The Story of French
Page 23
Dialectal differences had begun to develop as soon as the British took over. But at first it was not the Canadiens’ French that changed, it was the French spoken in France. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked repeatedly that New France was in fact an Old France—both in speech and in mores. Canadiens maintained the old aristocratic pronunciation of vowels in oi—for example, moi (me), toi (you), poil (hair)—as mwé, twé and pwèl. To this day some old-stock francophones in North America use pronunciations and vocabulary that derive from pre-Revolutionary France. The Canadiens retained the long vowel, which has all but disappeared in Paris. For words like bête (beast), être (to be) and arrêter (to stop), Quebeckers draw out the first vowel, whereas the French keep it short. Quebeckers have also maintained diphthongs, which evolved on their own; a verb such as faire (to do, to make) is pronounced fair in France, while Quebeckers introduce an extra vowel (almost an extra syllable) and pronounce it as fah-air. Quebeckers pronounce pâte (dough) as pawt rather than pat, and fort (strong) as fawr rather than fore.
North American French has also maintained old consonantal sounds such as dj, tch, dz and ts, which have disappeared in standard French. A phrase like tu dis (you say) often comes out as tsu dzis, with a strong sibilance after the consonants. We noticed this feature in the French spoken in Guadeloupe as well, though Acadians have very little of it. Some of Jean-Benoît’s uncles, construction workers raised in the rural Beauce area of Quebec, speak a version of Quebec French that has held on to the tch and the dj. A verb like tiens (take) is pronounced tchien or even quiens, and a verb like marier (to wed) is pronounced mardjer. This type of pronunciation is still common in some parts of France, including central Auvergne. Quebeckers also roll the R as it used to be rolled in the ancien regime.
Some features of French-Canadian word composition, grammar and syntax are also typically seventeenth century. Jean-Benoît’s grandfather used to say formage despite the French Academy’s decision that fromage was the proper term. In Acadia, French speakers often conjugate verbs in an archaic style, saying je chantons rather than je chante. French Canadians also commonly use expressions like mais que instead of quand (when), or être après instead of être en train de (to be in the process of doing something).
Over the centuries Acadians and French Canadians also developed their own regional vocabularies. Acadians tend to say éparer (to lay out, as laundry to dry) instead of étendre, while Quebeckers say garrocher (to throw) instead of lancer. Each also developed special terms to suit their circumstances, like the Quebec term poudrerie (powdered snow). Having missed the French Revolution, and being sheltered from France’s most extreme post-revolutionary anti-clericalism, French speakers in America maintained a lively tradition of religious profanity that originated in sometimes obscure religious tools or practices. This is one of the most original features of their language, and is instantly recognizable.
The characteristics described above are rarely all found in a single speaker, and the general manner of speaking in urban Quebec today is a lot more polished than it was fifty years ago. The norm being the norm, most educated French Canadians and Acadians can easily drop dialectal differences from their speech, which they tend to do in public speaking and in writing. (Though different in some ways, French writing in Canada is as normative as it is in France, and it conforms to the same norms.) How pronounced these features are in speaking often depends on class, education and whether the person has an urban or rural background. There is no real formula to describe how much or how little Quebecker speaks with the traditional Quebec accent—or accents, since there are many regional variations. Jean-Benoît is educated, urban and bourgeois, but speaks with a strong Quebec accent, no matter to whom he’s talking. But even if some versions of modern Quebec French are more polished, major dialectal variations still remain. They are particularly noticeable in the speech of children, who are not yet conscious of “correctness.”
Anglicisms are another feature of French in America. Historically, the French and Quebeckers have had very different relationships with English. While the French have to deal with the relatively recent influence of English as a global language, French Canadians and Acadians have been dealing with the imposing local presence of English for centuries. This has resulted in many borrowings, such as poutine, the name of a Quebec dish of French fries and cheddar cheese curds with brown gravy. An English listener is always surprised to learn that poutine is a corruption of the English pudding, itself a deformation of the French word boudin (a type of blood sausage).
But anglicisms play completely different roles in European and Quebec French. In France they convey a certain chic. In Quebec, anglicisms are a clear marker of class and education, and are usually considered a sign of ignorance. But even if French Canadians have borrowed many words from English, these have hardly affected the phonetics of the French they speak. Borrowings, in fact, rarely affect phonetics or grammar, the skeleton of any language.
However, borrowings became so intense at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly in the cities, that they affected the structure of the French spoken in America. In Louisiana, in New England and in some communities of the Canadian West, many native francophones lost their capacity to conjugate verbs. For example, an anglicism such as “Il faut watcher son français,” (you need to watch your French), inelegant as it is, is still structurally French. But “Il faut watch son français” (which we heard in Acadia) shows that the speaker hasn’t mastered the basic system of verb conjugation in French. Today, if you have to go through a Canadian call centre (outside of Quebec), you will regularly hear recorded messages saying they will “répondre votre appel” (a calque of “answer your call”) and “accéder votre dossier” (from the English “access your file”)—proper French calls for the preposition à after the verbs in this context.
