French people have been claiming that theirs is a logical language for the past three and a half centuries, though what they mean when they say this is rather obscure – which is a pity, since the other adjective they use to describe French, along with ‘logical’, is the word ‘clear’, as we shall see.
In 1647 the father of all French purist grammarians – Claude Favre de Vaugelas – referred to ‘clarity of language the which property French possesses over all other languages in the world,’ and he was swiftly followed by people who asserted things like, ‘we [the French] in everything we say follow exactly the order of rational thought, which is the order of Nature.’
The most celebrated expression of this idea came in 1784 when a self-styled aristocrat (Count Antoine de Rivarol, 1753–1801) won the prize for the best essay presented at the Berlin Academy that year. Actually, ‘Count’ Rivarol was the son of an innkeeper in the southern French town of Bagnols, but he knew there was little hope of advancement unless such an unfortunate fact could be disguised. The title of his prize-winning essay was: ‘Concerning the universality of the French language’, and the author’s aim was to explain why French was used by all the toffs and intellectuals of Europe (including students at the Berlin Academy) in preference to other languages, even their own. Of course, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that France had been ‘top nation’ in Europe for a century and a half. French, he believed, was preferred by all rational-minded people on account of its inherently logical structure:
What distinguishes our language from the ancient and the modern languages is the order and structure of the sentence. This order must always be direct and necessarily clear. In French the subject of the discourse is named first, then the verb which is the action, and finally the object of this action: this is the natural logic present in all human beings…
French syntax is incorruptible. It is from this that results this admirable clarity which is the eternal basis of our language. What is not clear is not French: what is not clear is still English, Italian, Greek or Latin.
Given the importance Rivarol attaches in sentence three to placing the subject before the verb in order to establish the logical credentials of French, it is unfortunate that he should himself place the subject (‘this admirable clarity’) after the verb (‘results’) in sentence five. However, difficulties such as this have not stood in the way of successive generations of teachers and commentators peddling similar ideas.
In the nineteenth century C. Allou – a mining engineer turned grammarian – reproduced Rivarol’s thoughts almost verbatim: ‘One of the chief characteristics of French is its extreme clarity which renders it less susceptible than any other language to obscurity, ambiguity and double-meaning.’ The distinguished critic F. Brunetière went one better: ‘People have often vaunted the “clarity”, the “logic”, the “precision” of the French language, and they have been right. However, it is not the French language which is in itself clearer and more logical than the others, it is French thinking.’
Not all were agreed, however, about the ability of the inarticulate masses to do justice to the superlative qualities of their language. Many French people were felt unworthy of the treasure bestowed upon them. In 1910 Abbé C. Vincent declared, ‘Our national language, so clear, so subtle, so logical, so distinguished, is becoming increasingly fuzzy, turgid, deformed and vulgar.’
However, as the Great War approached, the French closed ranks. Claims about the intellectual qualities of French and of the French usually become shriller and more chauvinistic as the French nation comes under threat from outside – from the Germans, for instance, or from the Anglo-Saxons. On the eve of the First World War J. Payot announced, ‘We find everywhere among French people the courageous striving after clarity.’ In the hey-day of Gaullist hostility to American influence in France, J. Duron declared in 1963:
I consider precision and clarity to be the prime qualities of our language… to such an extent that I doubt whether there has ever existed, since the time of the Greeks, a language which reflected thought so transparently…
And it is in precisely this area that the French language has for a long time had the reputation of being beyond compare. Well handled, it makes clear the most difficult ideas, and this is one of the reasons for its long domination in Europe…
It carries further than any other language the requirement and the capacity for clarity.
Such drum-banging in favour of the French language is not the monopoly of the conservative right. Even the socialist President Mitterrand was drawn into it:
On the subject of the French language, after so many others it is hard to add further praising words to those so often repeated concerning its rigour, its clarity, its elegance, its nuances, the richness of its tenses and its moods, the delicacy of its sounds, the logic of its word order.
