The Story of French
Page 26
The schools of the Alliance israélite universelle flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, but lost much of their clientele during the war as the Nazis systematically destroyed Europe’s Jewish population. By the end of the war the organization had also lost its raison d’être; the dream of creating a Jewish middle class had to some extent been achieved. With massive emigration to Palestine and the Americas after 1946, the AIU shifted its focus and energy to the state of Israel, where it opened schools that would downplay French culture and reinforce Jewish religious education, which was not stressed in Israel’s new secular school system. In 1949 the AIU opened lycées in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, where most AIU students are concentrated to this day.
From the inception of the Alliance israélite universelle in 1860 to the creation of the Délégation générale des relations culturelles in 1945, it had taken the French government nearly a century to wake up to the tremendous potential these private initiatives represented. Since then the government has fully co-opted the entire network, to the extent that today no country in the world is as actively engaged in cultural diplomacy as France.
In a world of instantaneous global communications, the idea that a country’s reputation depends on its ability to represent itself through artistic and educational programs has become familiar. In his book Soft Power, which explores the phenomenon of cultural diplomacy, Joseph Nye argues that diplomats today achieve as much by capitalizing on the attractions of their country as they do by using coercion or offering financial aid. Most nations—especially the large ones—have systems of cultural diplomacy in place, which the Americans also call “public diplomacy.” The United States practises cultural diplomacy through the American Cultural Exchange and Fulbright programs. Britain has 151 British Councils. Germany runs 128 Goethe Institutes. Spain has 58 Institutos Cervantes. These institutions are important tools of foreign policy. But Nye acknowledges that France is still exceptional in the field, spending close to a billion dollars a year to spread its civilization around the world—at least as much as the U.S. spends on “public diplomacy,” and much more per capita than the U.S. spends on overseas development projects. The budget for France’s cultural centres is considerably inferior to that of the British Council, but France compensates by pulling its Alliances françaises, Missions laïques, collèges and lycées into the effort.
France also has a type of individual outreach program. When Julie went to Lesotho she was accompanying Edy Kaufman, an Israeli professor of Argentine origin who is himself a product of France’s cultural diplomacy. In the 1960s he was president of the National Union of Israeli Students when he was asked to apply for a scholarship to do his PhD in France. Edy’s French was sketchy at the time, to put it mildly, but the French were interested in candidates they thought would go on to have a political career—this was one of the main criteria for selection. Edy ended up spending two years in Paris, wishing he could join in the May 1968 riots (he risked losing his student visa if he got caught protesting). In the end he turned out not to be an Israeli leader but rather a researcher and director of a peace institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Of course he was not the only intellectual the French government bet on—there were thousands like him, including Samir Kader, an Iraqi who did his university studies in France and Geneva and later became editor-in-chief of the Qatari TV broadcaster Aljazeera.
Language is still the linchpin of France’s cultural diplomacy effort. In 1999 the French government created the organization Edufrance to bring more foreign students to France. There are 250,000 foreign students in France, compared to 600,000 in the U.S., a considerable number when you compare the size of the countries. France distributes twenty thousand scholarships to foreign students and supports 26 research centres and 176 archaeological missions abroad. In addition to direct education initiatives, France sponsors a host of cultural, media and artistic organizations that either use or promote French abroad. The Association française d’action artistique helps French artists exhibit and perform in foreign countries while welcoming foreign artists to France. The French embassy in the United States recently created French American Culture Exchange (FACE) to promote French culture (films, dance, visual arts) on the campuses of American universities. Since 1949 Unifrance has promoted French cinema in fifty-five countries—which is why foreign sales of French films are equivalent to sales at home, a performance matched by no other country except the U.S. France’s international radio network RFI has forty-five million listeners. France distributes a million books and pays for six hundred translations per year, and the French government has been an important funder of cinema in the developing world since 1985. And that’s not counting the efforts of the French ministries of education and research, which each run their own exchange programs. In 2004 France’s 270 embassies, consulates and foreign representatives participated in the organization of ten thousand cultural events across the world—814 in Germany alone—including the Sounds French festival in New York, the May in France festival in Hong Kong, Printemps Français (French Spring) in Manila and France Dances in Japan. And to top that off, France spends 6.4 billion euros on foreign aid, three times more per capita than the U.S. does. These initiatives don’t even include the efforts of the Francophonie and other French-speaking countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and Canada.
