The Story of French (12 page)

In all, the Academy has managed to produce eight editions, with an average of thirty-seven years between them (the ninth edition has been in the works for seventy years now). The only period during which the Academy showed any semblance of real activity was the eighteenth century, when it produced no fewer than four editions. Members of the Academy at that time included Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert. In the spirit of reform, they set out to remodel the dictionary. The 1718 edition re-established alphabetical order, and the 1760 edition modified the spelling of eight thousand of the eighteen thousand words. But things were still slow to improve. “Woman” wasn’t promoted to the rank of “female and companion of man” until the sixth edition, in 1835.

It took the Academy 296 years to complete a grammar, which it published in 1935. Meanwhile, the book that would set the standard for French grammar guides was the
Grammaire générale et raisonnée,
published in 1665 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot. Hundreds more would be published before the Academy came out with its own. The plans to produce a rhetoric and a poetic never got off the ground. Even the academicians came to recognize that art and expression evolve in unpredictable ways.

We visited the French Academy to try to understand its role in modern French (more on that in chapters 8 and 17) and how the dictionary project had evolved. The Academy is located in the Institut de France, across the Seine from the Louvre, where it shares its offices with four other academies (of sciences, fine art, history and humanities). The baroque-cum-classical-cum-Italianate building is unmistakable, with its curved façade and oval
coupole
(dome)—coupole became the nickname of the Academy’s meeting place. After passing through the front gate we were led through a series of corridors where the staff of the Academy have their offices. The seventeenth-century building was designed before the advent of running water, sewage and electricity; with its peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpets, the overall effect—at least in the office area—is shabby chic, at best.

The two great meeting halls and the library were closer to what we were expecting from this prestigious institution; they were furnished with long polished wood tables and high-backed padded chairs arranged with almost geometric perfection. We were struck by the huge oil painting of Cardinal Richelieu on the back wall of the Red Salon, the hall where Academy members meet to discuss the dictionary. In the portrait (a copy) he is standing in a red robe with his usual ramrod posture and piercing gaze, looking awfully serious for someone who’s watching over a discussion of grammar rules. But of course, grammar is serious business here.

The Academy has about forty employees, most of whom are secretaries, ushers, bailiffs and guards. It manages about sixty literary awards and a number of grants, and more than a dozen properties, including several large castles. We didn’t run into any of the Academy’s forty “immortals” while we were there, and were told that they are rarely on the premises. If they do come, it’s only on Thursday, the day of dictionary meetings, and many, we were told, are chronically absent.

The reputation—or notoriety—of the French Academy is owed to a misconception. Outside of France it is seen as a kind of language police. In reality the Academy has never passed laws on language use; it has no authority to. The French government has official language terminology committees that make rules about what constitutes acceptable French and what doesn’t (more on this in chapter 18). These committees then run their choices by the Academy for rubber-stamping.

The French Academy’s main job is still to create a dictionary. Most of the work on the dictionary is done by eight lexicographers at the Academy who prepare lists of words and definitions for the academicians. On Thursdays the immortals debate definitions and decide which words to include in the next edition of the dictionary, its ninth. As Laurent Personne, the
directeur de cabinet
of the permanent secretary, and his chief lexicographer, Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, explained, the ninth edition, which was begun in 1935, was delayed by the Second World War and then by the disruptions caused by the Algerian war of 1954–62 and the student riots of May 1968. The Academy essentially did nothing after that until the appointment of Maurice Druon as permanent secretary in 1980. Since then, progress has been surprisingly swift (they were at the letter R as of early 2006). The new edition will double the number of words to forty thousand.

Although the French Academy still has great symbolic value, its dictionary is not well respected as a language resource. It has never been widely used in France, largely because, with an average of thirty-seven years between each edition, it can’t keep up with the times and is often already outdated by the time it’s published. The early editions had considerably more success outside France (more on this in chapter 5). The only exception was the sixth edition (1835), which was used as the reference when the French government defined official spellings for its civil service examinations.

