The stigma was reinforced during that century by the introduction of la dictée (dictation exercises), a technique that has survived until the present. All cultures use dictation as a language-teaching method, but francophones rely on it, and until quite far along in their studies (Jean-Benoît did his last dictation in college when he was nineteen). French TV personality Bernard Pivot turned dictation into a sport throughout the francophone world when he began his famous annual dictation contest in 1986. Literally hundreds of thousands of people from dozens of countries competed to win the Dico d’Or (Golden Dictionary) prize. Pivot’s dictations are really a series of grammar and spelling traps that have very little to do with how French is actually used. But usage is not the point. The whole idea of dictation is to prove that one can write sans faute—even at a level of language and vocabulary that has no use in the real world of conversation, culture or work (unless you’re a lexicographer).
An anecdote told by author Christophe Traisnel shows that changes in how people wrote took longer to develop, in spite of the strong ideology of purism. He tells of a boring reception at Fontainebleau in 1857, during which Empress Eugénie asked her friend the author Prosper Mérimée to organize a game. Mérimée came up with the idea of a dictation. The results were surprising—the Emperor had seventy-five fautes, his wife sixty-two, and Alexandre Dumas twenty-four. It was the Austrian ambassador, Prince Metternich, who won, with only three mistakes! Purism was obviously not a monopoly of the French; evidently even second-language learners had adopted a strong sense of correctness.
For generations now, French has been taught with an emphasis on exact spelling and grammar and avoidance of fautes. Francophones constantly remark on, or correct, one another’s speech and writing. Where language is concerned, they can demonstrate a righteousness that is quite similar to the way the Puritans confronted (as some puritans still do) the notion of sin. Like sin, fautes are inevitable. So the idea functions as a kind of regulating principle that makes speakers nervous about how their transgressions will be perceived. It takes a particularly strong personality to free oneself from the fear of committing a faute. As professional writers we can testify that one of the strongest factors inhibiting francophone writers everywhere is the fear of making fautes, which is seen as being not only unworthy of the language, but even a traitor to it.
Francophones can be divided into those who are forgiving and those who aren’t. Purists are not forgiving, and they have set the standards since the nineteenth century, so francophones learn to spell rare words and deal with cunningly complicated grammatical traps. The overall effect has been to produce an elite whose command of the language is magnificent and whose dictates tend to be regarded as absolute truths—even if no one entirely respects them.
The new emphasis on bon usage transformed what was once an extremely progressive concept—purism—into an extremely conservative one. By giving French rules, the purists of the seventeenth century had made it into the Latin of the moderns. But in the nineteenth century, with its ideology of the faute, purism rejected innovation, novelty, new rules, new pronunciations and, especially, new spellings. Purism also gave francophones the idea that the language is its spelling, to the extent that any attempt to change spellings was seen as an attack on French.
This new attitude came into focus when the French Academy attempted to reform spelling in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1835 the sixth edition of the Academy’s dictionary modified a number of spellings. Some of the reasons were bizarre; for example, enfan became enfant (child) for etymological reasons, to conform to the verb enfanter (to give birth). But on the whole, the changes were accepted with little protest. This is when words ending in -ois, such as françois, became français. However, in 1900, when the Academy again considered reforming the spelling of some words, the purists screamed. How could anyone think of writing psycologie instead of psychologie? They argued that such changes would make French look ridiculous and it would be impossible to read the classics—an absurd claim, since their spellings had been thoroughly modernized just sixty years earlier. A compromise was struck. In 1901 the French Academy made some proposals and the French government published “edicts of tolerance” in which it declared the recommended modifications—without replacing the old spellings. Large-scale grammar reform has been frozen since the nineteenth century because the purists have allowed spelling modifications to be carried out only one word at a time. And that is why francophones still have to deal with complicated and untranslatable rules about such topics as the accord (agreement) of past participles (more in chapter 17).
Language purism rears its head every day in the professional life of francophones. For the French edition of our earlier book, Jean-Benoît proposed back-cover text that included the word mondialisateur (globalizer). The words mondialisation (globalization) and mondialiser (to globalize) are both in the dictionary, but not mondialisateur. It didn’t seem like such a stretch to him, but our (French) editor refused to print the word on the basis that “Cela ne se dit pas” (“It’s not said”). Why not? “Because it’s not French,” she told him.
Our publisher was a modern young woman who liked challenging ideas, but where language was concerned, like most French professionals, she preferred not to rock the boat. The root of her hang-up was that mondialisateur was a neologism—a new word. Neologisms are the great evil of purism, which dictates that each word should have one definition and that there should be only one word for any given definition. This shows how conservative purism has become a handicap. To language purists, all innovations in grammar and pronunciation are, by definition, fautes. Borrowing words from another language or making up new words is a sign of ignorance—this is the moral underpinning of the issue of anglicisms. Wanting people to conform to what French supposedly is—in lexicon, in grammar, in phonetics—makes it very difficult to find words to describe new realities.
