Jean-Benoît visited Monaco in April 1999, to attend a conference of the finance ministers of French-speaking countries. Between interviews he decided to slip in a visit to the Museum of Oceanography, so he hailed a cab. The driver, as it turned out, was one of the rare true-blue Monegasques. Monaco, a tiny principality of 1.5 square kilometres on the Mediterranean coast, has only five thousand natives. The other twenty-four thousand residents are foreigners who live comfortably off one Monaco’s three main industries: casinos, money laundering and tax shelters. As he chatted with the driver, Jean-Benoît failed to notice that his notepad had slipped out of his pocket, so when he returned to his hotel, he was surprised to see the concierge produce it. “Vous êtes Québécois?” asked the concierge. The taxi driver had brought the pad back to the hotel and simply told the concierge it belonged to a Quebecker. Jean-Benoît realized that with an accent like his, he hardly needed a passport.
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.
At the Beirut summit in 2002, the Francophonie defined stricter rules of membership in order to create more internal coherence. The move was long overdue; after Albania and Macedonia applied for membership in 1999, a dozen more countries asked to be admitted, including Greece, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Until then, countries were admitted as so-called observers and then became full members almost automatically. But in Beirut new criteria were established: The status that applicants would be granted depended on the number of French speakers in the country and on its efforts to promote and develop French in the media and in education. So Greece, which has always been a strong defender of French in international forums and teaches the language widely, became an associate member right at the start. But Austria and Croatia will probably remain “observers” indefinitely. Ukraine was simply turned down. Ten states now have observer status, in addition to the forty-nine full members and four associate states.
The reason that non-francophone countries want to join the Francophonie is that its activities, though primarily focused on defending French, now go beyond language. As Abdou Diouf said when we met him at his office in March 2004, “The number of applicants proves that other countries recognize themselves in what we stand for.” In fact, both Boutros-Ghali and Diouf succeeded in getting the member countries to operate as a bloc in international forums, where they adopt common positions. At the 2002 Beirut summit, which took place just weeks before the U.N. Security Council met to hammer out a resolution on Iraq, the Fifty-three heads of state and government agreed to express confidence in the power of institutions such as the U.N.
The Francophonie took a long time to elaborate a coherent policy on language that would satisfy member states. Opposing English seems like an uphill battle, and all the more so since member countries like Canada, Mauritius and Cameroon hold both French and English as official languages. As to the notion of promoting French, this was also a contentious issue with the former colonies of France and Belgium, where French coexists and often competes with other national languages. At the Dakar summit of 1989, the Francophonie decided its mandate would be to promote French and langues partenaires (partner languages), a position that was politically sustainable to all.
It is from this basis that the Francophonie was capable of building a very effective stance on plurilingualism. While its positions on democracy, education, development and cooperation are pretty much the same as those of other international organizations, the support for plurilingualism is what distinguishes it. The basic idea behind plurilingualism is that a single language (in this case, English) is not sufficient for international relations. English-speaking media often ridicule the Francophonie for waging a rearguard, losing battle against English. There may be some truth to that, but the Francophonie has very shrewdly adapted its pro-French stance by pushing the more universal principle of plurilingualism, which has become its main battle cry in international organizations and the reason for the Francophonie’s renewed effectiveness in the last few years.
Plurilingualism is different from multilingualism. Institutions can be said to be multilingual because they have many official languages, whether people there use them or not. Plurilingualism refers to the state of actively promoting the use of different languages in international institutions—ultimately, to the actual efforts individuals within those organizations make to practise more than one language. In 1998, at a symposium on plurilingualism in Geneva, Boutros Boutros-Ghali made a strong case as to why plurilingualism was necessary:
[The first reason is] the respect for equality between states. We all know that forcing international civil servants, diplomats or ministers to express themselves in a language that is not theirs amounts to putting them in a situation of inferiority. It deprives them of the capacity for nuance and refinement, which amounts to making concessions to those who speak that language as a mother tongue…. Also, we all know that concepts that look similar often differ from one civilization to the next. For instance, the word democracy in English doesn’t refer to the same concept as the word démocratie in French. There are many more similar examples…. Words express a culture, a way of thinking and a world view. For all these reasons, I think that much in the way democracy within a state is based on pluralism, democracy between states must be based on plurilingualism.
