The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  Nowhere was this more obvious than in literature and the visual arts. There is much debate over the actual definition of Romanticism, but its central tenet—the expression of an enhanced sense of self and feelings of revolt—impelled France’s literary ideals for most of the century and beyond, spawning generations of literary masters (until the 1970s the French won a fifth of all Nobel prizes in literature). Even after the First World War, a generation of young American writers—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them—flocked to Paris for inspiration. Hemingway’s autobiographical A Moveable Feast shows how a young American hoped to learn from the French capital even when he didn’t write in French.

  The figure of Victor Hugo (described in chapter 8) stands tall in this century, but he was not alone. A dozen other French authors could have made a solid claim of having surpassed him in literary production, although none could claim equal status as a public figure. Whereas the previous century had been characterized by a generation of philosophes whose artistic output was rather thin, the nineteenth century produced a score of great writers who made significant contributions to world literature—some of whom became famous internationally in their lifetime. While Alexandre Dumas invented the popular historical novel, Honoré de Balzac invented the novel series. In a space of twenty years, between 1827 and 1848, Balzac wrote the ninety novels that composed his Human Comedy. Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and Émile Zola (1840–1902) invented literary realism; Zola, the founder of naturalism, brought literary craft to social inquiry. Their friends the Goncourt brothers developed a parallel academy to compete with the French Academy, and their literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, is today considered pre-eminent. Zola and Flaubert were so widely read during their lives that they became familiar names in capitals all over Europe and beyond. When Zola was tried for accusing a number of French officers of forgery in the famous Dreyfus affair, thousands of people demonstrated in London and New York to support him.

  The most widely translated of all nineteenth-century French authors was Jules Verne (1828–1905). Verne invented the genre that would come to be known as science fiction, and he still ranks high on the list of the world’s most read authors, even in English. He came from a bourgeois family and was expected to become a lawyer, but instead he dreamed of travel (he had his own yacht) and began to write adventure novels. As his career progressed, Verne became more and more interested in scientific speculation—one of his famous emulators was H. G. Wells. He created characters such as Phileas Fogg, who travelled Around the World in Eighty Days; Captain Nemo, who sailed 20,000 Leagues under the Sea; Professor Hardwigg, who made a Journey to the Centre of the Earth; Impey Barbicane, who flew From the Earth to the Moon; and other “Extraordinary Adventures,” like the Mutineers of the Bounty. Like Dumas, Verne eventually became a favourite of the film industry (in Verne’s case, of Walt Disney).

  Much as in literature, the spirit of exploration was strong in the visual arts in France, especially after 1850. In the spring of 2002 Jean-Benoît had lunch in the lovely town of Barbizon, southwest of Paris, on the edge of the beautiful Fontainebleau Forest. He was a guest of the late author Jacques Meunier, a travel writer and native of Barbizon. After a wonderful meal in a hidden garden off the town’s main street, Jacques took Jean-Benoît through a door in his backyard that led straight to a small museum located in the workshop of Jean-François Millet, one of the most famous members of a school of landscape artists called the école de Barbizon.

  Although Millet’s paintings now seem conventional, they were groundbreaking, partly for their technique and partly for their choice of topics. At the time, France’s Academy of Fine Arts condoned only mythical or grandiose subjects. Millet chose to depict peasant life in all its simplicity. The Barbizon school’s most famous member was Théodore Rousseau. Although none of these painters was revolutionary, they did foster a nonconformist approach that influenced a generation of artists who rose to prominence in the last third of the century: the French Impressionists, whose paintings still fetch the highest price in art auctions.

  Impressionism started with Édouard Manet, who was himself strongly influenced by the British painter William Turner. Manet’s Impressionist revolution, which the Academy of Fine Arts rejected for half a century, brought forth a series of creative artists: Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin. Since a command of French was not a requirement for belonging to their movement, nineteenth-century painters were much more open to outsiders than writers were. Foreign artists began to flock to France—from Van Gogh and Picasso to Dali and Chagall. These artists, whose works would enrich the collections of American connoisseurs and museums such as the Guggenheim, completely revolutionized visual art, making Paris its world centre for nearly a century. Generations of artists from other countries still flock to Paris and France to recapture the ideas and the feeling of discovery created there in the nineteenth century. Since the Second World War Paris has lost some of its edge in the visual arts, but it remains an important centre of creativity.

  The power of Paris’s appeal was not limited to art, culture and food. France was also a land of modernity in science, technology and industry. The city itself was one of the first examples of comprehensive urban planning. Although tourists even then went to France seeking history and culture, the city of Paris was modern by European standards. Napoleon had been a great builder, but his nephew Napoleon III surpassed him. He ordered the prefect of the city, Georges Eugène Haussmann, to rebuild Paris almost completely, to create gardens, lay out its great avenues, add sewers and water reservoirs and more (partly to destroy the old Parisian neighbourhoods, which were known as revolutionary hotbeds). Today’s Paris is largely a result of Haussmann’s work, which touched almost every neighbourhood, with the exception of Île St-Louis and Île de la Cité. The problem of sanitation was critical at the time, and in 1884 another prefect of Paris, Eugène Poubelle, ordered citizens to store garbage in metal containers—little did he know that his name, poubelle, would become the usual term for a garbage can.

