The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  English is not the subject of this book. However, it is impossible to understand the attitudes and actions of francophones in international institutions and forums today—which are both offensive and defensive, as we explain in coming chapters—without understanding some of the reasons English got where it is. Since the Second World War, American and British diplomats, businesses, universities and associations of all kinds have led a very systematic and competent, if not always concerted, lobby to promote English across the planet. While it would be an exaggeration to speak of a huge coordinated English conspiracy, it would be false to pretend that the present ascendancy of English happened naturally. There was nothing natural about it. Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, used the English language as a tool of power through a number of explicit or tacit policies on the part of government, but also through the official and unofficial actions of decision-makers in corporations and different associations.

  The role of diplomats was paramount from the beginning of this period. In 1946 they imposed the removal of quotas on American cinema as one of the conditions for American aid to France. As far as the Americans were concerned, culture and language had clearly become strategic on the world stage. Shortly after the 1945 creation of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which more than forty countries joined, the dominant Americans succeeded in making English the universal language of all airports. Meanwhile there was a new development at the U.N. While French and English were the organization’s official working languages, jobs for senior and middle management began to be posted in English only, and more and more of them required fluency in English, with no mention of French. And any criticism of this practice was dismissed as irrelevant or as an annoyance.

  Scientists also played a part in spreading the influence of English, and pretty much on their own. In their book Alerte francophone, former French diplomats Alfred Gilder and Albert Salon point out that the Anglo-American Conference of 1961 produced a confidential report to the British Council that recommended the use of only one language (English) in the field of scientific communication. Starting in 1967, most American universities suppressed the mandatory foreign language tests for PhD candidates. During the same decade, American, British and Dutch scientific publications began refusing papers that had been published in any other language than English. They also developed systems for measuring scientists’ influence, such as the Science Citation Index. Such reference systems, which are regarded as objective, count the number of times scientists are quoted by other scientists—in English-language publications. All these self-reinforcing mechanisms managed to produce a belief that no science is being done in any other language, even among people who speak other languages. And that belief is stronger than ever today.

  Business people also played their role in pushing English. The development of British and American business is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the last two centuries. Ideology, pragmatism, naval domination and dynamism (and luck) have helped create a universal impression that English is the exclusive language of business. Much like the U.S. Army, which refuses to negotiate in any other language than English no matter where it is, Anglo-American business people have become notorious for expecting meetings to happen in English no matter where they are. At the turn of the twenty-first century this has taken a new angle, as international law firms have begun denigrating French Civil Code–based legal systems (nearly half the countries of the world use the Civil Code rather than English-based common law) by claiming that they are ineffectual for business. The real problem is that they refer to legal practice, texts and jurisprudence in French, or any language other than English.

  We are not blaming the British or the Americans for understanding that they can promote their interests through the geocultural sphere, and we are by no means arguing that there is a grand conspiracy going on among Anglo-American interests. But it is important to underline that there was nothing inevitable or natural about the spread of English. A multiplicity of agents have been working for decades to further English with the goal of increasing Anglo-American power and spreading their influence. The result? Anglophones are convinced, and have convinced others, that English is the world’s only language of diplomacy, science and business, when in fact it is the language of some institutions, of scientific journals and of business papers. The confusion, self-serving as it is, has created an illusion that other languages are mere obstacles that have to be overcome in the name of making international affairs function smoothly.

  Chapters 16, 18 and 19 discuss what francophones have done and are doing to counteract this tendency, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But we wish to be clear on one point: Injured national pride is not what motivates French, Belgian, Canadian, Algerian and Senegalese diplomats to argue for the use of French in international forums. It is an issue of power, plain and simple. Everyone knows that when it comes to language, not all speakers are equal: Those speaking their mother tongue almost always have an edge over foreigners who learned the language at school. In any negotiations, discussions or arguments, whether between diplomats, business people or scientists, the choice of language amounts to deciding who will have to fight uphill and who will fight downhill. Diplomats constantly try to keep the playing field slanted their way when they have the upper hand, or to level it when they are at a disadvantage. This was why French became an official language of the League of Nations in 1919, why it was reintroduced as a working language of the U.N. in 1946 and why francophones are still fighting hard to maintain French in diplomatic circles.

  On the playing field of geocultural influence, francophones, like anglophones, enjoyed the advantage of being early starters and setting many of the first rules of the game. One reason French remains an important international language is that, like Britain, France understood quite early how culture and language can be a source of power. In other words, while the Americans and the British were lobbying to impose their language on the new playing field, francophones were not exactly sitting on their hands.

