Chapter 12 ~
The Invention of Cultural Diplomacy
In the summer of 2003, Julie spent two weeks in Lesotho, a tiny mountain enclave in the middle of South Africa. She was there to watch a friend conduct workshops aimed at reinforcing democracy at the local level. Democracy has had a hard time taking root in Africa since decolonization, but in fact Lesotho, with its population of two million, gained independence peacefully in 1966 and has a growing reputation as one of the few functioning democracies on the continent.
French missionaries were present in Lesotho in the early nineteenth century; they supported Lesotho’s king against attacks from neighbouring Boers, and they transcribed the language, Sesotho, into Roman letters. However, in 1868 Lesotho became a British protectorate. As a consequence, today English is the second language taught from the early years in Lesotho’s primary schools—and evidently with much success. Julie met teenage girls in the countryside who could carry on long conversations in fluent English.
Surprisingly, though, the French presence remains. Strolling through downtown Maseru, the country’s capital, Julie discovered that Lesotho’s single public library is, in fact, an Alliance française. A British couple donated the century-old sandstone building to the city in 1946 with instructions to turn it into a public library. When the library foundered in 1982, the Alliance française took it over and turned it into a combination city library, video rental store and language school. When Julie strolled in to take a peek, she saw that roughly half the shelves were stocked with English books and videos, while the other half had a good selection of French literature and films, encyclopedias, magazines and even some classic French comic-book series such as Astérix and Tintin.
There was more. The director of Maseru’s Alliance française informed Julie that the French language school was actually rather busy. At the time of her visit some 250 students were enrolled in French classes. Julie asked the director what could possibly motivate people in this isolated, poverty-stricken former British colony to pay for French lessons. He quickly replied, “French is an African language.” The students, he explained, were mostly lawyers, doctors and members of the military. Over half the fifty-seven countries in Africa and around the Indian Ocean use French, many as an official language, and French is an official language of the Organization for African Unity. So upwardly mobile professionals in Africa need French to pursue an international career on the continent.
Maseru’s is one of 1,074 Alliances françaises now operating in 136 countries. The language schools, together with some thousand institutions that teach French abroad, form the backbone of an extensive international system of French cultural promotion established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The system, which came to be known as cultural diplomacy, marked a new stage in the history of language. For the first time the French realized that foreign demand for their language had to be cultivated and maintained. Almost spontaneously, individuals took on the task. Like missionaries, French men and women set out of their own accord to spread French language and culture, like a religion. The French government didn’t play an important role in the movement until forty years after it started.
The actual origins of the movement are not widely known. The Alliance française is such a well-known brand that even well-informed people tend to think it was the first French association to start opening language schools abroad, and is the only one that operates them now. In fact, twenty-three years before the foundation of the Alliance française in 1883, a group of eighteen French Jews founded the Alliance israélite universelle (Universal Israelite Alliance), which wanted to spread French for different reasons. This organization was the brainchild of a lawyer, Adolphe Crémieux, and seventeen doctors, teachers, lawyers and journalists, all fervent believers in the ideals and principles of the French Revolution. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when only a tenth of the world’s Jewish population enjoyed basic civil rights and most Jews lived in abject poverty, French Jews were allowed to vote, own property, live where they wanted, practise liberal professions and enter politics—rights they had enjoyed since 1791. Many French Jews had risen to become influential figures in the country. Crémieux himself, when he became minister of justice ten years later, would pass a law granting full citizenship to Algerian Jews in 1870. In short, although French Jews were still subject to unofficial persecution, they were considerably better off than the vast majority of Jews in the world. The founders of the Alliance israélite universelle aimed to help poor Jews by creating an educated Jewish middle class, specifically in Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
But Crémieux and the AIU’s founders did not believe that the situation of Jews would be improved by mass migration to France. They wanted to bring modernity to existing Jewish populations so they could integrate into the societies where they lived. Their first tactic was to attempt to influence the French government to put pressure on other European governments to grant rights to Jews. Within several years, however, they decided that the best way to bring modernity to Jews was to educate them. Crémieux and his followers were modernists who were convinced that the traditional teachings of Hebrew schools would do nothing to improve the condition of Jews. They aimed to create French language schools whose graduates would go on to work in the banks and civil administrations of the countries where they lived.
The AIU’s first target country was Russia. When the Russian czar objected to the project, the association redirected its efforts towards Sephardic Jews living in Morocco, who were not as poor as Jews in Europe but more cut off from modernity. The AIU established its first French school in Tétouan, Morocco, in 1862, followed by a school in Tangier in 1865. The association created a teacher training school, the École normale israélite orientale, in Paris in 1867 to train teachers who would return to their countries of origin. The schools were strictly secular, and not always well accepted by the local Jewish leadership. Yet they soon spread to North Africa, Turkey and Europe; fourteen had been opened by 1870, and by 1900 there were a hundred schools with twenty-six thousand students. Those numbers had doubled again by 1914.
