Writers began using argot in the 1830s, around the time French authorities broke the crime syndicates that spoke it. In Hugo’s novel, thieves living in the Paris sewers do not speak like Madame de Pompadour. Hugo shocked his contemporaries in 1830 when he had convicts in the novel Dernier jour d’un condamné (Last Day of a Condemned Man) speak argot. In his 1862 masterpiece Les Misérables, he wrote two detailed chapters—quite fun to read, but edited out of English editions—describing how the common and criminal elements of society expressed themselves. In adopting argot, Hugo proved that it was not only a legitimate form of French, but often a more expressive one.
By Hugo’s time argot already had the double meaning of both criminal jargon and bas langage (low, impure French)—and it only underlines the elitist mentality of purism that a single term describes both. Hugo himself hesitates between the two meanings. But by the time Émile Zola published The Drunkard in 1877, all popular forms of speech were called argotique. Argot, still alive today, has long been the hammer and anvil of French lexical creation. Singer Edith Giovanna Gassion’s stage name, Piaf, meant sparrow in the argot of Paris between the wars. Paris butchers later developed a jargon called loucherbem, which consisted of replacing the first letter of a word with an L and moving the initial letter to the end, then adding an argotique ending such as -em, -oque or -igue. Loucherbem is itself a loucherbem term for boucher (butcher). And the process remains a lively one: A term still widely used today is loufoque (zany) from fou (crazy). But the meaning of argot became somewhat diluted over the last century. It is generally used as a synonym for French slang, but many French trades, or grandes écoles, refer to their own specialized terminology as argot de métier (trade jargon).
It’s strange to think that, by using fautes as a source of creativity, Hugo and his contemporaries would go on to enhance the prestige of French more than anyone before them (more on this in chapter 11). Paradoxically, though, their influence never made one dent in the norme. Throughout the nineteenth century the norme, and the idea of le bon français, remained as powerfully rooted in French education as ever, and education in turn was powerfully associated with the goal of teaching French.
As the century progressed and European countries entered the race to build colonial empires, the French, more than any other power, used education to try to consolidate their possessions. They taught French to local elites with the aim that they would support the colonial regime, ultimately hoping that education would assimilate Africans, Arabs, Polynesians and Asians to French culture. But, as they slowly realized, the methods that had been effective on French soil could not simply be grafted on to foreign populations.
Chapter 9 ~
Tool for an Empire
Tlemcen, Algeria, has always been proud of its links to Europe. Just east of the Moroccan border, the small city’s Spanish-style architecture, flowing fountains and leafy streets give it a distinctly Western flavour. A university town with about twenty-five thousand students, Tlemcen has a long and vibrant history as one of North Africa’s intellectual centres. Its cultivated atmosphere, combined with attractions such as a twelfth-century mosque and an ancient citadel, also made it a popular tourist destination, at least until civil war broke out in Algeria in the 1990s.
We visited Tlemcen in 2002 to attend a UNESCO-sponsored conference on plurilingualism. The gathering, organized by a French organization called Le Monde Bilingue / The Bilingual World, was the first international event to be held in Algeria in a decade, and we were the first group of foreigners Tlemcen had seen since the beginning of the civil war. Back in France, our Algerian friends were alarmed by our plan to attend the conference. Tourists had been kidnapped sporadically over the previous decade, and killings were still going on in major cities.
A French colony for 130 years, Algeria still bears the scars of civil war, the fallout from its violent war of independence from France, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. As a result, the country refuses to admit to its French heritage, at least officially. Unlike many former French colonies, it did not make French one of its official languages after independence.
The heritage of French colonialism is complex, and nowhere more so than where language is concerned. We met a young fundamentalist in Tlemcen who said he refused to speak the language of the colonizer and went as far as pretending he only spoke English (though he spoke it with a French accent). But the hostility towards France doesn’t translate neatly into a rejection of French. Among the former colonies, Algeria actually has the highest proportion of French speakers, to the point that French is hardly even a second language there. Half the population speaks French fluently, eighty percent of Algerian newspapers and most of the TV channels are French, and nearly everyone has some understanding of it.
The fact is, despite how painful Algeria’s colonial history was, the country is a striking example of how successful the French were in spreading their language during the second colonial push, which lasted roughly from 1830 to 1960. In many ways the second colonial era was the second great historical opportunity for French.
If French today is an official language in dozens of countries and territories and is widely used in Africa, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Polynesia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and even Latin America, it is because France and Belgium succeeded where other richer and more powerful countries failed. All European countries participated in colonialism, but France managed to carve itself out a vast empire, second only to Britain’s. In the colonial heyday of the 1930s, the French flag floated over a good third of Africa, the larger part of Indochina, a section of India, a huge swath of the Pacific, islands in the Caribbean and a chunk of South America. France also expanded its sphere of influence to Egypt, Turkey, China, Palestine and beyond. Mexico was France’s only large-scale colonial failure of the second wave, and even there it managed to attract the elites. Belgium’s possessions in central Africa—the Congo as well as Rwanda and Burundi—added to the extension of a French language empire on which, in a way, the sun still hasn’t set.
