Although Jules Ferry made public school mandatory in 1880–81, the poster should actually be called “A School before François Guizot.” Fifty years before Ferry, it was Guizot (1787–1874), the most important minister of the last French king, Louis Philippe, who took the first crucial steps towards creating a u
niversal school system in France. Guizot was minister of public instruction between 1832 and 1837. A historian and a Protestant, he understood that reading skills were necessary to unleash the potential of a nation in the middle of an industrial revolution. He also understood that to build a state, the French needed a competent bureaucracy, and for that they needed schools.
Guizot began his program by making reading and writing skills a requirement for all public jobs. In 1833 he passed a law that required all towns to build a primary school for boys, and all Départements to have a teacher training college to transmit basic knowledge, including religious and moral instruction, reading and arithmetic. He made school obligatory for boys, opened up education to all classes of society (including girls), and created a body of school inspectors. His successors maintained the program, and by 1880 the number of primary schools had grown from 1,700 to 75,000. The number of instituteurs had risen to 110,000, and 6.5 million boys and girls were attending school. So by the 1880s, most French children had been exposed to at least some French.
In 1880–81 Jules Ferry, a pillar of the newly formed Third Republic, created the Ministry of National Education and made public school mandatory, free and secular. Schooling was organized into three cycles: primary, secondary and lycée. Part of Ferry’s objective was purely républicain—he wanted to get the clergy out of public-school teaching for good. Even after the Revolution the Church had been encouraged to run schools, but clerics were known for rejecting the values of the Republic and advocating autocratic rule. In many regions, Brittany in particular, the clergy maintained and even encouraged local languages as a form of resistance to the Republic. Ferry’s secular teachers came to be dubbed les hussards noirs de la République (“black soldiers of the Republic”), partly for their severe black uniforms, but mostly because they were trained to fight obscurantism and actively promote the values of the Republic.
Although Ferry was really building on the work that Guizot began, there is a reason that the French today speak about school before and after Jules Ferry rather than Guizot. Guizot was a conservative who thought that democracy should be limited to the landowning class (that is, those who paid at least two hundred francs in income tax—a fortune). He also advocated a strong role for the clergy in education. Ferry, on the other hand, favoured the modern, secular conception of the Republic, where everyone would vote and where the clergy would be relegated to running churches—ideas that are fundamental to the French Republic to this day. So Ferry went on to become an icon of republican education and Guizot didn’t.
Thanks to both their efforts, however, education dramatically increased the number of people who had some understanding of French. At the time of the Revolution, not even half of France’s population spoke French fluently, and another twenty-five percent had no understanding of it at all. By the Second World War virtually all of the French understood the language, and most of them spoke it well—although fifty percent of the population still spoke their regional language as a mother tongue. The switch to French strengthened the French state and democracy, and dramatically increased the size of the public that both French writers and the media were able to reach. That created a powerful French popular culture in the nineteenth century, a novelty in the history of a language that had been confined to urban, aristocratic and bourgeois circles for centuries (more on this in chapter 11).
National education not only taught French but also largely determined how the French—and, by extension, all francophones—came to see their language. After the abuses of the Revolution-and-Empire period, the French monarchy, which was reinstalled in 1815, strengthened both the academies and their thinking (known as académisme). The monarchy pushed the notion of classics and classicism partly because they were comforting and not challenging. Authors such as Molière, Racine, Corneille and Pascal, who were believed to conform to these standards, soon came to form the canon of French literature. Their language was thought to be pure and their ideas did not challenge the monarchy. More than ever, the Academy of Fine Arts and the French Academy were setting the standards for beauty and language use.
