While cultural exchange is growing among the francophonie, so is business. Francophones are not preceded by their reputation in business, and even in France people have tended to think of French capitalism as an oxymoron. But that’s a mistake. Four of the richest members of the Francophonie are advanced industrial countries that play leading roles in critical industrial sectors, including the automobile industry, agribusiness and the energy sector. Stephen Jarislowski, a Germanborn financier who manages billions of dollars of pension funds from his Montreal office, is known in his field for his no-nonsense stance on everything from the new economy to corporate governance. When Jarislowski published his autobiography, he claimed, “The Francophonie is one of the most surprising things that happened.”
Business ideas do circulate in the French-speaking world, and again not necessarily just between France and its former colonies. In the late 1970s Franco-Ontarian businessman Paul Desmarais, who had built his fortune in transportation, began looking for a way to expand his empire into Europe. His search for a partner didn’t land him in Paris, but rather in the Belgian town of Charleroi, where he struck up a partnership with Belgian business tycoon Albert Frère. Desmarais’s New World savvy was evidently a good fit with Frère’s Old World wisdom. The two formed a holding company, Pargesa, which went on to buy substantial shares in the German multimedia empire Bertelsmann, which is active in fifty-eight countries, as well as in Total and Suez, respectively water and construction multinationals.
Business is business and francophone companies, always seeking ways to cut costs in a global environment, often look to other francophone countries for opportunities. Outsourcing call centres is an oft-quoted example of globalization, and a prime example of how globalization is happening in French. For several years now, following an American trend, French businesses have been outsourcing their call centres to francophone countries where labour is fluently francophone but less costly than in France. Their countries of choice: Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal and even Israel.
In some ways the French have been partly oblivious to this activity. Why? There are two reasons. First, the French relationship with the francophonie is paradoxical. On one hand, the French have grown remarkably tolerant of foreign accents, particularly in the seven years between when we went to France to study the French in 1999 and when we published this book in 2006. Back in 1999 we saw a documentary about Céline Dion on French TV in which her family and entourage were being interviewed. To our amazement her Québécois friends and family were subtitled (in French), because it was assumed that French viewers could not understand people speaking with a Quebec accent. Six years later, this is no longer considered necessary, nor is it required. Thanks mostly to the increasing distribution of Quebec music and films, the French have become familiar with the Quebec accent, not to mention various African accents. In the past fifteen years the development of African literature in France has also been remarkable.
At the same time, while the French are not ignorant of the francophonie, they are uneducated about it. Journalists rarely bother to make distinctions between the Francophonie (institutional) and the francophonie (linguistic and sociological). Articles on the topic in the French press are almost unintelligible because reporters, journalists and editors regularly confuse the two. In a country where journalists can nitpick for days about the exact significance of a word in their president’s speech, such lack of subtlety regarding the francophonie shows how far behind the French are in integrating the idea. The president of the Agence universitaire de la francophonie, Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, describes France as the “Wild West” of the francophonie—in other words, uncharted territory.
In defence of the French, some of their misgivings about the francophonie owes to the fact that (non-French) francophones play on language solidarity to gain entry to France as immigrants. During our travels to Africa many people commented bitterly that France was not as welcoming to immigrants as it used to be. In 1999, at the Monaco conference of ministers of the economy of the Francophonie, the question was raised with the French minister of economy and finance, Dominique Strauss-Khan, and his response was categorical: “Francophonie will not be about France admitting foreigners who speak French.” It’s hard to feel sympathetic to the French attitude, but the fact remains: Francophone countries’ attempts to use language to further their particular ends have not endeared the francophonie to the French public. This only reinforces the prejudice in France that the Francophonie is a front for post-colonialism.
There is another reason that France seems to be missing out on the activities of the francophonie. A sizeable portion of the French intelligentsia not only believe their language is losing its international role, but seem to believe that the fight was over before it even started. The result is that, in some ways, they are willingly turning themselves into a mental colony of the English-speaking world. There are signs of this defeatism everywhere. In Parisian legal circles, the new fad for 2005 was les class actions. The French press presented this as an “Anglo-Saxon concept,” ignoring the fact that Quebeckers have been pursuing recours collectifs in French for thirty years. In fact, Quebec long ago coined the vocabulary necessary to launch class-action suits in French in a civil code environment like France’s. Laurent Personne, cabinet director of the French Academy’s secrétaire perpétuel, told us that it was silly to speak of baseball terms in French, since this was obviously an American sport. It’s only silly if you don’t know that Quebeckers have been playing baseball in French for fifty years.
