The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  There was a reason—aside from the beaches and the weather—why the French-speaking finance ministers had decided to meet in this glitzy fiscal paradise. Monaco is the smallest member of the Francophonie, a kind of French commonwealth of fifty-three countries. We have often used the word francophonie (small f) in this book in reference to those who speak French, regardless of their nationality. The other Francophonie (capital F) is an institution that brings together the various organizations, associations and media outlets that promote French and the development of French-speaking countries. Much as the U.N. is the flagship among the thousands of organizations that make up the system of international law, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (International Organization of the Francophonie) serves the same purpose for the organizations of the French-speaking world.

  The Francophonie is often compared to the British Commonwealth, which started out in 1931 as a sort of informal club designed to maintain links between Britain and its former dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1949 the Commonwealth expanded to include the newly independent India (India refused to accept the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” so the British Parliament shortened the appellation). By 1957 the Commonwealth had been thoroughly restructured, with a permanent office and a budget, and it was ready to welcome former British colonies as they gained independence in the following years. It now has fifty-five member States and governments.

  The Francophonie was slower getting off the ground than the Commonwealth, and didn’t take shape until late in the second half of the twentieth century. The original idea came from a Quebec journalist, Jean-Marc Léger, who in the early 1950s had played a key role in creating the Union internationale des journalistes de la presse de langue française (International Union of Journalists from the French-Language Press). At a meeting with the French minister of foreign affairs in 1953, Léger proposed creating a consortium of French-speaking states whose representatives would meet to network, exchange knowledge and develop policies together. Initially Léger’s proposal went nowhere, but he refused to give up. In 1954 he founded the short-lived Union culturelle française (French Cultural Union). In 1961 he created a network of francophone universities that still exists today: the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF). Meanwhile, in 1960 Léger’s idea started to take root and the education ministers of fifteen French-speaking countries decided to establish their own permanent assembly—the first of its kind in the French-speaking world.

  At the time the word francophonie was not even in use. The French geographer Onésime Reclus had invented the term in 1887, in his book France, Algérie, et les colonies, to describe everyone who spoke French, irrespective of nationality. The idea of separating nationality and language was revolutionary at a time when geographers divided the world by race, ethnic type or religion. But the term was forgotten until 1962, when the intellectual journal Esprit published a special issue, “Français langue vivante” (“French, a living language”). A number of high-profile intellectuals—including Léopold Sédar Senghor—who contributed to the issue used the word. In fact, they called for the creation of a “francophone” organization exactly like the one Léger had proposed a decade earlier.

  By 1965 many French-speaking African countries were keen to organize themselves as a group on the basis of shared language. They received strong support from the government of Quebec, which was just as anxious to start playing a role in international forums with other francophone “nations.” In 1966 the President of Niger, Hamani Diori, laid down in front of President de Gaulle the blueprint for a multilateral organization for the cooperation of French-speaking states.

  While the British had been the driving force behind the Commonwealth, at the time the French showed no enthusiasm for a francophone organization. The wars of liberation in Indochina and Algeria had traumatized French diplomats, and they wanted to avoid getting involved in anything that sounded even remotely neocolonial. Jean-Marc Léger, now retired and living in Montreal, thought that France’s position at the time was wise—and still does. “They weren’t recreating the empire under another name. So it had to be very clear that other countries not only wanted it, but demanded it.” French diplomats were also not interested in multilateralism. Like any major power, France preferred dealing with other countries, especially weaker ones, on a one-to-one basis (an approach known in political jargon as “bilateral relations”). A multilateral agency that put everyone on an equal footing would reduce the power of its biggest members. Multilateralism was much more to the liking of a country like Canada, which had never aspired to be a great power.

  Despite France’s early reticence, formal talks to create the organization began in Niamey, the capital of Niger, in 1969. The early negotiations were far more complex that those for the Commonwealth; about two dozen countries were involved, each with its own agenda. Canada and Quebec struggled over who would represent French Canadians (Quebec had its own diplomatic service by this time, even though it did not represent a country), a problem they wouldn’t resolve for nearly twenty years.

  The word francophonie, although it was used informally at this time, did not appear in official documents of the Francophonie until 1996, partly because the French never liked the term. They associated it with colonialism, and so did the North African countries. De Gaulle himself rarely pronounced the word, and never in public.

  Still, by the time of the Niamey conferences in 1969 and 1970, France was more willing to get involved in the creation of a French-speaking commonwealth. The main thing complicating negotiations at this point was the ongoing quarrel between the governments of Quebec and Canada. From the start Quebec had been very enthusiastic about the idea of a francophone organization, but the Canadian government still considered foreign affairs its exclusive turf and refused to let Quebec participate on its own. French diplomats were stuck: They believed there could not be a francophonie organization without Quebec, but they needed both Quebec’s and Canada’s presence to prove that the scheme was not a neocolonial ploy. In the end France proposed including Quebec as a gouvernement participant (participating government). The softened terminology appeased Canada, and the federal government invited New Brunswick as well, to mitigate Quebec’s influence and to avoid appearing to put it on equal footing with Canada.

