The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  But France went to war against Germany three times in three generations, in 1870, 1914–18 and 1939–45, and each conflict hit the French worse than the previous one. The human and material cost of the First World War damaged not only France’s economy, but also Belgium’s—most of the fighting took place precisely where Belgium’s industrial base was located. On paper France was better off than Belgium; it had withstood the German assault and won. But it was a pyrrhic victory, more crippling to the victor than to the defeated. The country had lost 1.3 million soldiers in battle, and as many more were maimed or permanently injured. The civilian population had endured four years of privation, with two hundred thousand killed in warfare and another half million by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. German reparations didn’t cover the cost of reconstruction and France got little assistance from its former allies; the Americans, who had sworn to protect the French against Germany, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. So France had to rearm itself alone, against an enemy that was twice as big.

  The war seriously undermined French capitalism, which had been a dynamic force up until then. Investment had been reduced in all economic sectors that were not necessary to the war effort, inflation soared and France lost much of its edge in the two high-tech industries of the time: aviation and cinema. France remained an important manufacturer of airplanes, but soon lost its status as leader to the Americans (a situation that might have come about whether or not there had been a war). The effect on cinema was even more devastating. French film production (except for propaganda) ground to a halt during the First World War, and after the war the Americans flooded the Continent with cheap silent productions that appealed to speakers of all languages.

  The Russian Revolution of 1917 also took a heavy toll on France’s financial sector. One of France’s great diplomatic successes of the belle époque (1890 to 1914) had been to strike up an alliance with Russia in order to contain Germany. As part of the deal France had promised to invest heavily in the Russian economy. The French populace gambled millions of francs in high-return, high-risk loans to Russian industry, loans that the French government encouraged and the Czar guaranteed. Everything seemed rock-solid until the Bolsheviks destroyed the Czar’s regime and refused to honour debts incurred to the bourgeois capitalists of France. Overnight, half a century of French savings vanished. France gained tens of thousands of White Russian (anti-Bolshevik) refugees out of the deal—the French Academy’s present secrétaire perpétuel is a descendant of one such family—but it was little compensation for the destruction of so much French capital. (This is the main reason why, to this day, the French are touchy about investing in the stock market.)

  France and Belgium had barely recovered from the First World War when the same scenario repeated itself in 1939. And this time the consequences for French were even worse. Both countries were temporarily wiped off the international political scene, and their empires began to fall apart. As France tried to deal with the aftermath of German occupation, the legacy of Nazi collaboration, and its own active participation in the Holocaust, its reputation plummeted. Tales of the French Resistance salvaged some of France’s national pride, but the country’s reputation would suffer again during the messy post-war decolonization of Vietnam and Algeria.

  In the middle of all this French lost its status as Europe’s only diplomatic language. After the First World War, France’s Georges Clemenceau, Britain’s David Lloyd George and the United States’ Woodrow Wilson met in Paris in 1919 to discuss the conditions they would impose on Germany and how they could create a peace that would last. Hundreds of representatives from other countries and would-be nations spent six months hammering out a peace settlement. The resulting Treaty of Versailles divided up the possessions of the three defeated empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) between France, Britain and Belgium. Syria and Lebanon went to France and Burundi and Rwanda went to Belgium. It was the last treaty in which nations bartered entire populations.

  The treaty was a radical break from the past; at the request of Prime Minister Lloyd George and President Wilson, it was negotiated and written in both French and English. Wilson could not speak French and Lloyd George was a rare case of a British prime minister who hardly could either. Georges Clemenceau, who had been a diplomat in Britain and was married to an American, was the only one who could accommodate the others, so he agreed. For the first time since the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714, French was not the exclusive language of high diplomacy in Europe. The issue sparked outrage in France, but there was no turning back. English had begun its steady ascent as the new international language of diplomacy.

  French also lost out in the creation of a new international body. The Treaty of Versailles created the League of Nations, based in Geneva, which would serve as the prototype of the United Nations and the foundation of a new world order based on international institutions. In this new body French had to share official status with English. But a mere twenty-six years later, when the international community replaced the failed League of Nations with the United Nations, French barely made it as one of the five official languages along with English, Chinese, Russian and Spanish—and that was thanks to France’s permanent seat on the Security Council. Only English had official status as the working language of the Secretariat General. French was voted a working language in 1946, but some U.N.-related organizations created prior to this, such as UNESCO and FAO, would be known only by their English acronyms.