This return to purism was happening precisely when Guizot began building the education system. Between 1820 and 1840 most French people still did not speak French, so French teaching in schools was literally second-language teaching and, as a result, highly normative and rule-based. The influence of the new academism amplified this tendency. Between 1800 and 1860 no fewer than a thousand French grammars were published. The most influential was La nouvelle grammaire française, by François Noël and Charles Pierre Chapsal, published in 1823. It was followed by an abridged version, and the book went through more than eighty editions, including two translated American versions, one abridged and the other full-length.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century the flurry of activity in language instruction materials was phenomenal. In 1834 the Bescherelle brothers came out with another grammar, La grammaire nationale. Although Le Bescherelle now specializes in verb conjugations, it is still one of the most important names in French grammar. In 1849 an enterprising school director, Pierre Larousse, came out with the Lexicologie des écoles primaires, the first full method for teaching French grammar and spelling ever published. Three years later he published the Dictionnaire complet, which bore the motto “A dictionary without examples is a skeleton.” At about the same time the lexicographer Émile Littré published the Dictionnaire de la langue française. With its original definitions, etymology and examples from authors, it set a new standard in the field. Larousse and Littré are still among the biggest names in today’s dictionary business, and until the creation of Le Robert in 1967, Le Larousse enjoyed a virtual monopoly in schools.
In 1835 the French Academy published the sixth edition of its Dictionnaire, which got its usual lukewarm reception. However, partly because of Guizot’s influence, the French government decided at this time that candidates for the civil service had to pass written and oral tests. That meant that the government needed a standard, so it turned to the French Academy. This was the first (and only) time the work of the Academy took on a genuinely official character and, predictably, this became the heyday of its influence. Lexicographers even published unauthorized versions of the Academy’s dictionary on their own. In 1836 and 1837 no fewer than four of these abridged (basically bootleg) editions of the dictionary came out. Joining the movement, publishers edited and republished the classic French authors, including Molière, Racine and La Fontaine, with the new, official spellings. Ever since then, francophones have entertained the myth that classic French authors wrote exactly like the French bourgeois of 1830. This linguistic revisionism fed (and still feeds) a quasi-religious belief among francophones that the French language had been fixé (set) since the time of Louis XIV. That’s patently false, but most French speakers and many foreigners believe it.
While the Academy’s work had achieved official status, the real drive behind the purist movement came from the schools. Possessed by the idea of a pure language, teachers began pushing an idealized, bourgeois version of French on schoolchildren. They started a tradition of drilling generations of kids to write purely and perfectly by imitating the classics. This is why francophones—particularly, but not only, the French—are known for trying to speak as they write (formally, with rules), rather than write as they speak (informally, favouring effective communication, an approach widely associated with the writing of English speakers).
Although language purism has been drilled into the French for centuries through education, it is by no means exclusive to them. But francophones outside of France are perhaps more tolerant of linguistic variation, mostly because the French they speak differs from the norme imposed by French education. North American francophones are also influenced by a cultural tolerance for language mistakes that is more typical of the English-speaking majority around them, who tend to value communication over form. Yet all francophones—and even non-francophones—are subject to the pressures o
f purism.
The ideology of purism was so strong that it crossed the language barrier. Many French teachers in the United States accept as an article of faith that the French spoken in France is “purer” than that in, say, Belgium or Canada. Even the hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Canadian parents who go to the trouble of educating their children in French immersion programs (ironically, to make them more employable in Canada) tend to think there is an ideal French spoken somewhere else, and they imagine it is in France—more specifically, in Paris. What they are reacting to is the power of the norme: an ideal French that nobody really speaks. In fact, purism has never been able to eliminate accents and regional variations, because its primary object is the written word, which is why French is so uniform wherever it is written. No place or group speaks pure normative French; there is only a broad range of speakers across the planet who adhere to the ideal in differing degrees. For instance, we met many Africans who speak extremely normative French—at least they did with us, in public—and we responded in kind. But we don’t speak that way at home, and neither do they.
More than anything, this attitude is explained by a particular concept that developed in the nineteenth century: la faute (fault). A faute in French is not just a mistake (which is literally translated as une méprise). Faute has a moral stigma, contrary to erreur, which is more neutral. Until about the fifteenth century the term referred to the sins of the flesh, as in “original sin.” In the seventeenth century, language purists gave the connotation of sin to mistakes in speech or writing, and it became common to speak of a faute de goût (error in taste). In the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau still spoke of his language incorrections (improprieties). It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, when the French built their education system around a very strong purist doctrine, that the stigma of fautes was implanted in the minds of millions of French speakers, where it remains to this day.
The Story of French Page 17