Crémieux and his successor, Narcisse Leven, did not glorify the French language itself so much as embrace its potential as a tool. Over the decades, however, the AIU’s success drew the attention of the cultural leaders in France, especially in diplomatic circles. Despite the fact that the world’s elites still gravitated towards French as both a prestigious and an important international language, France’s rank on the world stage was slipping rather quickly by that time. The efforts of the Alliance israélite universelle showed that by exporting French culture, secular, missionary-like activists could create a new sphere of influence for France that went beyond foreign policy, instead reaching out directly to individual sensibilities.
Inspired by the model of the AIU, a group of members of the Société historique Saint-Simon met in Paris in 1883 and founded the Alliance française. One of these founders, Paul Cambon, who was French ambassador to the protectorate of Tunisia, had been impressed by the results of Catholic religious schools and the local AIU organization there, although the goal of the Allliance française founders was as much humanitarian as propagandist. The AF decided to create a network of “support committees” in France and abroad that would raise money to open and manage language schools, organize lecture tours and provide a forum for French personalities travelling abroad. However, the eight founding members realized immediately that, as a rather anonymous group of diplomats and civil servants, they didn’t have the clout to get such a movement off the ground. So they decided to rally influential figures such as the former governor of Senegal, General Louis de Faidherbe, Suez Canal–digger Ferdinand de Lesseps and the famed microbiologist Louis Pasteur to their cause.
Like the AIU, the Alliance française was immediately successful because the demand for French at the time was very high, and because abroad it relied on local committees that operated without interference from
Paris (still the basic organizational structure today). In the first three years after its creation, the AF had twelve thousand students. As a result of local initiatives, many of these founding committees morphed into schools, and by 1900, 250 schools were operating in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The first North American school opened in Montreal in 1902, followed by Toronto in 1903, then Winnipeg and Kingston. In the United States the first schools opened in the early 1900s in Boston, Baltimore, Lafayette, Detroit, Providence and Philadelphia. Support committees were formed in the first decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru, and quickly became popular. The biggest Alliance française school during the 1920s was in Buenos Aires; in 1924 it had ten thousand members and offered eighty-one different language courses.
At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900 the Alliance française ran one of the most popular pavilions. The exhibit featured a model classroom decorated with maps of France’s colonies and with students’ written exercises pinned to the walls. From May to November visitors flocked there from all over the world to watch La leçon de français: a teacher delivering a French lesson to a group of men, women and children from as far away as Madagascar, Indonesia, Senegal and Norway. The Alliance française had asked foreign governments to send a class for the event but few could afford it, so it borrowed foreign students from Paris’s Berlitz language school for the duration of the Fair. This slight misrepresentation didn’t detract from the exhibit’s appeal; the World’s Fair organizers awarded the Alliance française pavilion a gold medal.
Meanwhile, other projects to promote French in the world quickly sprang up on the AF’s heels. French universities in Grenoble and Toulouse struck up partnerships with universities in Prague, Milan and Barcelona to organize conferences and courses on French language and culture. Within several years these “feelers” from the French universities had developed into establishments known as cultural centres or institutes. The idea was not to compete with the Alliances françaises but to complement them by offering information and documentation on France and French culture, organizing colloquiums and events, and inviting French artists. This initiative also caught on quickly and the cultural centres flourished, especially in areas where the Alliances françaises weren’t strong, such as in Europe outside of France. Cultural centres opened in Florence in 1908, in London in 1910, in Lisbon in 1928 and in Stockholm in 1937. By the end of the 1930s most of them were independent from the universities where they had started. There are now 153 centres culturels or instituts français, but unlike the Alliances françaises, they belong to the French government, whereas the Alliance remains a private organization.
The Mission laïque française (French secular mission) was created in 1902 by a group of French teachers and university professors who shared an almost evangelical desire to spread the French language and culture throughout the world. They chose the term laïque to distinguish themselves from the Catholic and Protestant missions, which were still very active, especially in the French colonies and the Middle East (as discussed in chapter 9). The program of the Mission laïque was to train teachers and to refine teaching methods so that teachers could overcome cultural differences; the ultimate goal, of course, was to open more French schools outside of France.
In 1905 the Mission laïque began publishing the magazine Revue de l’enseignement colonial (Colonial Teaching Review), later renamed Revue de l’enseignement français hors de France (Review of French Teaching Outside of France). The organization opened schools in Greece in 1906 and in Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria in 1909. In 1902, in Paris, the agency opened the École normale Jules Ferry, a college for training language instructors to deal with cultural difference and adapt teaching techniques to foreign cultures and languages. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of French cultural diplomacy remained the work of private associations, but in 1906 the Mission laïque benefited from the first subsidies from the French government. The government was beginning to understand the political potential of cultural diplomacy. During the 1920s the Mission laïque opened more schools in the Middle East, Russia and Japan.