  The very symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, was one of the great technological achievements of the century. Its builder, Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923), is himself the prototype of the spirit that animated the people in this century of creativity. Eiffel, who had already built the tallest suspended bridges of the time, intended his three-hundred-metre tower to be a showcase for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889 and to demonstrate the strength of metal structures. Its construction required dozens of innovations to overcome technical obstacles—Otis, the young American elevator company Eiffel hired, had to come up with an elevator design that could carry people more than eight floors at a time. Although it has long since been surpassed in height, the Eiffel Tower was a technical tour de force. It was almost twice as high as the Washington Monument, the next tallest structure, but took only two years to build (compared to thirty-seven) and was one-fifteenth the weight. Two million people flocked to Eiffel’s tower in 1889 and bought an expensive ticket to ride its elevator—one franc for the first storey, two francs for the second and three for the ride to the top. Eiffel had himself footed most of the tower’s cost—7.8 million gold francs—but he recouped his expenses in the second year of operation. He later installed the world’s first aerodynamics laboratory in the tower, where he tested wing shapes.

  Innovations and inventions in the nineteenth century made Paris a window of discovery. Although the French were late to enter the age of steam, they were at the vanguard of the next stage in the Industrial Revolution: the search for an internal combustion engine. Its obvious application would be to propel self-moving autonomous carriages (automobiles) and heavier-than-air flying machines (airplanes).

  Automobile technology in fact had many fathers—German, English and French. The German Benz created the first light motor and the first automobile. But Louis Renault designed the first automobile that did not look like a horse-drawn carriage, as well as a number of other critical pieces of equipment, while Édouard
Michelin was the first to put tires on cars, in 1897. More than the Germans or the British, the French were passionate about the automobile, and it soon became a craze. Many foreigners saw their first automobile in the streets of Paris. Between 1898 and 1902, automobile makers and the media organized dozens of ambitious car races, the most spectacular of which was the Paris–Peking race. Hundreds of cars were at the starting line of some of these races, and they were often fatal; twelve people died in the Paris–Madrid race of 1903.

  The French were also at the forefront of aviation. In 1805, twenty years after the Montgolfier brothers developed the first hot-air balloon, the physicist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac climbed to the record height of seven thousand metres (twenty-three thousand feet) in a hot-air balloon to study the composition of the atmosphere. Clément Ader is credited with the first takeoff on board an air contraption, which was propelled by steam, in 1890. Although the Wright brothers succeeded with the first controlled flight in 1903, they owe their breakthrough to the contribution of little-known French engineer Octave Chanute, who emigrated to the U.S. and gave them access to critical knowledge in the field, mostly from France. The Wrights’ invention raised little commercial interest in the U.S., and they had to come to France to find interested crowds, industrialists and buyers. It didn’t take long for French inventors and aviators to improve on the Wright design, and Louis Blériot flew across the Channel in 1909. Others, including brothers Henri and Eugène Farman, started their own aircraft firms, building the first assembly lines for biplanes.

  Cinematography, another cutting-edge technology of the time, was developed in France. While Thomas Edison had invented a personal viewer for moving images, it was the Lyon chemist and industrialist Louis Lumière (1864–1948) who figured out how to project reels of film onto a screen. The Lumière family argued over the name of their new invention, toying with the name domitor, until they settled on cinématographe. Their patriarch, Antoine, a commercial visionary, began showcasing films in Paris. On the first day, December 28, 1895, in the basement of the Grand Café near the Opera, the show attracted thirty-three people. A few weeks later three thousand had attended. The new invention soon swept the planet. By 1897 there had been eight hundred thousand Lumière shows across the world—with images showcasing Paris. A stage magician, Georges Méliès, made the first motion picture in 1902, from a Jules Verne novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and created the first film studio. In the 1930s the unassuming Louis Lumière remarked dryly, “They say I invented cinema.” He was reputedly much more interested in photography, and had invented the Autochrome screen plate for colour photography.

  At the start of the twentieth century the scientific climate in Paris was exuberant. Some inventions made waves even though they didn’t have the popular appeal of cars and movies. In the 1880s Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabies—and invented modern biology. He also developed a process to kill the micro-organisms responsible for fermentation, which came to be known as pasteurization. At the turn of the millennium a Polish scientist, Marie Sklodowska, and her French husband, Pierre Curie, became the first to understand radioactivity. Marie Curie earned not one but two Nobel prizes—for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911—before inventing the mobile radiology unit during the First World War. (It was partly as a result of the couple’s work that France remained in the lead in atomic research until the 1940s.)