The cultural diplomacy activities of Switzerland and Belgium are not as impressive as they could be, largely because language has always been a contentious issue in these countries. In Switzerland the federal government has a hands-off approach to the issue and leaves it up to the initiative of lesser jurisdictions, but Swiss cantons do not have enough resources. Nonetheless, cultural diplomacy is one of the functions of the Swiss arts council, Pro Helvetia, which runs five cultural centres (in Paris, New York, Rome, Milan and Venice), eight bureaus (in Eastern Europe) and three liaison offices (in Cairo, Capetown and Warsaw). As for the communauté française de Belgique (French community of Belgium), it has been wrestling with chronic unemployment and severe restructuring of its economy since the 1960s, which has left it poorer than the Flemish half of the country—a major reversal of fortune. The communauté is not doing as much as it wishes it were, but it does manage to achieve a fair bit through the Francophonie (discussed in chapter 16). Outside of France, Canada and Quebec are the most openly active, because both levels of government are actually competing for recognition and prestige abroad (Quebec has its own network of overseas bureaus and delegations). For instance, each supports its network of Canadian or Quebec studies; the International Association of Quebec Studies has an assortment of 2,600 experts in fifty fields of research in sixty-five countries.
France’s cultural diplomacy is so effective that the French language continues to be attractive even where France isn’t. We visited one of the seven AIU schools in Israel, the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild, located in a comfortable neighbourhood of Tel Aviv. Known simply as the Alliance, it is one of the best-functioning schools of the AIU network. Many students who arrive here as young adolescents speak Hebrew and either English or French. They spend seven hours a week learning French—which is mandatory—as their second foreign language. When they graduate, they can carry on a conversation in French.
Although it is a little-known fact, Israel is the home of a large French-speaking minority; seven hundred thousand francophones live there (ten percent of the population), many from North Africa, but also sixty thousand French immigrants living in Jerusalem. France lost popularity in Israel when it supported the Palestinians in the 1967 war, and its reputation among Israelis has been declining since, particularly in recent years, as tensions between the large Arab and Jewish populations in France have led to attacks on Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and even businesses. Yet France is still the number-one tourist destination for Israelis, and French tourists make up the largest group of visitors to Israel—even larger than the number of Americans. French is not a very popular second-language choice in Israeli schools,
partly because of tense relations with France, and partly because most students choose Arabic as their first foreign language after English.
So what compels Israeli students to attend a French lycée (or their parents to send them)? French culture still has such a good reputation that Israeli parents continue to want their children to get a French education. As Colette Bitton, a teacher at the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild, explained to us, the Alliance schools have a reputation for providing a “classic” education as opposed to the down-to-earth approach of the Israeli school system. The school is public—and free—but it happens to be located in a upper-middle-class neighbourhood, so it is attended by better-than-average students. As Jacques Wahl, director of the AIU in Paris, told us, “Parents send their children to study at the AIU schools not because of French, but in spite of French.”
Practically speaking, even in Israel, learning French has its advantages. Many students of the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild find good summer work as tour guides and interpreters for French tourists. In 2002 the Tel Aviv Chamber of Commerce deliberately sought to hire students from French lycées for summer jobs in tourism. They were given special training to master the vocabulary of hotels and restaurants. Many of the lycée students also go on to do university studies in France.
The popularity of the 1,074 Alliances françaises spread across the planet defies conventional logic; in spite of the rapidly growing appeal of English, the Alliance française is still expanding. In some countries, such as Brazil, attendance is growing because French programs in schools are being cut (Alain Marquer, director of foreign development at the Alliance française in Paris, told us that some AF schools are catering more to children and teenagers, and overall attendance has been growing five percent a year since the mid-1990s). In India, demand has exploded in the last ten years because of the country’s growing interest in foreign trade. “In New Delhi, we turn away two hundred to three hundred people a day,” says Marquer. The organizations operate differently, not only from country to country, but also from one local organization to another, adapting to local conditions and cultural differences wherever they spring up. In Madagascar the Alliance française is under contract to train French teachers for the public school system. In Lesotho it offers courses in Sesotho, the national language, for the few foreign aid workers and diplomats who still make it there (the British Council closed its office in 1998 but the Alliance is sticking it out). Some Alliances, such as San Francisco’s, even offer English courses for French nationals. The teaching of local languages in addition to French distinguishes the Alliance from other international language networks.
To this day Alliance française schools remain mostly a product of local initiatives, as they were intended to be from the start. The French government supports the organization with subsidies and by lending personnel—perks that are available to small countries that can’t afford them, such as Lesotho, but also to high-profile showcase organizations such as the Alliance française of Miami. The Alliance school in Miami has three thousand students and enough resources to build a $1.5 million new facility, which it opened in the spring of 2005. The largest Alliance française in the United States is in New York City, with an impressive staff of sixty teachers, seven thousand students and a library of thirty-five thousand books. Some of the Alliances are run by directors who are on the payroll of the French foreign affairs ministry.