A third scheme to spread French had been in the making for two centuries by this time: foreign collèges and lycées, the oldest of which was the Collège français of Berlin, founded in 1689 by French Huguenots. However, the schools did not really form a network. Most of them were ad hoc creations of French expatriates who later opened them to non-French students—such as the lycée of Frankfurt, created in 1949 for children of the staff of the French consulate, but later opened to any locals who wanted their offspring educated in French. The history of this network prior to 1990 is sketchy because the schools were not organized as a common body; some of them operated under the aegis of France’s ministry of foreign affairs and others were run by the ministry of education; most were local organizations with some form of support from the French government. In 1990 France put them all under the authority of a single entity, the Agence pour l’enseignement du français à l’étranger (Agency for French Teaching Abroad).
There are now more than 430 French collèges and lycées in 125 countries, schooling 235,000 children, a third of them French. A quarter of the schools are in the United States, Morocco, Lebanon and Spain combined. The largest lycée is that of Madrid, with 3,700 students; the average has six hundred. Everywhere these colleges benefit from a reputation for offering high-end education—in Morocco the demand is so strong that kindergarten candidates have to take an admissions exam. Most of the schools are autonomous; only seventy-nine are directly managed by the Agence. The rest are run by locals, although programs have to conform to French education standards, and all or most of the teachers are of French origin. Famous former students of these lycées include former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; the president of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga; the architect Ricardo Bofill; and actors Jodie Foster and Robin Williams (who gives interviews in French).
France’s network of cultural diplomacy was nearly destroyed by the two world wars. The Alliance française, being entirely private, suffered badly from the First World War, particularly inside France, where many schools could not afford to operate after the war. In 1920 the Alliance opened the École pour étrangers (School for Foreigners) in Paris. Meanwhile the popularity of the schools was still growing where the war had not had much effect, especially in Latin America. By 1939 the AIU had doubled its enrolment to forty thousand students.
The Second World War was another setback for all the associations in the system. France’s Vichy government, which was strongly pro-Catholic, shut down the Mission laïque during the war. The occupying Germans were determined to get rid of an association devoted to the expansion of French civilization, so in 1940 they closed the Paris office of the Alliance française on Boulevard Raspail and removed the association’s archives (the archives were thought to have been lost until they resurfaced in 2001, in twenty-three boxes among Soviet archives). During the war the Alliance relocated its head office to London, and Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, was named honorary president. Meanwhile, though, the number of students across the world fell drastically.
But the Second World War turned out to be pivotal, and gave French cultural diplomacy new life. In 1945, when France was just emerging from the humiliating German occupation, France’s ministry of foreign affairs began looking for ways to resuscitate the country’s damaged morale and reassert its global presence. Language became its new tool. The network already existed, and the government believed it could use language and cultural promotion to prove to the world that French language and culture were still vital and important. For the first time the French government created a body to coordinate the different associations already in place: the Délégation générale des relations culturelles et des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger (Directorate General of French Foreign Cultural Relations).
Although the Alliance française had been hard hit by the Second
World War, it rebounded swiftly in this new environment: By 1949 there were AF schools in 650 cities in France, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, North America and Latin America. By 1950 the Alliance had quadrupled its postwar figures, with a total of fifty-five thousand students; by 1967 that number had again quadrupled to two hundred thousand students. More than ever, Latin America became the AF’s stronghold. The schools were extremely popular in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, countries with some of the biggest schools in the AF network to this day. In 1967 the Alliance expanded inside France, renovated its office on Boulevard Raspail and built the seven-storey Centre Georges Duhamel to house the expanding activities of the École internationale de langue et de civilisation françaises (International School of French Language and Civilization). Founded in 1952, the school had students from 187 nationalities in teacher training and language classes by 1970.
After 1945 the centres culturels and instituts culturels, already strong in Europe, actively boosted their efforts in areas where the Alliance française was least present, notably in Germany (to this day Germany has more French cultural centres than any other country). In the 1960s the Mission laïque was also given a new vocation: to open schools for the children of managers of French companies running projects abroad. These écoles d’entreprises (company schools) were staffed by teachers certified by the French national education system. The first one opened in Calgary, Alberta, in the 1960s for children of French managers of the oil company Elf Aquitaine. The Mission laïque continued to open new company schools throughout the 1970s, and by 1985 was operating fifty-seven schools with 2,500 students. Today thirty of the Mission’s fifty-four schools are company schools. They span the globe from the École MLF–Aventis Pasteur (a pharmaceutical company) in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to the École MLF–Peugeot Citroën in Kaduna, Nigeria. In all, they school twenty thousand children, twenty percent of whom are not French.
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