Those kinds of anglicisms, which are extremely rare in Europe among native speakers of French, are heard much more frequently in North America, and even more so outside of Quebec. They are often a clear indicator of imminent assimilation. Even as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, French-Canadian newspapers were blowing the whistle on anglicisms and bad French, trying to stop the process of anglicization. Their efforts had varying degrees of success. In the twentieth century, Quebeckers would come to realize that these anglicisms were the result of a power relationship—English bosses often forced them to speak in English even among themselves (more on this in chapters 15 and 18).
But power relations do not explain everything: Other anglicisms show how technology plays a role in disseminating language. At the start of the nineteenth century, Canadian turbines and locomotives came not from France or Belgium but from England and the United States. The result: The vocabulary of construction workers and mechanics in Quebec is a study in anglicisms. Many Quebec mechanics speak of le muffleur, le bumpeur or le wipeur, whereas his French colleague says silencieux, pare-chocs and essuie-glace. The difference, of course, is that the instruction manual for a Ford, Chrysler or GM car used to come in English only, unlike those for Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults. Technology-based anglicisms are one of the main forms of variances in North American French, and they show that technology is a vehicle of culture.
Of course, these technology-based anglicisms also highlight how much French Canadians and Acadians had been missing out on the important technical and intellectual developments that were taking place in France in the nineteenth century. Even while France was being outpaced by competing nations, Paris was still at the cutting edge of modernity. French culture, scientific and technological advances attracted millions of tourists, earned the admiration of the world and made the whole world hungry for French.
Part Three ~
Adaptation
Chapter 11 ~
The Power of Attraction
Most teachers of French we met and interviewed during the research for this book confirmed to us, with regret in their voices, that French was indeed waging an uphill battle again
st English in the war of second-language studies. Naturally we were curious to find out what kept them and their students so enthusiastic about French. The teachers cited a wide variety of motivations, ranging from extremely practical reasons to a kind of generalized idealization of the language. But one striking theme shone through in almost all their answers: People learn French to get access to French culture—or a certain idea of it—whether it’s France’s lively literary and artistic scene, French cuisine, French intellectuals, French films or just the French way of life.
In the history of any international language, there are two reasons why it spreads: It is either forced on people or people are interested in learning it. The global growth in French speakers in the nineteenth century owed a lot to French colonialism. Yet during the same century, the language continued to gain speakers outside of France’s colonial empire, in places as diverse as Argentina, the U.S. and Germany. The reason? People wanted to speak French because it gave them access to what was modern, sophisticated and state-of-the-art.
This chapter, admittedly, is not as much about the French language as it is about how French gained its mass appeal. Few people studying French today realize to what extent their motivations are rooted in nineteenth-century developments in France. In that century French went from being an elite language to a being language with mass appeal. It became definitively associated with luxury products, artistic innovation, tourism, cuisine and sophistication in just about every field, as well as scientific and technical progress. At the same time, French continued to develop the double personality it had gained during the Revolution-and-Empire period, and became even more strongly associated with universal values and human rights.
Nineteenth-century France was an amazing centre of creativity and innovation, and its tremendous artistic, scientific and intellectual production boosted the prestige of French across the planet. From Europe to South America and beyond, people knew French would give them access to the cutting edge of almost everything, and they wanted it. It was in this century that the French began speaking of the rayonnement of their language—a difficult term to translate, meaning a mixture of influence, spread and appeal. The French would later build on that appeal to construct widespread networks of associations and organizations that promoted French—many of which are still in place today (as we explain in Chapter 12).
The source of France’s early mass appeal is very little documented. One of the rare books on the topic is Harvey Levenstein’s Seductive Journey, which recounts the history of American tourism in France from Jefferson to the Depression. As Levenstein explains, tourism in eighteenth-century Paris consisted mostly of small-scale travel for personal cultivation. It became increasingly recreational over the next century as the number of travellers grew. The development of steam power enabled people to get to France by land and by sea faster than ever before. As many as a quarter of a million Americans visited the country each year before the First World War, and the number of English and German visitors was much larger.
French was still the language of high-level politics and diplomacy in Europe, and this status, unchallenged until 1919, inspired considerable interest in France. But the nation was also considered a window to the future. The thirst for novelty and progress attracted unprecedented numbers of visitors to the four world’s fairs that France hosted in the nineteenth century. Between the fair of 1855 and that of 1867, attendance tripled from five million to fifteen million people. In 1889 it more than doubled to thirty-two million, and in 1900 it reached fifty million—considered a good turnout for international exhibitions even today.
The Anglo-American elites, couldn’t get enough of France, to which they began travelling en masse. By the 1880s the community of American and British expatriates was big enough to support Paris’s first English-language paper, the Paris Herald, created in 1887. And Paris’s influence shone as far as the American West, where people went to saloons (a corruption of salon) and enjoyed lively French operettas by the likes of Offenbach—and the French cancan.
