The French Way (46 page)

Yet crossing the Atlantic did not mean completely embracing American ways. Jean-Luc Lagardere, director of the Lagardere arms group, evoked republican ideals of social cohesion and equality to distinguish French employers: “French business leaders in general,” he said, “have a much greater sense of their social responsibility than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.”
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Serge Tchuruk, the head of Alcatel, which manufactured telephones and high-tech telecommunications equipment, acknowledged that he ran a multinational whose language was English, but he insisted the company's “culture” continued to be French.
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The owner of a small construction firm concurred. He admitted
circumventing the labor code by taking on temporary labor, but said he regretted the practice: “If charges were lower and sacking was easier, I'd gladly take on more regular staff. But we don't want to get like America. It is right that workers should have some protection.”
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French companies increasingly adopted performance incentives for managers like those in America, but they borrowed without imitation. Large French firms like the food giant Danone and AXA began rewarding their managers with stock options. They did so for several reasons: in order to catch up with the performance of their American competitors; to respond to demands of their Anglo-American investors; to ward-off unwanted acquisitions; and to retain highly qualified staff.
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According to one expert, “A little over half of the total remuneration of French CEOs and top managers now comes in the form of variable pay based on some performance measure as opposed to fixed salary. As a result, large French firms now pay out the biggest stock options packages among continental European companies.”
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Managers whose income now came from stock options were more inclined to link their operating decisions to shareholder returns. But such change did not mean French enterprises followed American and British practices of corporate governance. On the contrary, they fiercely resisted greater accounting transparency and they effectively disenfranchised minority shareholders.
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The plunge into stock options as managerial compensation had its limits. In 1999, when Philippe Jaffre, the former CEO of Elf-Acquitaine, received a severance package in stock options estimated at €24 million, it sparked a political counterattack and a public backlash because it called attention to the hazards of American practices and, in principle, challenged republican notions of equality and solidarity. To opponents, mainly on the parliamentary left, the generosity of his severance package was both shocking—an affront to solidarity—and underhanded: it appeared as a device to avoid income taxes. Jaffre was also accused of being compensated not for his merit in operating Elf-Acquitaine
but for selling out his company in a merger with the petroleum giant Total, which suggested the Anglo-American practice of catering to shareholders. The Jaffre affair forced Minister of Finance Strauss-Kahn to retreat from plans to enhance the appeal of stock options. In the end the socialists, supported by the Right, created a complicated tax structure that distinguished between stock options as compensation from those that aided entrepreneurial risk-taking; the latter became known as
stock options a lafrançaise.
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Given the vogue of American entrepreneurial practices one might have expected that young, English-speaking, managers of French Internet companies would have been the most likely candidates to embrace the ways of their Yankee cousins. In fact such dynamic managers said they admired the United States for its entrepreneurship and easy access to capital; and they expressed the conventional criticism of the French system—it was too highly regulated and taxed, and the thirty-five-hour workweek was a constraint.
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But at the same time these IT workers in their thirties and forties were highly critical of the American socioeconomic model—they said it was “ultraliberal,” dominated by the profit motive, and “immoral” in its treatment of those left behind. Their self-image was not one of imitators of American Internet business; they were “French” or “European.” They endorsed the French system of social protection and accepted the state as the best guardian of the general interest; they thought they were adapting, not adopting, American business methods in France.

The exit of one transatlantic manager suggests the tolerable limits of business flirting with American ways: this is the story of the stunning collapse of Jean-Marie Messier's empire. Within two years of his acquisition of Universal Studios in 2000 the shareholders of Vivendi Universal, including American investors, ousted him as CEO. His fall came principally because of business mistakes like overpaying in a spree of acquisitions, withholding information from his shareholders, and failing to convince his investors that he had a sound overall strategy,
but there was also a certain measure of retribution engineered by more conservative managers who disapproved of his fascination with America and his distancing himself from France—which he once disparaged as “an exotic little country.” Messier told American journalists that he liked New York more than any city in the world and wanted to raise his children as Americans, adding “I am the most un-French Frenchman you will ever meet.”
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Rumors spread that he intended to move the headquarters of Vivendi Universal to New York. And he sneered at those of his own people who disapproved his venture into the American market: “France has much less a culture of risk than the U.S.,” he wrote.
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His attempt to sell the former core business of the company, Vivendi Environnement, to outsiders earned him a rebuke from President Chirac.

Messier also seemed ready to sell out the French cinema to the Americans. He provoked an uproar in the French entertainment world by proclaiming, appropriately in English to journalists in New York, that “the Franco-French cultural exception is dead.”
¹¹⁰
He was referring to the exemption of the audiovisual from the WTO and the web of government subsidies that supported the cinema. His remark was more than a gaffe because Canal Plus, owned by Vivendi Universal, contributed financially to the production of 70 percent of French films and Messier had criticized both film subsidies and the narcissistic ways of Parisian filmmakers. Minister of Culture Catherine Tasca scolded Messier for his provocative declaration. By acquiring Universal Pictures Messier had also purchased the studio responsible for the movie
Jaws.
Daniel Toscan du Plantier, a spokesman for the film industry, said, “It was a mistake to make a marriage between Canal Plus and Universal. They are two opposing cultures. America is great, France is great, but they make a bad couple.”
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In the end anxious investors who distrusted Messier forced his resignation. As the
Economist
summarized it, Messier “was too French for the Americans and too American for the French.”
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Language

The struggle with America in the final decade of the century extended to cultural questions, including how one spoke. Language has been the single most important marker of French culture. No other expression of Frenchness—be it food, or fashion, or fine art—has occupied such a preeminent position. And it was American English that mounted the principal challenge not only to the purity of French but also to its global status.