  The Curies’ curium (an artificial element), Pasteur’s pasteurization and Poubelle’s poubelle were not the only cases of people’s surnames being used to name discoveries and inventions in this period. The new writing system for the blind, Braille, was named after its inventor, Louis Braille. Louis Godillot’s army shoes became known as godillots, which then became the deprecatory godasses (a term of which M. Godillot’s heirs are certainly not proud). However, inventors and researchers generally preferred making up new words from Greek or Latin components, such as autoclave, bathyscaphe, capillarité (capillary action), galvanoplastie (electroplating) and inoxydable (stainless steel). The other main source of new terms was borrowings from foreign languages, such as caoutchouc (rubber, from Spanish). People also borrowed freely from English for scientific and technical vocabulary and words for daily life. It was in this century that two ancient gallicisms from English, gentleman and toast, re-entered French. Other terms such as packet boat and riding coat were frenchified into paquebot and redingote.

  The Industrial Revolution profoundly changed class relations in France, as everywhere, and the French had to invent new vocabulary for this phenomenon as well. Communiste, a word invented in the previous century, became popular in 1840, as did socialiste. Workers organized into syndicats (unions), which produced syndicaliser (to unionize) and syndiqués (unionized workers). To go on strike became faire la grève. Grève means beach—the first strikers in France gathered on the edge of the Seine River at Place de Grèves, which is right in front of Paris’s city hall.

  During this period the French earned an international reputation for grand schemes of all sorts. In the 1880s the French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi proposed that France offer its sister republic, the United States of America, a great gift to celebrate its centennial. He designed a gigantic forty-six-metre statue titled La Liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World). Though rather academic in its design, the Statue of Liberty was the tallest statue of its time. Bartholdi even took a boat to New York City to choose the island where it would stand.

  But other schemes did more to directly spread the influence of French. The French had invented the metric system during the Revolution, but during the second half of the nineteenth century it spread to become an international system, thanks to a campaign by French diplomats, scientists and industrialists to convince other countries to adopt it. The campaign succeeded because the need was there: Commerce and science in Europe were handicapped by different national standards in weights and measurements, which might involve fractions and proportions based on eight, twelve or sixteen, making international calculations extremely difficult. By 1875 some forty countries had joined the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements. Today most of the world uses the metric system to some extent. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866, but it remains one of the rare countries—along with Liberia and Myanmar (Burma)—that still use the old imperial system in day-to-day life. However, it is a little-known secret that even American standards like pounds and miles are defined in terms of the metre as established in Paris; for example, the official length of the foot is 0.3048 metres.

  The most grandiose of nineteenth-century French schemes was Ferdinand de Lesseps’ (1805–94) idea of digging a canal across the Isthmus of Suways (the French called it Suez) between the Mediterranean and Red seas. Lesseps did not come up with the idea on his own; it was one of the many projects that had motivated Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798. But Lesseps’ idea of a trench 163 kilometre long and 30 metres wide to link three lakes across the desert, was ultimately the one that was applied.

  It took Lesseps as much time to convince people his plan was feasible as it did to actually dig the canal. The British in particular were extremely critical of the scheme. They didn’t want France meddling in their naval domain, and they rightly saw the canal as a move to further French foreign interests by building a base for colonial expansion (which we discussed in chapter 10). In 1854 Lesseps, who spoke fluent Arabic, convinced the khedive of Egypt, who was a personal friend, to adopt the project. Then he spent the better part of the next fifteen years convincing shareholders to finance it.

  Although this massive project was threatened with bankruptcy several times, it was a truly international enterprise—even the British public bought shares. When the canal finally opened in 1869, it was an immediate success, carrying fourteen percent of international sea traffic. The canal’s international convention of neutrality was respected until 1948. As an ultimate tribute to Lesseps’ idea, the British took a controlling share by buying back the khedive’
s Suez Canal shares in 1875. But it was through this scheme that the giant French multinational Suez was created, allowing the French to make their mark in massive engineering projects, a field in which they remain world leaders today.

  The Suez Canal also had the desired effect of raising the profile of French in the Middle East. From this date on, French was an important language among the Egyptian bourgeoisie and elite, even after Egypt became a British protectorate in 1914. So, not only did Lesseps embody the spirit of progress of nineteenth-century France, but his idea raised the profile of French everywhere, and in particular within the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

  In the meantime, France—or, more properly speaking, the French—would put the incredible influence of their culture to use in deliberately spreading the French language in an entirely original way. French elites knew that geopolitically France was slipping, despite the achievements of the century. They decided to use the French language to compensate for this growing weakness. Between the 1860s and the Second World War, the French built a multi-tiered system of language associations, cultural centres and schools that would not only reinforce French where it was already present—in Europe, the Middle East and North America—but also carry it across the globe. This massive system was part of a new initiative called cultural diplomacy. And it succeeded largely because so many people across the planet already wanted to learn French.