Why and how did France and Belgium succeed where Germany and the Netherlands failed, and where France had failed a century earlier? Both France and Belgium had strategic advantages such as direct access to the sea and proximity to Africa. They were also highly motivated to build empires. By the end of the nineteenth century France was falling behind its neighbours demographically and Belgium had very few natural resources left to fuel its economy. Both countries were looking for ways to compensate for these weaknesses. In the second colonial push, France adopted a more coherent approach than it had in the first. It also had remnants of the first empire—for example, Senegal and Pondicherry—that it was able to put to use as bases for the second push.
Neither the French nor the Belgians were particularly original in how they went about colonizing. Like every other colonial power—including the United States and Russia—they invoked a “mission to civilize” or some variant of that as justification for empire building. Historians still compare French colonialism, which was based on the principle of assimilation, to so-called British paternalism in order to show the relative merits of either approach (depending on which side they’re on). In our opinion, this is nothing more or less than historical revisionism. There was nothing better about the British “white man’s burden” than there was about the French “civilizing mission.” They were the same thing: a pretext for dominating and exploiting foreign peoples. All the European powers colonized for their own ends. In 1885 Georges Clemenceau, France’s leader during the First World War and an outspoken opponent of expansionism, nailed it when he said, “To speak of civilization is to join hypocrisy to violence.”
The French, like all colonial powers, performed some ambitious semantic pirouettes to try to hide the ugly face of the civilizing mission. They called the elites they created in their colonies les évolués (the evolved). The colonial administration developed a special status called indigénat (from indigène, native). The indigènes were given their own sp
ecial justice system, as stated in the Code de l’indigénat, which authorized a new form of servitude, le travail forcé (forced labour), and so on. In Africa the broken French spoken by the indigènes was called petit nègre. Another racist term, more colloquial but still heard today, is bougnoul, a Wolof term that originally meant black person. The French used it pejoratively to refer to the évolués in Senegal, and today apply it to Arabs.
But the real difference in French colonial techniques was not the so-called civilizing mission, it was the way they went about it. For the French, the ultimate objective of colonization was cultural assimilation. They believed, or said they believed, that this could be achieved through mass education. More than any other colonial power, the French were explicit, if not adamant, about the importance of educating their colonial subjects and teaching them French. So the French language became a tool for empire building.
Of course, there was often a gap between the official discourse and reality. In Algeria, Senegal, Congo, Indochina and Lebanon, French and Belgian education policies were unevenly applied, with uneven results. In western Africa, particularly in Senegal, teaching began early in the nineteenth century, while in the Congo and central Africa there was virtually none until a century later. In some areas education was the work of the State, in others only missionaries were involved; in many, it was a combined effort. All in all, the French policies failed to educate the masses. But they succeeded in training an elite of so-called évolués who would act as colonial auxiliaries for the French and take over after independence—this would become the trademark of French colonial techniques.
On the whole, France’s effort to educate its colonial subjects does not explain how it succeeded in spreading the language so widely during the second colonial push. The main reason was that, as opposed to the first colonial push, the French this time sent settlers abroad. In the Pacific Ocean, where New Caledonia became a French colony in 1860, the French sent forty thousand convicts—four times the number of settlers and engagés they had sent to New France. Tunisia had attracted about 150,000 Europeans (mostly French and Italian) by 1906, still a considerable number. And the one million Europeans who had settled in Algeria by the 1930s were as numerous as all the settlers in all the other French colonies together. Not surprisingly, the second colonial push had a lot more impact on mainstream French than the first did.
Algeria was France’s first colony, and the first African territory officially declared a colony by a European country. While many historians consider this the event that sparked the second colonial push, the French hadn’t really set out to create a colony. For centuries, Algerian pirates had been in the habit of capturing European boats along the Mediterranean coast and selling their Christian crews as slaves. Between 1815 and 1824, British, American and Dutch fleets tried to put a stop to this practice by attacking Algerian fleets and bombarding Algiers, but it was the French who finally succeeded. Under King Charles X, France landed and seized Algiers in July 1830. The King’s successor, Louis Philippe, then decided to turn Algeria into a colony, partly as an attempt to boost the legitimacy of the French monarchy and partly to spite England, which had taken the hotly disputed Egypt out of French hands in the first years of the century. The moment he took power, Louis Philippe began laying siege to Oran and the rest of the Mediterranean coast. In 1833 France set up a colonial government in Algeria, the Gouvernement général des possessions françaises dans le nord de l’Afrique (General Government of the French Possessions in North Africa).
