The Bonjour Effect

10. Down by Nature

2: It’s predictable for the Anglo-American press to indulge in French bashing—Francophobia has been a subgenre of English literature since 1066. Anti-French articles, whether written in 1951, 1973, 1998, or 2013, almost all say exactly the same thing, and the ones that will be written in 2029 or 2041 will probably be similar. They focus on familiar themes: “France is in decline”; “The French language is on the decline”; “France is too centralized”; or “The French resist change.” In our opinion, they all display the same flawed logic and bad faith (this was the subject of our first book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong). On the other hand, such criticism is fair game, since the French have produced plenty of anti-British and anti-American writing themselves. For that matter, the link between foreign policy and the international content in the press is ancient and well documented. Even when printers started producing early forms of newspaper in the seventeenth century, kings granted printers charters on the condition that they write strictly about local gossip and foreign affairs.

But a large part of the negative bias in reporting on France is explained by the fact that foreign journalists get their information and opinions from the French themselves. The French are the last ones to put forward a positive assessment of their country: they tend to say France is in a crisis no matter what’s actually going on. Curiously, French defeatism then begets even more French defeatism as the French turn around and mirror what has been said about them in the foreign press. In short, French bashing à la française gives new meaning to the expression “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

12: The famous prelude to the French Revolution, known as the episode of the cahiers de doléances (registers of grievances), sheds an interesting light on how negativity operates where money is concerned. The grievances were compiled over the months of March and April 1789, a few months before the French Revolution began. There were sixty thousand of them coming from as many towns and parishes, and much of their content is about the harshness of life. As Graham Robb puts it in The Discovery of France, they are not completely reliable because they could be used to avoid taxes in a time when people were taxed on apparent wealth. There is no doubt that harvests had been bad since 1784 and particularly bad in 1788, but the uniformity of the language in the cahiers de doléances also suggests a willful if not sly posture. It can be argued that this posture endures.

11. Fixation on French

1: Quebeckers have a radically different culture of the language. This is partly because of their exposure to English, but the main reason has to do with history. Two centuries ago, the vast majority of the French still did not speak French as a mother tongue but only learned it at school. This was not the case in Quebec. Quebeckers all spoke French and learned it from their families. So Quebeckers have a much older, and much less elitist, relationship with their language. Part of what makes Quebec French sound so strange to the French is not the accent, which is not particularly unusual, but the Quebec culture of language, that is, what Quebeckers consider good and bad in language. Quebeckers cultivate a strong populism and nonelitism that the French find unsettling. They do not aspire to speak as they write. Many assume these cultural traits are borrowed from the surrounding English culture. In fact, it simply comes from the fact that Quebeckers’ language culture does not come exclusively from school.

5: The one thing that escapes most French purists when they discuss the decadence of their language is how much it echoes the discourse on the decadence of Spanish from Hispanic purists or the decadence of English from British or American purists. And it’s the same as the one held by German or Arabic purists about their own languages. In a way, its lack of originality speaks of a larger truth.

Since World War II, three things have happened to most international languages: a lot more people speak them; a lot more people are schooled in them; and a lot more people write and publish owing to new technologies based on writing. No generation has written and published more than the present one. Consequently, people now publish writing very spontaneously in a variety of registers. And the fact that these writings can reach so many people so quickly creates a natural tension between standards and actual language. How speakers of a language react to this tension varies depending on the culture of the language. There are purists in English who complain about falling standards in writing, but English has a strong culture of simplicity so purism remains marginal. Spanish speakers are more purist, but since the language has twenty-two academies, the idea that there are competing standards is a fact of life. French has the same evolution with the difference that errors are qualified as fautes, not to be tolerated, but since they occur nonetheless, the discourse on the decline of French is equally great. People will blame the young or foreigners, but standards change because the French are just keeping up with the times.