In many cases, by the time the purists change their minds the world has already passed them by. In the sixth edition of its dictionary the French Academy explained what a bateau à vapeur (steamboat) was under the entry for vapeur. By the time the next edition came out, in 1878, people were using un vapeur (masculine gender) to talk about the boat and une vapeur (feminine) to talk about steam. The Academy refused to include the new meaning and the new masculine version, arguing that it was a neologism—in this case, giving a new meaning to an existing word. By the time they had decided to include the concept (in 1935), steamboats were no longer being used! It’s something of a caricature, but this example shows how the purists have always had difficulty integrating new discoveries, new inventions, new realities and new attitudes into French. French doesn’t lack the resources—as the example of mondialisateur shows—and it is not inherently less adaptable than English. The root of the problem is the purist mentality that has dominated French for the past two centuries.
Things are changing, though. Purists now distinguish between what they call “new words” and neologisms. A new word describes a new reality, whereas a neologism is a new word that describes a reality for which there is already an existing word. However, this almost theological nuance still doesn’t solve the problems that result from the stifling influence of purism. For instance, the French Academy refuses to include the word récré (short for récréation, recess) in its dictionary. The Academy claims that récré is a neologism and is worried that it would set a dangerous precedent; it would then have to accept gym for gymnase (gymnasium) and prof for professeur. For some reason the Academy does not consider these terms to be acceptable French, despite the fact that everyone uses them. Fortunately, all other French dictionaries recognize them. Of course, these examples also show that French evolves no matter what the Academy thinks, but purists will probably continue to fight their rearguard battle—no matter how popular usage evolves.
At the height of purism’s glory, other realities were shaping the language, including regional languages, Romanticism and slang.
&nb
sp; Since the French Revolution, regional languages had been relegated to the status of patois. Yet these patois held their ground for a century after Guizot—to the point that teaching in patois had to be formally forbidden in 1853 and again in 1880. Like all European societies in the nineteenth century, France was experiencing massive population movement from the countryside to the cities. This mixing, along with education, gradually forced people to adopt French as a common language. At the same time, though, few French people abandoned their local languages, so most of them were bilingual. In 1900 most of the French spoke patois eighty percent of the time. According to the National Institute of Statistics, a third of French people born before 1920 still spoke their regional language to their children.
As a result of the nineteenth-century rural exodus, many patois terms entered the mainstream. Spirou (squirrel) came from Ardennes; gones (children) from Lyon; cabochon (stubborn) from Beaujolais; tartifles (potatoes), pitchoune (cutie, referring to a child) and fada (crazy) from Provence; galette (buckwheat crepe) from Bretagne; arnaquer (to sting) from Picardy; dégoter (to find) from Angers; mouise (shit) from Jura. This short list doesn’t do justice to the depth of the borrowings, which number in the hundreds, if not the thousands.
However, the rate of borrowings slowed down as French became more solidly established as a mother tongue. By 1900 most of these languages had entered a phase of decline. It was not schooling that hastened the waning of regional languages in France so much as compulsory military service and, later, the development of mass media. Few patois had up-to-date lexicons or grammar. As the common language, French took on the job of naming modern concepts, which meant that the patois were relegated more and more to traditional spheres of activity and private life—the classic prelude to assimilation.
During the nineteenth century a number of poets and thinkers in France took up the cause of saving local languages. The most successful was the poet Frédéric Mistral, who worked to revive a variety of langue d’oc (or Occitan, as some call it) that he dubbed Provençal. He created an association, the Félibrige, to rejuvenate the language, and updated its spelling system, which had not kept up with the times. Mistral even wrote poetry in Provençal, and was the first writer in a minority language to win the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1904. Unfortunately, of all the pre-French dialects that survived, Provençal is not faring the best today.
In a 1999 survey, twelve percent of the French population—seven million people—claimed they still spoke a regional language. Another survey determined that seventy-five regional languages were spoken in France, although this included ethnic languages of the overseas territories. In continental France about two dozen local languages are still spoken, some as obscure as Poitevin-Saintongeais or Bourguignon-Morvandiau. The ones that are doing best are langues d’oc (two million people), Alsatian (about 900,000), Breton (200,000), Corsican (125,000), Catalan (100,000) and Basque (40,000). All of them, except langues d’oc, have the distinction of being spoken literally at the edges of the country. The use of these languages is largely oral; only a small proportion of speakers have any idea how to read or write in them, so their vocabulary and grammar do not follow the times. The category of langues d’oc is the largest because it includes five varieties, such as Provençal (spoken by about a hundred thousand people, mostly in the interior along the Mediterranean coast between Avignon and Nice). Throughout the twentieth century, Provençal, Occitan, and other regional languages such as Breton and Alsatian have been much more influenced by French than they have influenced mainstream French.
Ironically, nineteenth-century writers reacted to academism by defying it and pushing French in new directions. After two centuries of language purism, literature and poetry had been stifled by conformism. The standards of the Academy had been elevated practically to the level of law. Tragedies had to be structured according to the classical dictates of unity of place, time and action. If they weren’t, they were dismissed as simple melodramas. To be taken seriously, poems had to be written in the alexandrine form. Literary characters were expected to speak in beau langage, whether they were nobles or farmers. The French Academy even refused to recognize a new literary genre, the novel, as a legitimate art form (unlike poetry and drama, novels have no classical roots). Important novelists such as Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola were never accepted by the Academy because they did not write poetry; the Academy went so far as to reject Zola’s candidacy twenty-four times.