This position explains why countries such as Greece and Austria want to join the Francophonie; even though they don’t have French-speaking populations, the organization could give them leverage to protect their own languages on the international stage.
English-speaking countries make regular appeals for the use of English (and the elimination of other languages) in international organizations for the sake of “simplicity” or “efficiency.” But Diouf and the Francophonie have shifted the frame of the argument from one of efficiency to one of democratic principles. In their view, language is a political issue in that the use of English puts all non-English speakers at a disadvantage. While not directly attacking English, plurilingualism attaches the issue of language diversity to a political value—democracy—that is very difficult to contest. The defence of plurilingualism has allowed the Francophonie to rally speakers of Arabic, Spanish, Russian, German and more to its cause. Ingo Kolboom, a professor at the University of Dresden and one of the very few specialists on the Francophonie outside the French-speaking world, claims, “Francophonie is an attempt, maybe the only one, to balance the discourse on the American-style global village.”
Of course, the Francophonie’s purpose is still to protect and promote French. At the moment it is especially preoccupied with the declining use of French in international institutions (the 2002 Beirut summit even called for “urgent action” on this). French and English are both working languages of the Secretariat General of the U.N., but English has been encroaching on French since the 1970s. The Francophonie has permanent representatives in the U.N.’s New York and Geneva offices, as well as in Addis Ababa, at the head office of the African Union, and has created groups of informal ambassadors in various institutions to monitor the use of French in those institutions. It created one for the European Union in 2003, and another for Washington in 2004. “We have taken a lot of flak from people who consider us a nuisance, but there’s no turning back. We can’t give up,” said Ridha Bouabid, a former ambassador who represents the Francophonie at the U.N. in New York. As we explained in chapter 13, the Francophonie’s campaign is not driven by hurt pride. The issue at stake is, Who will have the advantage of using their mother tongue in the incredibly finicky and subtle (in fact, politely brutal) discussions that are the mainstay of international institutions?
It is very unlikely that the Francophonie alone will bring French back on a par with English, particularly at the U.N. (more on this in chapter 19). As part of its effort to defend French, the Francophonie has actually been documenting the decline of French in international institutions. Studies made by Francophonie members, most notably France, have measured this decline by watching how often French is chosen for correspondence and public speeches, and how many translations are made into French. The Francophonie has fifty-three members, but at the U.N. only thirty-nine countries request their correspondence to be in French. In the European Union, French and English were still on a par in 1997 as the primary language for written documents, with about forty-two percent each. But by 2003 English had risen to seventy-two percent while French had fallen to eighteen percent. Overall statistics show that English is progressing everywhere to the detriment of all other languages, including French, although French is still faring better than the others. The case of the U.N. office in Geneva has shown that even a francophone environment outside the office door does not stop the progression of English. Putting European institutions in francophone cities such as Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg will not be enough to stop English either. Actions have to be taken, and the Francophonie knows it.
The Francophonie is more hopeful about reversing the trend towards English at the European Union, partly because the decline of French there was caught much earlier. Stéphane Lopez, a sociolinguist, was appointed in May 2003 to run the Francophonie’s ten-year program to boost French in the European Union. Lopez has targeted three groups: the ambassadors and negotiators at the EU, the national civil servants who deal directly with the EU and its ministers, cabinet directors and heads of states, and the journalists who cover the EU. The number of national civil servants who take French classes has risen from 1,300 in 2002 to 7,400 in 2005. As for senior EU executives, the number who take French classes has risen from forty to seven hundred. For the politicians Lopez has created a special program in which they are invited for three weeks of immersion in Spa or Avignon, with a private instructor (who could resist?). Lopez is also working on eight national academies that train diplomats. “Our line with them is that, though English is necessary, it is not enough,” he said, admitting that it will probably take ten years just to evaluate the program’s results. He added, “But the increase in enrolment shows that there is a demand for French at the top level everywhere.”