  In 1970 delegates from twenty-one French-speaking countries and governments gathered in Niamey and created the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation, or ACCT) and appointed Jean-Marc Léger as director general. However, the word francophonie was conspicuously absent from the new agency’s name. In fact, Léger himself was hostile to it. “The Agency was originally supposed to be focused on international development and foreign aid. The original idea was to create an organization of countries united by language, not for language,” he told us.

  The polemic about the Agency’s name would last for the next thirty years, but the real problem was defining its purpose. The ACCT was meant to be a stepping stone to a Commonwealth-style summit of heads of French-speaking states, but there was no summit for the next fifteen years. The main problem was, again, the ongoing guerre de drapeaux (flag war) between Canada and Quebec. Things got even worse when Quebec elected a separatist government in 1976. This new government saw the ACCT as an ideal way of projecting the image of Quebec as an independent country, a position the Canadian government naturally resisted. The problem wasn’t resolved until 1984–85, when new governments in both Ottawa and Quebec were able to reach a compromise. Paris hosted the first Sommet des pays ayant le français en paratage (a clumsy title, and even more so in translation: Summit of Countries That Have French in Common) in 1986. Once again the term francophonie was curiously absent, despite the fact that, informally, everyone referred to the meeting as the francophonie summit.

  Throughout its development, the Francophonie was plagued by two problems. The first was how to define its membership criteria. Some very obvious
francophone countries such as Algeria have never joined (for reasons we explain in Chapter 14). Zaire was also wary of the colonial connotations of the organization, and only joined because Canada was a member and Belgium was not one yet (the French were right on that point). Other countries, including Cambodia and Laos, had reservations but eventually joined. On the other hand, Egypt was admitted in 1983, and even at the time its membership seemed odd, since only a small segment of the society spoke French and Egypt was never a colony of France (the case is all the more interesting because Egypt refused to be part of the Commonwealth but demanded to be part of the Francophonie). Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs at the time, argued that Egypt had always had strong ties with France, including a legal system based on French laws. Even if French is taught considerably less now than it was forty years ago, thousands of children from the Egyptian bourgeoisie are schooled in French in Jesuit colleges and speak French with their families at home. Still, Egypt’s membership was a stretch compared to that of Romania and Moldova, who joined in the early 1990s. In both countries the French language is very much alive, even after seventy-two years of communism.

  During the 1990s the Francophonie started accepting candidate countries that had only a veneer of French, such as Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria, all of whom have fewer francophones than tiny Monaco. Such choices were all the more surprising given that because some very francophone countries—for instance, Israel, which is over ten percent French-speaking—are not members (Israel would have joined long ago, but Lebanon has always rejected its candidacy). Switzerland joined surprisingly late, in 1995, but then the militantly neutral Swiss are particular about joining international organizations: They did not even join the U.N. until 2002, despite the fact that the organization’s European office is located in Geneva!

  The Francophonie continued to have difficulty defining its purpose, its major stumbling block. It hesitated between being an organization of nonaligned states, a French U.N., a French UNESCO, or a sort of academy of things-French-and-not-English. Until the middle of the 1990s Francophonie summits were mostly spent deciding on the date of the next summit. But gradually members came to agree that the meetings had to produce some concrete results. In 1987 the leaders of Quebec and Ivory Coast convinced their peers to create an Institut francophone pour l’énergie et l’environnement, based in Quebec (this institute has gone on to help poorer members to develop energy policies and energy-production techniques adapted to local conditions and resources). Members also decided to put under its authority some existing francophone bodies such as the TV5 channel and the Agence universitaire francophone, or rather, to put them under the authority of the “summit of heads of state and government.” In 1993, at the summit in Mauritius, member countries adopted their first common position on a matter relating to international trade, when they developed the policy of exception culturelle. The Anglo-American press has often mistaken this for a French policy, although Quebec was heavily involved in its formulation. The policy stated that cultural goods and services could not be regarded solely as merchandise, and was meant to influence the outcome of negotiations of the World Trade Organization. This resolution, as we will see, contained much of the ferment for the Francophonie’s future political actions.