In the fall of 2004 the Délégation générale de l’Alliance française, the umbrella organization for American Alliances, in Washington D.C., organized a book tour for us to speak at twelve local Alliances in the eastern United States. It is almost impossible to generalize about the American Alliances, beyond the fact that many members are French teachers. Some local Alliances, for example Miami and Boston, are large, professional language schools and cultural organizations. On the other hand, the Providence, Rhode Island, school is housed in the basement of a church. Like the one in Lubbock, Texas, a number of U.S. Alliances offer no language classes, but are just French clubs where members meet regularly to practise their French or discuss French affairs. Or, as in Norfolk, Virginia, Alliances serve as networks for French teachers.
The American Alliances demonstrate how French cultural diplomacy has retained its power. Interestingly, though, this power is not necessarily tied to France anymore. Some Alliances, particularly the older, more established ones, have a strong bias towards “French from France.” Members of these groups consider France to be the definitive and exclusive source of French culture; they usually had difficulty (or said they had difficulty) understanding Jean-Benoît’s Quebec French. But many of the newer Alliances have adopted a broader franco-phone philosophy that is, in fact, more in line with the present orientation of the overall organization. The members of these Alliances know a lot about Quebec and Canada, are interested in the rest of the francophonie, and in terms of culture and dialects tend to place all francophone countries on equal footing. The Alliance in Lubbock, Texas, was particularly attuned to French-Canadian culture: It was run by an Algerian who could cite Quebec authors and singers by heart. He also knew a great deal about African literature.
So has French cultural diplomacy begun working to the advantage of other French-speaking countries? There is no doubt that France has been very successful in cultural diplomacy and in projecting “soft power” by promoting its language and culture across five continents for the last century and a half. The surprising result seems to be that the French language today is more popular than France itself.
Chapter 13 ~
A New Playing Field
At the same time the French were busy establishing a system of cultural diplomacy all over the planet, geopolitics was not working to the advantage of the French language. Between 1850 and 1945 France declined as a European power in contrast to Germany and Britain, which were steadily climbing. The world wars were devasting both to French morale and to France’s international reputation, and logically should have spelled the end of French as an international language.
But exactly the opposite happened. At the beginning of the twenty-first century French has a unique position among international languages. French ranks only ninth in the number of speakers today, well below international languages such as English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Russian. But it has official status in more countries than any other language besides English. Two G8 countries are French-speaking; two francophone cities, Brussels and Geneva, are important centres of internationalism. Francophone countries have even gone on to create their own version of the British Commonwealth, the Francophonie, which has fifty-three member countries (see table 6 in Appendix).
What happened? In a nutshell, the world changed, and French adapted to it rather nimbly. The same events that brought about the collapse of France as a world power in the first half of the twentieth century ushered in a new world order where language became a source of shared identity that transcended geographic borders—and would soon become a tool that nations would use to further their influence. Partly because of the work France had already done in spreading its language across the globe, partly because of the creation of new French-speaking states after Napoleon’s defeat a century earlier, and partly as a result of post-war decolonization, French was able to take on a surprisingly forceful role in this new internationalism.
The clouds were already gathering by 1850. Until the eighteenth century French had benefited from being the language of Europe’s largest country and strongest continental power. The next biggest competitors, German and Italian, were spoken in hundreds of city states, principalities, duchies and bishoprics. This lack of unity favoured the language of the continent’s biggest nation, France, especially in the courts and among the urban elites. Then, in the nineteenth century, the Germans and Italians created unified countries, and French lost two of its main “markets.” French intellectual, industrial and technical supremacy was now challenged by equally good, often better, production in other languages.
As British commerce, German science, American industry and Soviet ideology established their influence, the cultural lustre of French faded. France compensated by pursuing influence in other regions (namely Romania), but the glory days when French did not need to share the field were clearly over.
During the same period France’s population growth slowed. By 1914 there were only forty million French people—a small increase from the twenty-eight million at the time of the Revolution. The British population had tripled to forty-three million by this time and the German to sixty-seven million. The populations of Russia and the United States, meanwhile, were close to 125 million and 100 million respectively. With stunning foresight, Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted in his book Democracy in America—published in 1835—that America and Russia would one day share dominion over the world. By 1919 this was already happening.
The French, however, had developed ingenious strategies to compensate for geopolitical and demographic stagnation. Seizing their second chance after the failure of their first colonial push, they carved out a new empire in Africa and Asia that would be second only to Britain’s. They began granting automatic citizenship to people born in France, a policy that made France the most welcoming country in Europe, and a country of immigration rather than emigration. France also sought to strengthen its position by building alliances, first with Britain, but also with Russia; Paris’s majestic Pont Alexandre III (Alexander III bridge), dedicated to Czar Alexander, is testimony to this new approach.