Only time will tell if the Francophonie’s efforts to boost the use of French will bear fruit. “Europe is the main battle ground,” says Roger Dehaybe, who was chief executive officer of the Agence internationale de la Francophonie until 2006. “If French disappears from European institutions, entire countries will start to consider it less important for science and diplomacy.” To its credit, the Francophonie has recognized that the sorry situation of French at the U.N. and the European Union is only partly a result of the attractiveness of English. The Francophonie and its individual members sat on their hands for years over the issue. Francophone countries did not take a unified public stance on plurilingualism at the U.N. until 1995, and did not make it effective before 2002. In the 1990s neither France nor Belgium nor the Francophonie voiced a complaint when the European Commission required that Eastern European countries apply in English (many are part of the Francophonie). Of course, British and American diplomats did not sit idly by the whole while (as we saw in chapter 13); the Commonwealth played a strong role by frequently forming unified blocs over the issue in international institutions. But the fact that francophone countries took forty years to get the Francophonie up and rolling cannot be blamed on others.
It is fair to say today that Francophone countries have learned from their mistakes. They are looking to elbow their way into the international political arena in a way that will give them clout to match that of the Commonwealth. In 2005 Abdou Diouf convinced the member states of the Francophonie to place its subsidy arm, the Agence internationale de la Francophonie (the former ACCT), under the authority of its political arm to create the single Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. This should allow more rapid action. And the Francophonie’s decision to demand more militancy of its members comes at a good moment, as Europe recently created a commissioner for multiculturalism. With eleven of the twenty-five European countries also being members of the Francophonie—and soon thirteen out of twenty-seven, when Hungary and Romania are integrated in 2007—many European civil servants and politicians will be hearing about plurilingualism in the coming years.
Even if the position of French has been eroding in the European Union, the language remains well entrenched in related organizations like the European Court of Justice, where proceedings are done in French, the European Tribunal of First Instance, the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg and the Press Room of the European Commission in Brussels. This is a good institutional base.
The Francophonie’s program is to start using its combined weight to act as a unified bloc within important international organizations. In the case of the African Union, twenty-five of the fifty-three member countries are also members of the Francophonie, excluding Algeria and Comoros, which are both de facto francophone countries. In the case of the Arab League, six out of twenty-two member countries are in the Francophonie—again, excluding Algeria and Comoros. In the case of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), eleven of the thirty member states are part of the Francophonie, as are three of the ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Even among the thirty members of the South Pacific Commission, five are members of the Francophonie.
After decades of hesitation, the Francophonie has turned itself into an increasingly effective organization, but it still has its defects—the main one being financial. The Francophonie’s overall budget is a little over eighty million euros, which compares well to the Commonwealth’s thirty-eight million pounds but remains insufficient for everything it’s trying to do. All international organizations are facing the same problem—the U.N. can hardly afford to be the U.N. anymore. But in the 1990s the Francophonie’s budget did not increase to keep pace with the number of new member countries being admitted. The Africans and Asians lobbied hard to make sure the Francophonie’s resources would be shared as little as possible with countries in Eastern Europe.
There’s certainly money out there. The French are often criticized for being lukewarm francophones. But France contributes a hefty fifty-five percent of the Francophonie’s budget (compared to thirty percent of the Commonwealth’s budget from the U.K.). The other rich members—Canada, Belgium and Switzerland—could probably afford to give more than their combined twenty-five million euros, or about forty-five percent of the budget (Canada contributes twenty-two percent of the Commonwealth’s budget alone). The rest of the francophone countries have a symbolic contribution of below five percent of the budget. The most surprising figure remains the small contribution of Quebec, which has little excuse for contributing a mere 2.5 million euros or 4.1 percent of the budget. After all, Quebec has an advanced economy and is over eighty percent French-speaking. Yet it contributes less in proportion and in number than Switzerland and Belgium, which have fewer francophones than Quebec, but chip in to the level of 6.6 and 8.6 percent of the budget respectively. “It remains a great mystery,” says Jean-Louis Roy, who ran the ACCT from 1989 to 1998. “If Quebec wants to raise its profile internationally, what other official channel does it have? I just don’t get it.” In fact, neither do we.