But French CEOs, entrepreneurs, scholars, researchers and diplomats often echo the belief that French is losing ground and that it has no future. Even when they don’t say a word, the actions of the French elite speak volumes. One of the most eloquent examples comes from a famous book series titled Que sais-je? (What Do I Know?), published by the Presses universitaires de France (University Presses of France). Created in 1941, this collection of about four thousand short handbooks provides the fundamentals on subjects ranging from mushrooms to thermodynamics. They have been translated into forty-three languages. In 2004 the publisher came out with a new book, titled Investments. The entire book was written in English, even though there is a perfectly good word in French for the same thing: investissements. In a communiqué the publisher explained: “The field is taught mostly in English today. We took the initiative because it answers a need and makes the collection more modern.” In a way the move was not surprising. Parisians who follow the stock market speak of les traders instead of les courtiers. France Telecom, France’s national telephone company, named its Internet service Wanadoo (“wanna do”). Other prime examples of this Paris pidgin are businesses with meaningless but distinctly English-flavoured company names such as Speed Rabbit Pizza and Leader Price (no one has yet been able to explain to us exactly what a speed rabbit is).
But the reasons for French defeatism go much deeper than a failure to plug into francophone culture beyond their borders. It would be an exaggeration to say that the French are the only French speakers who feel that their language is disappearing from the world, or the only ones who are contributing to the trend. We have identified about half a dozen reasons that may explain the lack of confidence in French among francophones from all countries.
The most obvious is simply that francophones have absorbed the idea that English is the language of science, business and diplomacy. In scientific circles, those who defend French are familiar with what is called the dilemme des congrès (conference dilemma): Delegates can either speak French and address a small group, or deliver in English and fill a big room. Given the options, many ambitious people choose English; the decision is justified on the grounds of “realism.” A second factor, which applies mostly to the French, is the dilution of nationalist sentiment. Given the wars it has caused, nationalism has bad press in Europe. In France only the far right indulges in the kind of flag-waving that would be considered a normal expression of patriotism in the U.S. Since language is an imp
ortant feature of nation building, a fair chunk of the French elite has distanced itself from French as a political topic, even though, paradoxically, members of the elite tend to be language purists. In other words, for the French, speaking English in international forums and declining to defend French have to some extent become ways of showing that they are not succumbing to the sirens of nationalism and Gaullism.
A third cause that also applies mostly to the French is anglomania. The French are very down on France at present—they themselves call this a period of general morosité (gloom). They went through a similar phase in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they perceived all sorts of defects in their society and were seeking ways to remedy them. When this happens they look elsewhere for solutions, and right now they are looking to English-speaking societies. Record numbers of French people are going to Great Britain to work, and the ambient influence of English caused by this migration is probably one reason the French create so many faux-English terms. This anglomania is particularly strong in French business sectors. Even an emblematic company such as France Telecom produced a 2006–8 business plan with the title “Next.” In the document, written in French to its French clients, it announced a series of new services and products with English names, including Family Talk, LiveCom, Business Talk, LivePhone, LiveMusic, LiveZoom, Mobile & Connected, and Homezone.
To combat such abuses, in 1999 a group of four French associations for the defence of the French language created the Académie de la carpette anglaise (literally, the English Rug Academy, but the term carpette also means doormat). The academy gives an annual “award of civic indignity” to representatives of the French elite or institutions who distinguish themselves for their unremitting servility to English. Predictably, France Telecom won the 2005 award. Past laureates include the CEOs of Renault and Vivendi, a minister of national defence, the editor-in-chief of Le Monde and the head of France’s most prestigious business school, HEC. In all fairness, not all members of the French elite share this anglomania. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry made a first survey on the issue in 2002 to try to measure the phenomenon. In 2005 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s national library, proposed a European plan for a digital library to compete with Google. And since 2002, France has required the CIA to use French as the working language for the new liaison office, named Alliance base, it shares in Paris with the Délégation générale de la sécurité extérieure (the French version of the CIA).
Of course, the castrating influence of conservative language purism doesn’t help. This is particularly strong in France, but in the back of the mind of most francophones is an academician who slaps their wrists for uttering new words or allowing new definitions for already existing words. English speakers are free of this hang-up. Many French speakers are attracted to the relaxed aspect of English and to the no-fuss way in which that language adapts to modernity. As we have seen, francophones are capable of dealing with modernity when they remain casual about their language and push aside the purist voices in their heads. But for many, it’s clearly easier to use English. In a way it feels like less of a betrayal of French.
A fifth cause for the disenchantment of some of the francophone elites is psychological; we call it l’amour trahi (betrayed love, in the sense of a spurned lover). Francophones, and particularly the French, have grown up believing in their language’s potential to be “universal,” to be used by everyone on the planet. As English makes further inroads (though it’s far from being truly universal), the French have become more disillusioned than ever about the failure of their language to deliver on its promise. The result is that many French speakers feel like jilted lovers: They resent the object of their pain as if it were the cause. With no small measure of extremism, many conclude that if French can’t be everything, then it can’t be anything. Francophones from outside of France tend to see the situation differently; as minorities constantly dealing with the presence of competing languages, they have never harboured illusions about the universality of French and have a more self-reliant approach to the language. In other words, they accept the idea that if French is to flourish, it’s up to them to act. They know no one else will do it for them, especially not the betrayed lovers in France.