  In a speech from the 1960s, France’s minister of culture André Malraux spoke of language as “une nouvelle république de l’esprit” (“a new republic of the mind”). A decade earlier, Albert Camus had written, “Ma patrie, c’est la langue française” (“My country is the French language”). Linguistic patriotism is not unique to francophones, but it is one reason the French, and by extension all francophones, have functioned well in this new world order, playing the geocultural game skilfully, even shrewdly.

  By 1945 France had already built a strong framework of cultural diplomacy. That was immediately put to work when language became a major factor in the battle for geocultural influence. So France was particularly well placed to exploit the international status its language had gained through international institutions. Other factors gave French a geocultural influence disproportionate to its actual number of speakers, chiefly France’s dynamism in industry, science and cultural creation of all sorts.

  During the period between 1945 and 1975, known in France as les Trente Glorieuses (the thirty glorious years), the French economy boomed and France transformed itself from a predominantly agrarian society to a post-industrial consumer society (some joke that France skipped the twentieth century and went directly from the nineteenth to the twenty-first). France modernized its telecommunications sector and created Minitel, the first national information network, which was based on teletext. The terms fournisseur de service (service provider) and autoroute de l’information (information highway) went on, via English and the Internet, to become part of the standard vocabulary of information technology, transposed into almost any language. At the same time, France became the world’s fourth nuclear power and developed successful programs for high-speed trains, civil nuclear energy and space launchers. It is now the world’s fourth-biggest car producer and the number-three arms dealer. Fibre optics, HDTV and smart cards are all French inventions. Through all of this, France maintained a very productive
agricultural sector that made it a giant in agribusiness. It also developed a gigantic modern tourism industry, to serve first its own nationals, then foreigners.

  Understanding the importance of international communication and media, Charles de Gaulle nationalized the world’s oldest wire service, Havas, to create Agence France-Presse, which is still the world’s third-biggest news agency, after Reuters and Associated Press. Its 117 offices produce three million words a day in six languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese). Although French has nowhere near the influence in the field that English does, it clearly has a niche of its own. A newspaper such as Le Monde is a recognizable franchise everywhere, and TV5, the international francophone television network, enjoys an audience that makes it the world’s number-three network after CNN and MTV. Other French media have also built international franchises—such as Paris Match and, more famously, Elle, now produced in thirty-seven foreign editions. In the Big Ten global advertising companies, French-language Publicis ranks fifth. And in the wider field of communication (including public relations), Publicis and Havas hold fourth and sixth place.

  Even after the nineteenth century, Paris continued to enjoy high status in its artistic and cultural output. Although it no longer sets the standard in literature and visual arts, with its seventy thousand painters, France has lost none of its critical mass in the field. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, which sold 75 million copies, is the novel that was translated in the most languages, over 160. Artists such as Jean Cocteau, musicians Edith Piaf and Erik Satie and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir managed to forge an almost mythical association between the French language and cutting-edge artistic innovation. The French intellectual class continued to be at the forefront of scholarly experimentation, and remained influential in spite of a long flirtation with Stalinism. The French produced a new literary genre, the nouveau roman (new novel), which sought to reinvent the mode of narration. Aside from a few fans in Italy, it never seduced anyone outside France, but it did contribute to the mystique of French in intellectual circles throughout the world.

  Throughout the period, France also remained an important force in cinema. Because the industry was never touched by a McCarthy-style anti-communist witch hunt, and because it resisted the onslaught of U.S. blockbusters, French films and France’s star system have continued to generate international appeal. Paris intellectuals such as Foucault, Derrida and Ricoeur are the darlings of American liberal arts colleges. France has become one of the main centres of world-beat music, and continues to harbour many immigrants and intellectuals who contribute to its artistic production. To this day a great number of non-English novels first come to the attention of the English market after they have been translated into French.

  Decolonization also worked to the advantage of French, though it could have worked against it, as in the case of Dutch. In 1945 the Netherlands had one huge colony, Indonesia. The Dutch fought an extremely violent decolonization war, no less brutal than the ones France fought in Indochina and Algeria. After independence the Indonesian elite abandoned Dutch, and the Dutch language lost a country that would become the world’s fourth most populated. This is why, even today, Dutch is regarded as a “small” language, even if it is in reality “mid-size” (it is spoken by 21 million people in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, which places Dutch well within the top one hundred of the world’s six thousand languages, although clearly in a different league from English and French). In comparison, most of France’s former colonies chose French as an official language or kept French as the language of administration after independence. So, in spite of the fact that the French were never as successful as the British and Americans in expanding their language through the geocultural sphere, the number of countries that had French as an official language, a national language or a language of administration had multiplied sixfold by the 1970s to reach thirty. And this excludes Algeria, where the proportion of fluent speakers is well above fifty percent even though French has no official status there at all. This phenomenon was significant in the new international system that created institutions that afforded every country a vote, no matter how small they were. (For more details, refer to the tables in the Appendix.)