It is perhaps understandable that this myth about French should have had a strong hold on the minds of native speakers of the language, but it is a little surprising that it should be shared by distinguished professors of French in Britain:
In translating English prose into French we shall often find that the meaning of the text is not clear and definite… Looseness of reasoning and lack of logical sequence are our common faults… The French genius is clear and precise… In translating into French we thus learn the lesson of clarity and precision. –Ritchie and Moore
It is even more surprising when we find eminent linguists pushing the idea:
The seventeenth century, which believed it could bend everything to the demands of reason, undoubtedly gave logic the opportunity to transform the French language in the direction of reason. Even today it is clear that it conforms much more closely to the demands of pure logic than any other language. – W. von Wartburg
What are people thinking of when they make claims like these about the inherent logic and clarity of the French language? The implication contained in all of the quotations we have looked at is that the structure of French is miraculously closer to that of pure, language-free thought (‘mentalese’, as Steven Pinker expresses it) than the structure of other languages. Indeed, we have seen how French commentators have regarded their language as the universal language to which all rational human beings naturally aspire in spite of themselves and in spite of their own mother tongue. Allegedly, French syntax follows very closely the order of logical thought processes; allegedly, the organization of French grammar and vocabulary coincides with the natural ordering of time and space; and French style allegedly clothes ideas in a simpler and more elegant garb than is to be found elsewhere. Let us look at each of these notions briefly in turn.
The argument most frequently advanced in defence of the logicality of French is that based on word order: just as ‘in logic’ the agent precedes the action, which precedes the patient, so the fundamental word order of French (unlike that of Latin and German) is Subject + Verb + Object. This argument is suspect on several counts. Firstly, French is by no means the only language to be of the SVO type – so is that language which Rivarol found so terribly unclear and illogical, English. Secondly, it is legitimate to ask just how fundamental the SVO order is in French. In formal style cases of inversion of Subject and Verb are quite common, as Rivarol himself unwittingly demonstrated.
e.g. Sans doute vous écrira-t-elle = No doubt she will write to you
In informal style ‘dislocated structures’ like the following are the rule rather than the exception.
O S V
e.g. Mon chien, je l’ai perdu = I have lost my dog
Moreover, if we base our argument on meaning rather than on grammatical function, all passive sentences in French become a breach of the so-called natural order.
patient action agent
e.g. Le vieillard a été soigné par un guérisseur = The old chap was looked after by a healer
The organization of French grammar and vocabulary coincides with the ‘natural’ ordering of time and space
Here we would expect the language to provide a linguistic expression for every distinct idea and reserve only one idea for each linguistic expression. On these counts it is very hard to demonstrate that French fares better (or worse) than any other language. Indeed, don’t the speakers of most languages consider their mother tongue to provide the most natural vehicle for their thoughts?
Since there is no limit to the ideas human beings are likely to have, we can be sure that there will be plenty of ideas for which French has no neatly coded expression. The French past-tense system, for instance, fails to distinguish between ‘I sang’ and ‘I have sung’ – a distinction which we in English find indispensable. They have the same word for ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’, for ‘ox’ and ‘beef. Similarly, there are plenty of words in French which have more than one meaning (e.g. poser = (1) put down, (2) ask [a question], (3) pose [for a picture]), and a large number of words which all sound the same (e.g. ver = ‘worm’, verre = ‘glass’, vert = ‘green’, vair = ‘a type of fur’, vers = ‘towards’, vers = ‘verse’). All of these breach the ‘rule’ of clarity and are potential sources of ambiguity. Indeed, one of the principal sources of jokes in French is the pun:
e.g. Napoleon: ‘Ma sacrée toux’ (= My bloody cough!)
Dim officer takes this to mean ‘Massacrez tout!’ (= Massacre everything!), so liquidates the entire population of the village.