The issue had already reached the highest levels of the republic during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. During the 1960s words like
le weekend, le parking
, or
le pressing
(for dry cleaning) had become commonplace while advertisers borrowed Anglicisms to suggest modernity and style and business managers and officials sprinkled their speech with Anglo-Saxon borrowings. It seemed to some that the language was collapsing into “Franglais,” the bastard spawn of two tongues. In 1966 Prime Minister Georges Pompidou created the High Committee for the Defense of the French Language and President Charles de Gaulle castigated “Franglais.” This struggle to keep the Yankee linguistic intruder at bay escalated in the last decades of the century.

It is difficult to exaggerate the esteem the French attached to their language at the fin de siecle. The spread of Anglicisms and the abuse of grammar and orthography were an affront to a country where sales of a book titled
La Grammaire est une chanson douce
(Grammar Is a Sweet Song) were in the hundreds of thousands; where the national spelling bee was conducted on prime time television; and where “defending or reforming spelling [was] a national psychodrama.”
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“The language of a people is its soul,” declared Maurice Druon, the secretary-general of the Academie Française, the hoary institution whose role since the days of Cardinal Richelieu has been to guard the language.
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“The French language…quite obviously and for some decades, has deteriorated, loosened,” Druon warned, and in some cases it had “purely and simply been
abandoned.”
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Prime Minister Balladur solemnly intoned the defense of the tongue as “an act of faith in the future of our country.”
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According to the premier the entire world was menaced by “the domination of a primitive English unsuitable for nuance or intellectual sophistication.”
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Balladur's socialist successors were only slightly less vehement. Prime Minister Jospin connected language to republican institutions, proclaiming that French was the “cement of the Republic and the values it is founded on.”
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And his foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, while admitting that English had become the language of global communication, and that the French needed to learn foreign languages, insisted, “I don't accept the idea that it would be ‘old-fashioned' to defend our language…(because) it remains vital to our identity.”
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Since linguistic defense was a matter of national identity, global status, and republican integrity, politicians had to act. In 1975 the Bas-Lauriol Law made it obligatory to use French in commerce—in advertising and instructions on packaging, for example—as well as in workplace agreements. Penalties were in order. Evian, for example, was fined for marketing its product as “le fast drink des Alpes.”
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This legislation was not strictly enforced, and borrowing from American English continued, especially in areas like science, computers, music, and business. The legislature decided to take further action in defense of what was called linguistic patrimony. In 1992, at a joint session held in the Palace at Versailles, it amended the constitution to read, “The language of the Republic is French.” But even this initiative did not satisfy everyone. Several hundred intellectuals, including luminaries like Alain Finkielkraut and Regis Debray, protested that French should also be declared the language of business and education and awarded special status in the international community. They blamed multinationals that conducted international commerce in English as the principal villain and asked, if Europe is to have one language, “[W]hy should it be that of the United States?”
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Jacques Toubon, Balladur's minister of culture, brought the issue to a boil in 1994 by convincing the National Assembly to remedy
the Bas-Lauriol Act with new legislation affirming the right of French speakers to use French and specifying ways to curb adulteration of the native tongue. Sanctions, including fines, would be imposed on those who used foreign expressions, unless there was no French equivalent, in official announcements and documents, work contracts, advertising, teaching, and radio and television programs—with exceptions, such as for foreign-language broadcasts. Scientific meetings risked losing public subsidies if they failed to provide translations or summaries in French of papers presented in a foreign language. The undeclared enemy was, of course, American English; as Toubon later acknowledged, he aimed at saving Francophony from the “unique Anglo-mercantile model.”
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The Toubon Law formed one element of a wider campaign. Public authorities had been enjoined to find French substitutes for Anglicisms in specific fields like finance, computers, and the media and they published a directory of synonyms in 1994. At the same time separate legislation set quotas for foreign music in radio broadcasting.

The Toubon Law won an endorsement from some, but it also aroused skepticism and derision in many quarters and stirred Americans to mirth and mockery. Those who encouraged Toubon cited the lament of the philosopher Michel Serres about Paris streets displaying fewer expressions in German during the Occupation than they currently did in English. The publisher-writer Yves Berger applauded Toubon, expressing concern that the national culture would become so
franglaicises
that in twenty years the French wouldn't know how to read Montesquieu or Chateaubriand.
Le Monde diplomatique
, true to form, applauded Toubon's “modest” effort, blamed linguistic debasement on multinationals, and rejected speaking the “language of the masters.” A member of the Academie Française and columnist for
Le Monde
, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech worried that “American jargon” was becoming the talk of everyone who thought of themselves as “modern.” There was no need to import terms, he contended, that added nothing to what existed. For example, Poirot-Delpech suggested,
romans d'anticipation
, a phrase coined by Jules Verne, was prettier and more appropriate than
“science fiction.”
¹²³
Yet even this academician who backed the Toubon Law noted that one could not legislate or police usage; power and inventiveness determined parlance and when the French displayed sufficient creativity, then
logiciel
would naturally supplant “software.”