If the Francophonie (capital F) were the only organization acting on behalf of French speakers, the francophonie (small F) would be in bad shape, but luckily that’s not the case. Much in the way that French survived in North America because French Canadians, Acadians and Franco-Americans organized themselves, francophones of the world started taking care of themselves long before the official Francophonie was created. In the nineteenth century the diplomats and intellectuals who created the Alliance française and the Alliance israélite universelle got France’s cultural diplomacy rolling. Many francophone associations have done the same thing for the francophonie. The existence of an institutional Francophonie is largely the product of these private efforts.
Throughout the twentieth century, dozens of activists created their own francophone associations for dentists, lawyers, mayors, members of Parliament, composers, union leaders, sociologists, economists, school directors and even deans of medical faculties. The oldest, the Association of French-Speaking Pediatricians, was founded in Paris in 1899. One of the largest, the Fédération internationale des professeurs de français (International Federation of Teachers of French), includes some seventy thousand teachers of French from 180 associations in 120 countries. All of these organizations are international forums where people exchange ideas and get exposed to new ideas and ways of doing things. Many, like the Réseau Poincaré pour le français langue de science (Poincaré Network for French as a Language of Science) and the Centre de coopération interuniverstaire franco-québécoise (the Quebec-France Centre for Inter-university Cooperation), are dedicated to the promotion of French in scientific circles. There are in fact so many French-language organizations that another association was created in 1975 to network the networks: the Association francophone d’amité et de liaison (Francophone Association for Friendship and Liaison); it now has more than 132 francophone associations as members.
The two bright lights in this nebula of francophone organizations are TV5 and the Agence universitaire francophone. Though both now operate under the authority of the Francophonie summit, they were created independently and stand as sister rather than children organizations of the OIF. And both have had impressive results in promoting French. The oldest star among francophone organizations is the Agence universitaire francophone. Founded in 1961 by Jean-Marc Léger to link thirty-three universities in Canada and France, the AUF has mushroomed into a network of 525 universities from sixty countries, twenty of which are not even part of the official Francophonie. Part of the AUF’s success dates back to the 1960s, when the rector of the University of Morocco, Mohammed El Fasi, proposed that the AUF extend membership to universities that operated only partially in French. It now networks an additional 350 faculties of French worldwide. In all, some seven thousand researchers work together in some eighteen sectors ranging from engineering to linguistics, demography, agronomy and genetics. The AUF grants about two thousand bursaries a year, as well as awards to researchers such as Van Ga Bui of the University of Dasang in Vietnam, an engineer who designed a new computer model to measure pollution from diesel motors, which he then applied to redesign moped motors in his country.
While in Dakar, we made an impromptu visit to the AUF’s virtual campus at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Opened in 2000, it is certainly among Dakar’s most well-kept buildings, with state-of-the-art electronic equipment and the country’s only three video-conference rooms. The campus offers training and tools for technicians working in network management, professors in online program development, students doing research, entrepreneurs looking for a good start-up environment, and archivists who need large-scale capacity to scan documents. When we visited the campus, a marketing professor there had just begun a class on website creation. Frantz Fangong, who is in charge of project development, proudly told us that the University of Saint-Louis, north of Dakar, had created a full curriculum for teaching the brand new field of cyberspace law. “It took them a year to develop it. This is incredibly specialized, and it is stunning to think that it could come from here and not a university in Quebec or France or Belgium.”