  As early as 1987, member countries began inviting guests to the summits: governments, jurisdictions or international organizations that were not members but were considered sympathetic to the cause of French, including representatives of Louisiana, New England, Algeria and the United Nations. One of the guests invited in 1995 was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who, like most of the Alexandrian bourgeoisie, had been schooled in a French lycée. During those years, France, Belgium and the sub-Saharan countries lobbied hard to get the organization to assume its true vocation and to adopt an easy, catchy official name: La Francophonie. In 1995 the ACCT became the Agence internationale de la Francophonie. At the 1997 summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, the Francophonie chose Boutros Boutros-Ghali as its first secretary-general. The Francophonie was split into two bodies: a political head office, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, and the Agence internationale de la Francophonie, which managed subsidies and budgets. In 2005 these two entities were finally merged into a single Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

  Strangely, it took Jean-Benoît six years to understand exactly what the francophone finance ministers were doing in Monaco in 1999. They were supposed to discuss joint economic policies at the meeting, but Jean walked away feeling as if it had been just three days of pointless articulations of lofty principles—in short, so much diplomatic hot air. As with many commentators (including francophones), his view of the Francophonie was heavily influenced by his inexperience in covering high-level diplomacy, but also by the organization’s legendary difficulties, lack of purpose and tendency to let anyone join. In Monaco he concluded that the Francophonie was scattered, at best. He could see that the French themselves were ambivalent about it, and left with the conviction that the organization was doing nothing more than fighting an ineffectual, perhaps futile, battle against English. He even wrote a report wondering if the Francophonie shouldn’t be called the “Franco-phoney.” His impression of this conference was partly well-founded; the conference of ministers of economy was a foreign body and the graft never took. Yet the Francophonie has had a lot more success with conferences that gathered ministers of foreign affairs, culture or education.

  Since 1999 a lot has changed, including our own understanding of what the Francophonie does. In fact, as we would learn, the Francophonie does a lot more than it has been given credit for. But its reputation suffers from its early incoherence. Under the tenures of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and his successor, former Senegalese president Abdou Diouf, the Francophonie became an international organization with scope and ambition to match the Commonwealth’s, and a clearer sense of purpose.

  Much of the Francophonie’s efforts go towards improving economic and democratic development in member countries, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. This is not just humanitarian goodwill; half of the poorest countries in the world are members of the Francophonie (which, on the other hand, also includes two G8 countries—Canada and France—in addition to Belgium and Switzerland, which are not exactly poor either). The Francophonie runs projects ranging from Internet development in Africa to conferences on education in Africa and the Indian Ocean region. It runs some fifty rural radio stations and fifty-three Internet access stations. It also supplies technical training and briefs civil servants to prepare them to participate in international trade talks and forums such as the World Trade Organization. The Francophonie was particularly effective in what it called the Cotton Initiative, a program designed to help Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Chad convince the World Trade Organization to deal fairly with subsidies in the American cotton industry. The Francophonie supports the Université Senghor in Alexandria, where top civil servants from African countries receive PhD-level training in specialized fields such as project management and management of financial institutions and cultural programs. It also monitors electoral processes in member countries and sanctions countries where the democratic process is not respected. In 2004 and 2005 it went as far as temporarily suspending a member, Togo, and imposing sanctions on Ivory Coast.

  In Senegal we saw the development goals of the Francophonie at work. Jean-Benoît took the rickety train from Dakar to the nearby city of Thiès, seventy kilometres east, to meet Horace DaCosta, local director of the CLAC program. CLAC is a catchy abbreviation for Centre de lecture et d’animation communautaire (Centre for Reading and Community Activity). It is just one of dozens of projects run by the Francophonie in Senegal. This program was the brainchild of an inspired librarian, Philippe Sauvageau, head of Quebec’s National Assembly Library, who wanted to support community life in rural areas. His idea was to develop small libraries—of about 2,500 books—that would offer other types of services, including Internet access, games
, movie-screening facilities and sound systems for shows. Since the program was inaugurated in 1985, 213 CLACs have been opened in seventeen countries from Lebanon to Haiti, at the extremely moderate cost of forty thousand euros each.

  With Horace DaCosta, Jean-Benoît toured three CLACs, each quite different in its approach. In Joal, a coastal city of about forty thousand people that is relatively well equipped, the CLAC serves as a library with seven thousand books and offers musical performances. In Ndiaganiao, a rural community of about twenty-five hamlets that can be reached only by a broken road in the middle of baobab country, the CLAC is a community centre, and the hub of the community’s social life. Ndiaganiao’s CLAC developed its own daycare centre and offers public health programs—an initiative it started after twenty children and twelve women in the community died suddenly because of poor sanitation. A study done in Burkina Faso has shown that the rate of success in national exams is three to four times higher in communities with a CLAC than those without. Organizations from Portuguese-and English-speaking countries have approached the Francophonie to start their own versions of CLACs.

  Because of its minuscule budget of eighty-four million euros, the Francophonie tries to concentrate on original programs, such as the CLACs, that other international agencies don’t take on—starting with the promotion of French, but not limited to that. Until the mid-1990s the Francophonie ran the École internationale in Bordeaux, which essentially trained African civil servants to manage Francophonie programs. But since that school became redundant after the opening of the Université Senghor in Alexandria in 1990, Bordeaux switched its mandate to developing the Internet in francophone countries. The Francophonie was also behind the creation of a trade show, the MASA—Marché des arts du spectacle africain (African Entertainment Market). The MASA, which takes place in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, has allowed African artists to escape the folklore ghetto and develop original forms of contemporary art.