Then, for the first time in its colonial history, France got serious about sending settlers to a colony, partly because there were settlers anxious to go. France was late to enter the Industrial Revolution and was still largely a peasant country in the 1840s, but the population was expanding and land was becoming scarce. Landless farmers were seduced by promises of freely available rich farmland in North Africa, the legendary breadbasket of the Roman Empire. By 1850 there were twenty-five thousand European colonists in Algeria, mostly fishermen and peasants; half were French and the rest were Spanish, Italian, Maltese and Corsican. In the following decades unemployed Parisians and Alsatians poured into Algeria. By 1876 there were three hundred thousand Europeans in Algeria, half of them French. French winegrowers whose vines had been wiped out by the phylloxera epidemic in 1878 fled there looking for new land; Algeria was famous for its wines.
This contact between French soldiers and colonists and the Algerian indigènes brought a second wave of Arabicisms into French; the first dated back to the time of the Crusades (see chapter 1). But whereas then the French had borrowed scientific and technical terms from Arabic, the Arabicisms that slipped into the language in the nineteenth century were all popular expressions. Soldiers were the first to borrow from Arabic, using the word barda (from bard’a, packsaddle in the Algerian dialect) for their military kit. Bled (the country’s interior) took on a pejorative sense in French, referring to an insignificant place. And the Algerian tabib (healer) became the soldier’s toubib (still used in France for doctor). Other borrowings included chouya (a little bit), maboul (crackpot), kif-kif (the same) and nouba (party); all are used commonly in French even today, while others, including casbah and raï, spilled over into English. Dozens of other borrowings come from this period, many related to food, including the most famous, couscous, which is well on its way to becoming a national dish in France.
Almost from the beginning of the colony in Algeria, the French dreamed of replacing Arabic with French. French administrators declared French the colony’s official language and set about looking for ways to get Algerians to learn it. One of the early plans was to pay children two francs a day plus a meal to attend French school. The scheme failed. In 1850 the government created a school for sons of tribal chiefs in Paris, but this also produced few results. The main obstacle was the fact that Algerians already had a tradition of education. Before the conquest, up to forty percent of Algerians learned to read and write by studying the Koran in Muslim schools, so few North Africans bought the argument that the French were bringing them “civilization.” Meanwhile, the French settlers, who relied on exploiting undereducated indigènes as labour, were not too enthusiastic about applying the Paris education policies, which they considered too generous.
Nevertheless, the French persisted in their education objectives. In the 1850s the colonial government created “mixed” schools where students learned Arabic in the morning and French in the afternoon. By 1863 only a few thousand students were enrolled in them. From 1879 on, the French government began to create French lycées, collèges and schools of law and medicine in Algiers, and a full French school system was created in 1901. But the Muslim Algerians strongly resisted sending their children to the schools, and by 1914 only five percent of children attended French schools. The native inhabitants strongly opposed intermarriage as well, the other main means of assimilation.
Meanwhile, however, the French were assimilating almost all the other European settlers in Algeria. All the children of Europeans went to French schools, as did the Jewish population, both immigrant and indigenous. The overall result was that, by 1914, roughly a million inhabitants in a total population of 4.5 million spoke French as a mother tongue; three-quarters were Europeans, Algerian Jews and other assimilated foreigners, and one-quarter were Muslim évolués.
In spite of the failure of the school program, French made rapid progress, though for the least noble of reasons. With the help of the colonial government, European settlers had been able to take over the best of Algeria’s agricultural lands, and they quickly transformed Algerian peasants into employees who had to speak the boss’s language. The French government had declared Algeria part of France in 1848, with each French ministry responsible for its own affairs there, so French became the language of administration. It was also the language of military service. Many Muslims performed military duties because the French government made oblique promises to grant them citizenship in exchange for these “special duties.”
The overall result was that, by 1930, it was possible to go anywhere in Algeria without an interpreter.
The number of French settlers was considerably smaller in the rest of Africa, but there were so many colonies that it would be futile to try to give the details of how French progressed in each. The case of Senegal, however, is a good example.
What has gone down in history as the first French lesson in Africa took place in the town of Saint Louis, Senegal, in 1817. It was given by an equally legendary French instructor, Jean Dard, who was a visionary. When he arrived and opened a school that year, only a few thousand French people were living in Senegal. He began studying Senegal’s most important local language, Wolof, and even went on to publish the first French-Wolof dictionary in 1826, which described the structure of the language.
Jean Dard developed a new approach for teaching French outside of France, called the “mutual method” or méthode de traduction (translation method). The approach was to teach children to read and write in their native language, Wolof, then to learn French by translating. It was a very modern and very effective method, and Dard was said to have achieved remarkable results with it. Unfortunately he had to return to France in 1820 for health reasons. He came back to Senegal in 1832, but died a year later.
The Story of French Page 19