The reasons for this interest in Paris were complex. For a long time Paris had been a mandatory stop on the grand tour, as the British called their cultural pilgrimages across Europe (the source of the term tourism). Nineteenth-century developments in arts, tastes, science and industry made Paris even more tantalizing. French taste in food and design set the standard for the world’s elite. Luxury items from the realms of fashion, perfume, wine and cuisine, already a French forte, acquired even more renown. Demand for these goods led an ambitious French merchant, Aristide Boucicaut, to buy the Paris store Au Bon Marché in 1852 and turn it into the first of the grands magasins (department stores), an idea that soon made its way abroad, notably to New York City.
Everyone looked towards France for the latest developments in everything. To keep the public informed and to transmit information to the capitals of Europe, a translator, Charles Émile Havas, created Agence Havas, the world’s first news agency, in 1841; one of his employees, Julius Reuters, started his own telegraph wire service in London in 1851. A Russian Jewish refugee in Paris, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, was so impressed with the French daily Figaro that he decided to recreate and modernize the Hebrew language so it could be used for modern communications (more on this in Chapter 17).
The popularity of French cuisine grew in step with the development of tourism. Even today, the French word cuisine is the universal synonym of gastronomy in every language, and cuisine is cited as one of the best reasons for learning French. France was already famous for food before the Revolution, although most people today would be surprised by a French meal of the time. Dishes were prepared a couple of days in advance and laid out in serving dishes on the table—individual servings became popular only in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Russian-style service.
Things started to change with the development of the restaurant at the end of the eighteenth century. The term restaurant originates from a shop near the Louvre Palace in Paris that in the 1760s served a meat-based broth known as a bouillon restaurant (restoring broth). The term gave birth to the idea of a restaurateur, the person who owned the establishment. But the big shift came with the Revolution. Prior to that, most chefs cooked for bourgeois or aristocratic families and their numerous guests. When their bosses fled abroad to avoid jail or the guillotine during the Revolution, these chefs and maîtres d’hôtel found themselves out of work, so they started opening their own establishments. The number of restaurants in Paris had multiplied sixfold by 1810. By 1830 there were more than three thousand restaurants in Paris, of varying quality—some already of a high standard. The word restaurant entered the dictionary of the French Academy in 1835. Since not everyone in France could afford to eat at the expensive table of a great chef like Auguste Escoffier, brasseries, bistrots and cafés began to multiply in order to cater to different clienteles.
Haute cuisine, already a big draw by the nineteenth century, became a tourist magnet, especially for wealthier Americans visiting France (middle-class tourists tended to stick to modest hotel restaurants); this was when the word menu appeared in the U.S. At the same time, the British took to drinking claret, as they called Bordeaux. The French fed the new demand for high-end products, developing brands such as Lu cookies and Schweppes sparkling water. Near the end of the century they developed the system of appellation d’origine (label of origin) to classify French wine—and later extended the appellation concept to other produce such as Roquefort cheese, onions, lentils and meats. Escoffier and Swiss hotel owner César Ritz began a policy of exporting French cooking by placing French chefs—about two thousand in all—in hotels and restaurants across the world. French became essential for any chef with ambition, and remains so today, which is why people still speak of entrées, hors d’oeuvres, casseroles, vinaigrettes and meringue, to name but a few French gastronomic terms used in English.
Grave political upheavals shook France over the nineteenth century, although they did little to damage France’s at
tractiveness. Between 1830 and 1871 the French changed regimes no fewer than four times, each time violently. Paris was partially destroyed during the Prussian siege of 1870 and during the Commune uprising of 1871, but the tourists kept coming anyway. Not even the catastrophic invasion of phylloxera, an American parasite that almost wiped out the French wine industry, was enough to kill interest in French cuisine and winemaking.
Curiously, while the French language came to be associated more and more with elite culture and tastes, it also became the language of human rights. It remained the language of the European elite throughout the nineteenth century despite the competing influence of English and German. But the Revolution of 1848, an insurrection that ended the rule of King Louis-Philippe and ushered in the Second Republic, spread anti-monarchical rebellion to all the European capitals except London, associating French once again with progressive, reformist circles, as in the early years of the French Revolution. The association of French with anti-conservative politics got even more impetus from the rise of great French literary stars such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Alphonse de Lamartine—all reformist thinkers who played a role in the Revolution of 1848. It is something of a semantic miracle that French kept its elitist reputation while surfing the wave of democratization. One of the keys to this double identity probably came from the development in France during this century of the outspoken public intellectual. Even today France manages to be an aggressive player in the globalization movement while articulating a coherent anti-capitalist, pro-socialist discourse on the international stage.
Strangely, although France experienced political upheavals throughout the century, it also benefited from a period of peace in Europe that lasted from the 1815 Treaty of Vienna to the beginning of the First World War (even the 1870 Franco-Prussian War failed to drag in other powers). In France this unleashed creative energies that had been suppressed for at least a generation, which in turn reinforced the importance and prestige of French in the world. The progress of French in France through education (recounted in chapter 8) was critical. It created a bigger domestic market for the consumption of culture, but also dramatically increased the number of French-speaking potential artists, writers and scientists whose success would feed the demand for French.