This stifling purism and conservatism ultimately fuelled a creative explosion, the Romantic movement, whose impact was more profound on France than on any other society, and is still being felt two centuries later. The French were late in embracing Romanticism. It had already begun in Germany and Britain by the late eighteenth century; refugees from the French Revolution had absorbed it during their exile, and they brought it back to France (the most famous among these were Madame de Staël and Francois-René de Chateaubriand, whose writings were suffused with a novel sense of the self). Like the Germans and the British before them, French Romantics rejected seventeenth-century classicism and embraced all things natural and medieval—or at least pre-Classical. Romantics valued emotion over reason. Artistic creation became an expression of the self—a very new idea.
The development of French in the nineteenth century owes much to a series of larger-than-life personalities who were part of this movement. They were all driven by an obsession with furthering France’s greatness in science, in industry and in art (more on this in Chapter 11). Among the writers, the figure of Victor Hugo stands tall. The son of a general in Napoleon’s army, Hugo was only fourteen when he wrote in his schoolbook that he would be “Chateaubriand or nothing.” He started his first literary journal at age seventeen and soon made his mark with poems and a series of popular novels. He wrote with an ease and freedom untypical of his predecessors. At twenty-one Hugo earned himself a royal pension. His first play, Cromwell, turned him into a celebrity. Its preface—in which Hugo made a plea for what he called le grotesque (popular reality) and against the classical canon of unity of time, place and action—was considered the manifesto of French Romanticism. “All too often, the cage of unity contains a mere skeleton,” he wrote. As to the play itself, it was anything but classical, with hundreds of characters and dozens of locations.
At about the same time Hugo began experimenting with a new approach to prose, based on telling the story of less than ideal characters—a poor bohemian girl, a deformed bell-ringer and a lecherous archdeacon, the three pillars of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Few fans of the novel, which has inspired several successful films, know that Hugo wrote it to save the famous Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame from demolition. During the Revolution Notre Dame had been used as a salt-petre plant. By the nineteenth century it had suffered so much neglect that builders wanted to reuse its stones for bridge construction. Gothic art was then regarded as ugly and offensive, so Hugo’s choice of location was deliberate; it linked the grotesque characters with the ugly art. The first three chapters of the novel are a plea to preserve Gothic architecture—in Hugo’s words, a “gigantic book of stone,” which he, as a Romantic, found beautiful.
Victor Hugo entered the French Academy at a youthful thirty-eight, as recompense for his poetry and theatrical works, not for his novels. When the president, Prince Louis-Napoleon, staged a coup in 1851 and proclaimed the Second Empire, Hugo fled with his wife, children and mistress to the Channel Island of Guernsey, sister Island of Jersey (discussed in chapter 1). While in exile he reinvented French poetry and produced another masterpiece, Les Misérables, which was immediately translated into a dozen languages (the English editions even kept the French title).
On the reverse side of our poster “A School before Jules Ferry” is a poster titled simply “Victor Hugo.” Hugo, of course, is an icon of the French Republic. In the poster he is shown with his trademark snow-white beard, surrounded by a group of children. Because of his uncompromising political stance (he refused to return to
France after Napoleon III’s general amnesty to exiles) and because of his literary genius, he became a sort of grandfather of the French Republic—a curious fate, since he started out as a royalist. Yet, more than any other French writer, Hugo stands as the prototype of the militant intellectual so idealized in French culture. Hugo was so admired that half a million people paraded under his balcony on his eightieth birthday, including a band with 5,500 instruments! When he died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, three million people came to pay their last respects at the Arc de Triomphe, where his body was laid.
In the history of the French language, Hugo is significant for more than his political activism, or even his literary genius. Hugo stood at the forefront of a movement of nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights who, in the name of realism, had their characters use popular language, including argot (slang). The roots of argot go back as far as those of standard French. In the fifteenth century, Argot was the name of a crime syndicate of brigands, thieves and killers who spoke together in jargon (a deformation of the Norman word garg, throat). Jargon was not a language so much as a system of words that criminals used so they couldn’t be understood by anyone outside the group, in particular the bourgeois and aristocrats they robbed and the authorities who pursued them. By the seventeenth century the bourgeois referred to this criminal jargon as argot.
What is argot exactly? Semantically it is French, but argot borrows its vocabulary from regional and foreign languages and masks French words with suffixes. Roupiller (to slumber) is from Picardy; zigouiller (to kill) is from Poitiers; pognon (money) is from Lyon and ringard (corny) is from a northern dialect. Loustic (rascal) is from German, gonzesse (girl) is from Italian, flouze (cash) and souk (disorder) are from Arabic and berge (years of age) is Romany. Argot deforms standard French words with suffixes such as -iergue, -uche, -oche and -igue, which are the most common. So vous (you) in argot is vousiergue, and moi is mézigue.
The Story of French Page 18