  Perspectives were bleak, yet the French language would prove to have uncommon fortitude in adapting to the new international context that was taking shape. French did not go down the road of Russian, which became an important international language almost overnight as a result of the Communist revolution of 1917 and the U.S.S.R.’s superpower status after 1945. The Russian language, which was taught in all Western and Third World universities during this period, was sent back to its original turf when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989. In Paris, the Algerian who ran our photocopy shop was a former professor of Russian—eighty percent of them had had to recycle themselves practically overnight. Unlike Russian, French was not the language of an ideology.

  But more important, the same forces that brought the collapse of France as a world power in the first half of the twentieth century—European nationalism, imperial destruction, decolonization—actually helped French rebound in the second half of the century.

  The seeds of this rebound had been planted a century earlier, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It was here that European countries recognized for the first time that the constant use of brute force to solve quarrels was unproductive and cost more than it achieved. They attempted to create informal mechanisms to settle disputes and avoid war by establishing a level playing field between nations. The founding principle of the new game was that might was not right. Throughout the nineteenth century imperial powers took concrete steps to achieve this goal, including the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, followed by a series of new organizations based in Geneva (the International Telegraphic Union of 1865, the Universal Postal Union of 1874, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1875). All of these bodies were designed to eliminate topics of dissent between states and settle problems before they led to war. Many operated in French; in fact, French is still the working language of the Universal Postal Union. In the case of the International Olympic Committee, founded in 1896, when discrepancies arise between French and English versions of written materials, the French version prevails even today.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, European powers went a step further and created the first arbitration court (though it failed to prevent the First World War). The 1919 League of Nations was the first real attempt to create a permanent multilateral institution, although it was flawed and did not prevent the outbreak of a second world war. One of its biggest limitations was that the Americans, whose idea it had been in the first place, refused to join. The creation of the
United Nations and its various agencies and institutions in 1945 reached a new height in this type of international law: It gave each member country an equal vote no matter how great its wealth or power. In this new world order no country was too small to have a voice. Even failed states such as Haiti sat as equals next to developed countries—though other institutions, such as the powerful executive body, the U.N. Security Council, still gave special privileges to the mighty. French would benefit more than any other language except English from this new context.

  The United Nations was created through discussions between the U.S. and Great Britain, in conjunction with the Soviet Union and China, all of whom became members of the Security Council. France was still occupied at the time of the original discussions, between 1942 and 1944, so it was not considered for membership. It was included on the Security Council in 1945 thanks to lobbying by Britain (Churchill was feeling rather small, all alone between the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and China). At the official creation of the U.N. in 1945, the fifty member countries chose to have five official languages—English, French, Russian, Spanish and Chinese—but English was the only working language of the Secretariat General. In practice this meant that members had to be able to express themselves in one of the five official languages, but all had to understand English.

  Then, in January 1946, French was voted unanimously as the second working language of the Secretariat General. By then many countries felt that having English as the only working language gave the United States too much of an edge. As Joseph Nye puts it in Soft Power, it was already clear that institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations reflected the liberal and democratic values of the American system. So French, representing the same values but from a different tradition, provided a counterweight. The fact that it received unanimous endorsement a mere six months after barely making it as an official language showed that French still carried a lot of weight. There were also practical reasons for adopting French, according to Pierre Gerbet, author of Le rêve d’un ordre mondial, de la SDN à l’ONU (The Dream of a World Order, from the LN [League of Nations] to the UN. He explains that the early U.N. suffered from an “Anglo-Saxon” spirit that favoured vagueness and flexibility as means to reach unanimity. Working in French and English, diplomats had to clarify their ideas, because the spirit of French favours precise definitions.

  A case in point is the U.N.’s famous article 242 of November 1967, voted in the wake of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Because of peculiarities of grammar, the French and English versions do not say the same thing. As a result of the ambiguity of English grammar, the English version is open to interpretation. It calls for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” This could mean any or all occupied territories. The French version is more specific and demands “le retrait (…) des territoires occupés”—meaning all.

  French went on to become a working language of most U.N. entities, agencies, institutions and operations, from the Human Rights Commission to UNESCO and the International Labour bureau. French is also a working language of independent agencies such as the OECD, INTERPOL and Intelsat, as well as hundreds of non-governmental organizations such as the International Red Cross, the Union of International Organization and Doctors without Borders. While there is no definitive list of organizations that use French as an official language, there is no doubt that the use of French at the U.N. is declining (more on this in chapter 16). Still, U.N. statistics on the number of documents produced in French and the number of people learning French at the U.N. show that French is still a strong second language after English, and still in a class of its own with respect to other U.N. official languages. According to professor Richard Shyrock, of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, a recent listing of international jobs distributed by the U.S. State Department stated that 204 required or preferred French, 71 a U.N. language (one being French), 53 Spanish, 19 Arabic and so on.