  The fact is, despite the way French benefited from the new world order, numbers still count for something. Had French been confined to its original domain, it might have gone the way of German or Dutch. No matter how one looks at it, the reason French has remained an important international language is that more people than ever have added their voice to the concert of French. What is really surprising is that French grew stronger in nine out of ten former colonies of France and in all the former colonies of Belgium after their independence than it had been before. It is one of the enigmas of decolonization that still puzzles people to this day.

  Chapter 14 ~

  Choosing French

  We met Ibrahima Kouyaté because the Lonely Planet guidebook to Senegal recommended him as the best nature guide in Niokola-Koba National Park, the country’s famous wildlife reserve. While he was indeed an excellent guide, his story also gave us a first-hand illustration of the power of French in poor African countries. Ibrahima’s parents’ land was expropriated in 1954 when the French turned the area into a national park. Ibrahima, the youngest of five brothers, grew up in Dar Salam, the village located at the entrance of the park. As a child he spent hours exploring the park, and from this early passion for wildlife he developed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the park’s flora and fauna. So his decision to become a park guide came naturally.

  But as we learned during the three days we spent with him, passion wouldn’t have been enough to secure Ibrahima’s future in his chosen profession. To become a certified park guide he had to pass a written exam in French. The problem was that Ibrahima, who grew up speaking Mandingo, went to school for only three years. His mother died giving birth to him; his father, who suffered from leprosy, pulled him out of school early and sent him to work as a shepherd. Ibrahima was orphaned at age twelve, so he had practically no chance to learn French.

  We couldn’t believe the story when we heard him tell it—in excellent French. He evidently wrote well enough in French to send a thank-you note to Lonely Planet for praising him in their guide. “I was inclined towards French,” he told us, a rather vague explanation for his remarkable success in mastering the language. Later, Ibrahima elaborated: After his father’s death he had sought out every opportunity he could to expand his French vocabulary and learn to read and write, even visiting the library in the next village. Over the years he also used his continual exposure to Europeans visiting the park to polish his French.

  Before we left the park, Ibrahima asked us if we could send him back books about African wildlife from Canada. We offered to include a French–English dictionary in the package, thinking that such an ambitious fellow would see learning English as the logical next step in his career development (Lonely Planet recommended Ibrahima even though he didn’t speak English). Ibrahima told us he would like that very much, but we could see he was being polite. For most Senegalese, particularly those who, like him, live in the countryside, the advantages of speaking English are still pretty remote. French remains Senegal’s language of social promotion, and just learning it opens a world of possibilities. Before learning English, Ibrahima wanted to get his driver’s licence so he could pick up tourists in Dakar and tour them through the park without hiring a driver. That alone would multiply his business and profits by ten.

  Like the majority of Senegalese, Ibrahima had not even been born at the time of independence from France in 1960. Yet, like him, millions of young Africans born after independence want to learn French. That’s because, in most former French and Belgian colonies, French progressed more after decolonization than it had during the colonial period. The only exceptions were Syria and Indochina.

  The French and Belgian empires, like the British, began to disintegrat
e during the Second World War. The French protectorates of Lebanon and Syria became formally independent in 1941. Tunisia and Morocco followed in 1943. Wars of independence started in Indochina in 1945, and in Algeria in 1954. In the Belgian Congo, as well as Rwanda and Burundi, the cracks in the empire didn’t start to show until the 1950s, but by 1960 most of France’s colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of Belgium’s, had become independent.

  Most former French or Belgian colonies in sub-Saharan Africa kept French as one of their official languages. Countries such as Ivory Coast, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) made French an official language along with some of their national languages. Some countries made French their only official language. In others, such as Madagascar and all the countries in North Africa, French remained the de facto language of administration and education in spite of official policies to eliminate it.

  In the spring of 2004 we met Abdou Diouf—now secretary-general of the Francophonie, and president of Senegal from 1981 to 2000—at his office in Paris. At the time of Senegal’s independence he was a young politician and protégé of the country’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Diouf had watched Senegal’s independence unfold from a front-row seat, so we thought he was in a good position to explain why Senegal kept the French language even though they kicked out the French. His answer was simpler than we expected: “French was forced on us during colonialism, but then we chose it.” Newly independent countries had a number of reasons for holding on to French, depending on their situation. In most African countries, ethnic groups speak a very wide array of languages (as many as 250 in Cameroon). Today 750 African languages are spoken in the thirty French-speaking countries in Africa. At the time of independence French was a neutral language that didn’t privilege one ethnic group over another.