In a closely related point, the French intellectual class seems to lack ambition. Until the Second World War, the francophone elites’ conviction that they wrote for the world drove the rayonnement of French culture. As we saw in chapter 5, there was a time when the French were so imbued with the ethic of their language’s clarity and purity that they were full of ambition to communicate to the whole world. Since the Second World War, it seems that in some ways they have turned inwards and become satisfied with writing and thinking only for themselves.
We could write an essay about this point, but two examples stand out. In the world of literary non-fiction and journalism, which we know well, French editorial practices often work against the goal of clarity. The French publish articles without indented paragraphs and books without indexes; they often write in long, windy sentences, to the point where great thinkers such as Michel Foucault are more readable in their English translation than in the French original. And what can explain the universal absence of indexes? Perhaps it’s either cost-cutting or an assumption that readers don’t need them. But researchers do need them. When faced with little time and a lot of material to cover, they will pitch the French books out the window and concentrate on the more accessible and user-friendly English ones. A comparison of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the Encyclopédie universalis speaks volumes on these different approaches (we used both in researching this book). It is true that Universalis articles are often geared to more specialized readers, but the writers make little effort to use plain language (this is all the more curious since, as we discuss in chapter 5, the original goal of encyclopedias was to make knowledge accessible to everyone!). Too often recently, intellectual productions in France have been imbued with a hermetic spirit. French intellectuals have evidently delegated the job of making sense of the world to other languages, and English has been waiting at the door, ready to work.
Another aspect of this lack of ambition is the complacency of the French university and post-secondary systems. French universities provide good instruction, but they do not capitalize on half the intellectual resources they have at their disposal. Their libraries are notoriously mediocre; faculties have no tolerance for hybrid specialities; universities are continually short of resources and fail to give students access to the most advanced research, because top research in France is done outside of universities in specialized centres. In all fairness, there are fields in which French research is cutting-edge, including mathematics, civil nuclear energy, oceanography, demography, the humanities and history. In those fields foreigners do read French journals—in French. But the competition is fierce and the French need to improve their universities in order to keep their competitive advantage. They have every right to leave their universities the way they are, but as education globalizes, France’s schools are not growing as fast as they could. Small may be beautiful, but it is also—well, small.
The debate over the relevance of French is normal. The same debate is taking place among speakers of the other international languages—with the exception of English. In our view the issue is less about reality than about perception. As we saw over the course of researching this book, the root of French’s problem is not that there is nothing going on in the language. The problem is one of spirit and attitude. The original domain of French seems to have lost its stamina, its fortitude, its spunk.
Francophone societies outside France also find France’s reluctance to defend and modernize the language insulting and alienating. Many North Africans now go to Quebec to pursue their studies, precisely because Quebec has no qualms about providing access to modernity in French. Furthermore, because their language is that of a minority where they live, francophones from Quebec, Belgium, Algeria and Senegal are accustomed
to fighting for it. Listening to French defeatism simply appalls them. In the end, the global future of French depends on whether francophones, but particularly the French, decide that it matters, or not. And if the French won’t defend the place of French in French journals, who will?
If the French continue along the road they are on, they could miss a fantastic opportunity, the same way they did in America. The continent was up for grabs and they chose the slave islands instead of Canada and Greater Louisiana. The choice was not irrational at the time, but it lacked foresight, to put it mildly.
Basically the future of French boils down to a question of choice. Pro-English propaganda is de bonne guerre (fair enough) in a world where language has become an issue of power. But for francophones, believing that propaganda may amount to collective linguistic suicide. It is surprising to hear French people rationalize the success of English by arguing that English is more efficient than any other language for expressing certain concepts. It’s fair game for the anglophone media to make such a claim, but nobody is obliged to believe it. The French should know better, since they used the very same argument in the eighteenth century, when they claimed “what was not clear was not French.” No language is intrinsically more or less efficient or complicated than another. English is an extremely difficult language to master, primarily because there are so few rules and so many exceptions. Only a fool (or someone who speaks it poorly) would think it’s easy. But most of all, the French seem to forget that any language is the most efficient one for expressing its own ideas. Many words in French can be explained in English only through long definitions and clumsy paraphrases—revendiquer, vie associative, nuire, abandon and rayonnement, to name a few. The frequent and continual borrowings of French terms by English testifies to that. So why are the French so ready to sacrifice their mental universe?
The Story of French Page 41