  The reason French rebounded so strongly on the world stage was that language played a paramount role in the new world order. Language is so strongly associated with our modern idea of nations that we forget that there was a time before the French Revolution when it was hardly a consideration in either domestic or foreign affairs. The treaties of 1713 and 1763, which granted the colonies of Acadia and New France to Britain, never mentioned language. In the seventeenth century the French-speaking people of Jura and Franche-Comté, near Switzerland, were annexed by France against their will. They wanted out of France, even though they spoke a closely related Romance language. At the same time, the Germanic-speaking Alsatians wanted in. Even when Napoleon was at the height of his imperial expansion in Europe, and France had formally annexed parts of Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, language was rarely an issue—France itself was barely French-speaking at the time.

  In 1707 the English officially united Scotland and England under the umbrella name of Great Britain in an attempt to merge the two peoples into a common British identity—though British means English more than anything else. At the time of Revolution-and-Empire, the French successfully imposed the idea that France and the French language were one. And although it took them another century to actually disseminate French throughout the population, few French citizens would have challenged the idea that France was French, even by 1815. In fact, language really only came to be associated with nations in the nineteenth century, when it became a basis for unifying the German-speaking and Italian-speaking principalities, city states, bishoprics and duchies. That’s why in 1835 Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “Language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link which unites men.”

  What was true of nations in the nineteenth century would be true on the international stage of the twentieth century: Language became an organizing principle of a new form of internationalism. The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck is famous for having said that the great event of the nineteenth century was that the United States spoke English. He foresaw that the link created by a common language would, in the long run, determine international affairs. The idea was also becoming clear to French speakers, as their efforts in cultural diplomacy demonstrated.

  Language came to belong neither to the classical sphere of geopolitics (where armies, food, energy, resources, supplies and logistics account for influence) nor to the economic sphere (where industry, capital flow, workforce and patents are paramount). Rather, like religion and ideology, it belongs to what we call a geocultural sphere. This sphere is seldom talked about, but it is not new. The Soviet empire, though a geopolitical behemoth, was held up by the geocultural sphere—ideology—and brought down partly thanks to religion, the result of the Papacy’s destabilization efforts among Polish Catholics, who eventually defied the Soviets.

  Like religion and ideology, language is a source of identity that transcends national borders, has its own symbols and creates affinities between citizens of different countries. Of course, like religion and ideology, language can contribute to (or detract from) a country’s influence in traditional spheres such as diplomacy. Japan is the world’s second economic power, yet its language (like its religion) has little influence, making Japan’s overall influence in the world weaker. While oil gives Saudi Arabia some geopolitical clout, religion and language give it as much influence (the country remains an economic dwarf). An extreme example is the Vatican, which has geocultural clout but nothing else. Consider Belgium: Most of its influence comes from the fact that two of its native tongues, Dutch and French, are international languages, and the latter draws on a large international club. The cases of Canada and Quebec are also interesting. As a province, Quebec has more geocultural clout than it has geopolitical or economic influence on the world stage, because it draws on the international influence of French. And Canada’s influence owes a lot to the fact that it is part of two important geocultural spheres: English and French.

  It is the Anglo-American ex
perience that best illustrates how language became a factor in creating and solidifying transnational identities. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the British and the Americans led the way in developing their geocultural sphere. Much in the way the French developed cultural diplomacy to compensate for their geopolitical weaknesses in the nineteenth century, the British, after their defeat in the American Revolution, quite spontaneously sought what came to be called a “special relationship” with the United States.

  Right from the 1780s, cultural affinity justified numerous trade agreements, accords and treaties between Britain and the United States. The United States’ support of Britain against Nazi Germany (when the U.S. was still officially neutral) was justified on that basis. Churchill was especially sensitive to linguistic affinities, an idea he developed in his 1956–58 volumes A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. With the same logic, during the interwar period Britain sought to unite its former colonies Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as a Commonwealth of Nations. The British and the Americans quickly saw there was a lot to gain by linking language, culture and industrial interests in the right way. In Soft Power, Joseph Nye makes a good case that the penetration of American films helped sell not only more baseball caps and cars, but also values and ideas about the American way of life—all of which produced a remarkable reservoir of goodwill towards the U.S. In essence, the Anglo-Americans had the same goal as France did in pushing cultural diplomacy. But they had two advantages over the French: The combined populations of the U.S. and the U.K. were much bigger than those of France and Belgium. And compared to France and Belgium, Britain and the United States had sustained relatively little damage during the Second World War. The Anglo-Americans also got reinforcement from four other English-speaking nations: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada—the last of which did not care much about French until the 1960s. It would not take long for the Anglo-Americans to push their edge a little further and spread the idea that the English language was not merely useful, but necessary.