It was Rivarol who declared that ‘What is not clear is not French.’ Well, on this count there must be millions of deprived people living and working in France with no language to call their own. Some might not be surprised if the unlettered masses produce jumbled and confused ‘non-French’, but even the educated elite, even those people whose business is style, have their problems:
Donner à l’ analyse du style une configuration épistémique plus rigoureuse que celle qui consiste actuellement à remettre en circulation des concepts détramés et effilochés par l’ usage, qui – dans les perspectives trop positivistes d’une extension réitérée de la rhétorique et de la ‘linguistique du discours’ aux actes de parole ou à la pragmatique – cherche à réduire l’analyse à des inventaires technologiques: tel est le dessein…
Giving to the analysis of style a more rigorous epistemic configuration than the one which currently consists of putting back into circulation concepts slackened and frayed by usage, which – in the over-positivistic perspective of a repeated extension of rhetoric and ‘discourse linguistics’ to speech-acts or pragmatics – seeks to reduce analysis to technological inventories: such is the purpose…
The idea which people seem to find very hard to grasp is that languages cannot possess good or bad qualities: no language system can ever be shown to be clearer or more logical (or more beautiful or more ugly) than any other language system. Where differences of clarity and logic are to be found is not in the language itself but in the abilities of different users of the language to handle it effectively. Some French speakers produce utterances which are marvellous in their lucidity, while others can always be relied upon to produce impenetrable gibberish – but it is the speakers who deserve our praise or blame, not the language.
How is it that so obviously mythical an idea as the logicality of French has taken such strong root in France and to some extent among her neighbours? The external perceptions of French are not too hard to explain – they seem to be bound up with the national stereotypes which developed in Europe a century ago and which are sadly still around today. Italian became a ‘musical language’, no doubt because of its association in the minds of non-Italians with Italian opera; German became a ‘harsh, guttural language’ because of Prussian militarism; Spanish became a ‘romantic language’ because of bullfighters and flamenco dancing; French almost inevitably became a ‘logical language’ thanks to prestigious philosophers like Descartes, whose mode of thinking was felt to contrast sharply with that of the ‘pragmatic English’.
But why should the French have taken on board the myth of logic and clarity so fully themselves? Here the answer perhaps lies in the important role played in the development of French culture by the standard language. A standard language is a set of ideas about what constitutes the best form of a language, the form which everyone ought to imitate.
When the notion of standard language started to gain ground in France in the sixteenth century, the question of what made the ‘best form’ of French better than the rest was a relatively simple one: the ‘best French was the best, because it was spoken by the best people (i.e. the King and his Court).’ In the age of absolutism established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hitching linguistic norms to aristocratic fashion came to be regarded as too crude and too fragile a basis upon which to fix the standard language. What constituted the ‘best French’ had to be anchored in something more rational and permanent: so the powers-that-be convinced themselves that ‘the French (of the best people) was the best, because it corresponded the most closely to the timeless dictates of logic and clarity.’ Thereafter, only ‘the best French’ – those uses of French which complied with what people then considered clear and logical – was deemed worthy of the label ‘French’ at all. Hence Rivarol’s circular slogan ‘What is not clear is not French.’
But things did not stop there. In 1793 the Revolutionaries decapitated their king and the nation desperately needed a new symbol for its identity to ensure solidarity within France and distinctiveness without. The French standard language was roped in for the job. It is not uncommon, even today, to hear French people speak of ‘Her Majesty the French language’. Since the French language is the language of reason and logic, any French person who uses it improperly must be cognitively defective, irrational, even mad. Since the French language is now the symbol of the nation, failure to use the national language and even failure to use it ‘properly’ makes you a traitor to the national cause. Indeed, it is still widely believed that to speak French badly, to break the rules of French grammar or to make frequent use of foreign words is to be in some way unpatriotic. In 1980 the politician Raymond Barre is reported to have said, ‘The first of the fundamental values of our civilization is the correct usage of our language. There is among young people a moral and civic virtue in the loyal practice of French.’
It is easy for Anglo-Saxons, for whom language is not normally a fundamental element of national identity, to be patronizing about the French agonizing over the intrinsic qualities and status of their language. However, they would be unwise to underestimate the capacity of language to generate national solidarity in the struggle for economic and cultural dominance which permanently characterizes international affairs. This is particularly so in France. French politicians know this and exploit it to powerful effect.
For a general overview of myths about language circulating in France, see Marina Yaguello, Catalogue des idées reçues sur la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1988). For a collection of studies focusing specifically on the question of the clarity of French, see the journal Langue française 75 (1987), Marc Wilmet (ed.). The question is discussed in English in ‘The myth of clarity’, The Times Literary Supplement, 4.6.62.