The AUF’s achievement has been to stimulate research in French and even raise the demand for French at some university campuses, notably in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. French is still strong among the intellectual elite of Hungary, largely because of the AUF’s work. In Southeast Asia the number of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian university students who learn French or learn in French had risen to forty thousand in 2003, and the increase was due largely to the work of the AUF, which runs the Technology Institute of Cambodia, among other things. Such links are also being built elsewhere: Through the AUF, the biology department of the University of Havana is linked with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and has developed a French-language option in the department. “We do all this with a forty-one-million-euro budget,” Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, the rector of AUF, told us when we met her at her Paris office. “French is still a language of science. And not just for French-speaking countries.”
When you visit Beijing, Tokyo or London, your hotel TV will likely receive a French channel. And chances are it will be TV5, the world’s most successful French cable channel, to which 160 million households and three million hotel rooms subscribe worldwide. TV5 was created in 1984, when five TV channels (three French, one Belgian and one Swiss) decided to pool their programs into a sort of international TV digest—a collage of their best shows. TV5 did not have auspicious beginnings. It had trouble sticking to a schedule, and the programming choices were not as good as people expected. But the shows got progressively better as other TV channels joined in, most notably Radio-Canada, Canada’s National French-language network. In the mid-1990s TV5 acquired a strong private-sector management team and built an international distribution network of six thousand cable companies and fifty-five satellite operators. The channel invested heavily in subtitles in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch and Swedish to reach audiences outside the French-speaking world. Today, among international channels TV5 ranks third behind MTV and CNN, and ahead of BBC World, Aljazeera and Deutsche Welle. In Europe ninety million homes receive the French-language channel. In Algeria alone, two million people watch TV5.
TV5 also has an educational wing that produces a full range of services for French teachers abroad. Every month some forty thousand French teachers tap into TV5’s documentaries and series by consulting eight hundred thousand videos online, and thirty-two thousand teachers are registered in TV5’s “Teach and Learn” program. The website TV5.org offers tips on using the French language, an interactive French dictionary and dictation exercises by the popular literary critic and French-language guru Bernard Pivot. In Africa, where infrastructure is always a problem, TV5 is shown in ten télé-cafés called the Maisons TV5. These were created in Burkina Faso in 2001 and later spread to Benin and Senegal. TV5 is considering expanding the initiative to all developing countries.
In 2005, for the publication of our previous book, Jean-Benoît spent a couple of hours at TV5’s head office in Paris in the company of the channel’s assistant news director and star interviewer, Xavier Lambrecht. At a glance, the cramped office had more in common with a regional TV studio than an important international TV channel. As Lambrecht explained, “TV5 used to broadcast the national newscast of national channels. Now the staff rewrites every news item with the world in mind. We found ways of doing this with very little staff.” Specifically, TV5 has its own newsroom staffed with forty journalists who tap into fourteen affiliated networks, including Radio-Canada. By the time of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, TV5 was in a position to deliver real-time reporting on location. During the Iraqi war it produced ten newscasts a day. It has managed to do all this with a shoestring budget of eighty-five million euros, twelve million of which go to the newsroom alone, a pittance compared to the thirty million dollars CNN spent covering the first month of the Iraqi war.
TV5’s mission has always been to break the quasi-monopoly of Anglo-American news images and content. Part of its success in doing so has come from the way it has positioned itself as an alternative media source between American news and Aljazeera. This approach is paying off: TV5’s biggest viewer gains in 2003 were in English-speaking countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and South Africa. In the latter two the public was attracted by the alternative news perspective. Since then TV5 has become a fixture at the U.N. headquarters in New York, a market from which it was totally absent before 2003.
Since 2005 TV5 has gone even further by relabelling itself TV5-Monde (TV5 World). The late Serge Adda, head of TV5 until his death in 2005 and the main brain behind the channel’s renewal, had been adamant about what he called the décloisonnement (decompartmentalization) of cultures. “I didn’t want an African film just to be for Africans. African cinema must be seen in Hanoi, Tokyo, Rio, Dakar, Cairo, and conversely.”
TV5’s motto, taken from seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, is “Le centre du monde est partout” (“The centre of the world is everywhere”). It could be the motto of the Francophonie as a whole, and in a way it is a good summary of the next chapters in the story of French.