12. English Envy

3: The debate on anglicisms is complicated by the fact that some so-called anglicisms are not anglicisms at all. Obsolète, for instance, became common in French in the 1960s as a result of the influence of the English word “obsolete.” But it was originally a French term, derived from Latin, which fell out of usage during the eighteenth century and was repopularized through English, but with new meaning. So how much of a borrowing is it, exactly? Since its English derivatives, “obsolescence” and “obsolescent,” have Latin roots to begin with, they don’t require any adaptation to be used in French.

Words that are labeled anglicisms are often the results of the normal process of the evolution of languages. The verb réaliser (to realize) has half a dozen definitions in French, much like in English. In fact, the English word itself and most English senses of the term come from French. But one of the meanings of réaliser (to understand clearly, to be fully aware) only entered the French language in 1850, under the influence of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was translating Edgar Allan Poe. Writers adopted the new sense of the word, introduced by Baudelaire, and used it in italics for two or three generations before it was accepted in their language.

French purists often pounce on the influence of English in French word order or sentence structure, but their conclusions are often debatable. The French singer Lorie marked generations with her song called “La positive attitude” and purists claimed it violated the nature of French (the proper French would be l’attitude positive). In fact, there are many cases of adjectives that acquire new meaning depending on whether they are placed before or after nouns in French. For example, a simple soldat (a private) is not a soldat simple (a stupid soldier). Another case of English syntax in French is the use of the English genitive in ’s, as in “my mother’s mother.” However, the only case of a Frenchified English genitive is the officially accepted la pin’s (a pin), which was introduced in the 1990s. This constitutes absolutely faulty English (it’s supposed to be plural, not possessive) and cannot be regarded as an anglicism of syntax, but rather as faux English.

10: There are plenty of legitimate reasons to protect one’s language, but in France, the defenders of French often weaken their arguments in two ways. First, they base many of their arguments on aesthetic judgments. They will say that English borrowings “disfigure” French. That, of course, flies in the face of the etymology of most French words, which come from foreign sources. Secondly, French defenders tend to pepper their arguments with gratuitous, chauvinistic, and sometimes quasi-racist comments that might have flown a century ago but sound ridiculous today. A typical author along this line is Alain Borer, who wrote a book titled De quel amour blessée?, essentially a collection of pointless aesthetic pronouncements and chauvinist clichés. The French language defenders would be better off without such bad advocates.

For that matter, discussions of language are often complicated by the fact that people confuse the science of language, that is, linguistics, with a set of values that they ascribe to a language—which is inherently political and sociological. The common assumption that English is simpler or more precise actually has nothing to do with English itself. It’s about the culture that surrounds English and shaped the language. The case of English influence and anglicisms is compounded by notions of foreign policy and anti-American (or pro-American, as the case may be) feelings. Opinions about English are shaped by external values that have nothing to do with the language.

13. Looking Out for France

2: Because of its official policy of language protection, the Quebec government puts a lot of effort into coming up with French terminology. It monitors two hundred sectors to identify new specialized terms and novel technical jargon, then defines and translates the terms if it deems this necessary. The Quebec Office for the French Language (OQLF) has created a huge online database called Le grand dictionnaire terminologique (The great terminological dictionary), which has millions of entries. Each year, it receives 50 million information requests. That is twenty-five times more requests than the French Academy gets—what’s more, half the requests come from Europe. The University of Sherbrooke, in Quebec, spent twenty years developing an online dictionary called Usito. This is the first case, in the history of French, of a general standard dictionary being produced outside of France.

5: The Paris-centered worldview doesn’t mean that France was closed to outsiders. It has always been an important country of immigration. Many personalities and artists that the French regard as French were foreigners. Frédéric Chopin and Marie Curie were Polish. Picasso was Spanish. Le Corbusier was Swiss. Samuel Beckett was Irish. The singer Charles Aznavour is Armenian. The actor Yves Montand was Italian. In fact, one remarkable feature of French colonialism was that the French made their colonies part of France. African leaders like Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast were part of the French government in the 1950s before they became presidents of their respective countries. For more on this, see Pascal Ory, ed., Dictionnaire des étrangers qui ont fait la France (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2013).