Today, the Academy’s new website gets about two million hits per year, compared to fifty million for Quebec’s Terminology Bank. But in a way, the dictionary is not really the point. As Laurent Personne explained, the real role of the Academy is to preside over the French language, rather like a House of Lords for culture. Sometimes the Academy does act, as when it accepted spelling reforms in the early 1990s. At other times its inaction is conspicuous, as in 1997, when it refused to accept the feminization of titles (more on these two issues in chapter 17). Personne described the Academy as a “
magistrature morale
” (moral magistrate). “We are not there to decide on rules or establish law, but to consecrate usage,” he said.

Fuzzy as it sounds, the idea of consecration is actually what the Academy is all about. If a word enters the Academy’s dictionary, its use is indeed “consecrated.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone uses the word—that’s not the point. Consecration means that the word is recognized as part of the ideal French that every francophone is supposed to have in the back of his or her mind. In other words, the French Academy is a place to store the French language in its ideal form—a kind of museum of ideal French. In fact, some Academy members even describe themselves as curators of the French language.

In its four-hundred-year history, the French Academy has had little impact on how French is actually used. But the ethic of purism that inspired the Academy’s creation would have a major impact on how French evolved over the centuries. Since the seventeenth century, French authors and grammarians have had the objective of clarity in mind, not just to produce a language that is precise, but also to make French comprehensible to as wide a public as possible. The fables of La Fontaine and the fairy tales of Perrault are monuments of that century that are still read today because of the genius of authors who wanted to write for all of humankind. In the eighteenth century the doctrine of purism made it possible for French writers to export their work and spread their influence over the entire European continent (the subject of chapter 5). In fact, most French authors remained obsessed with clarity and precision until the twentieth century.

But first and foremost, this purist ethic shaped how francophones put together their dictionaries. The French lexicographic tradition is far more prescriptive than the English. There is no equivalent in French of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
From its inception, the OED was meant to be a vocabulary collection and a great inventory of archaisms and regionalisms—almost half the words on any given page are no longer used. In comparison, French lexicographers do their spring cleaning regularly so that the language doesn’t hold on to words it doesn’t need. Ever since Malherbe’s time, synonyms, neologisms, regionalisms and archaisms have been weeded out on a regular basis and pushed into obsolescence. Sometimes, however, archaic terms are rescued from limbo and repopularized by an author or public figure. Charles de Gaulle is famous for labelling the May 1968 riots
la chienlit
(shit-a-bed), resurrecting a sixteenth-century insult that hadn’t been heard for centuries.

The logic of French purism since Malherbe has been that each word should have a precise definition; no two words are perfectly synonymous. In Webster’s English dictionary the word
tolerate
has a definition. But
put up with
is defined merely as “tolerate,” without further explanation. No French dictionary would ever do that. A French dictionary of synonyms goes much further than an English thesaurus, which merely lists the synonyms. It will either give precise definitions for each equivalent, categorize the synonyms as literal, analogous or figurative, or differentiate them in some other way.

The French tradition seems to have convinced everyone that there are fewer words in French than English. A popular statistic of comparison is the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s six hundred thousand entries as compared to
Le Robert
’s hundred thousand. Yet half the vocabulary in the OED is never, or almost never, used. At the time of its creation the OED was meant as an inventory of English words not listed in any other dictionary. In 1987 linguist Henriette Walter disproved the old, false misconception about the paucity of French vocabulary. She simply added 175,000 terms found in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plus half a million technical terms, plus a couple of hundred thousand new words created since the 1960s, and came up with a total of 1.2 million different words. And this is a conservative estimate, since it excludes archaic and technical terms that fell out of use before the nineteenth century. Quebec’s
Grand dictionnaire terminologique,
created by the Office québécois de la langue française (French Language Commission), lists a million French terms used in two hundred fields of science, industry and technology. According to Sherbrooke University professor Pierre Martel, who is currently working on the first modern dictionary of Quebec French, twenty to thirty thousand new terms are created in French every year “if you consider all regional varieties, all fields of research and all slangs,” although, according to Martel, “Most of these terms are short-lived and used by very few people, sometimes as few as half a dozen.” The real difference between English and French dictionaries is one of spirit. Because they exclude things such as technical and scientific vocabularies, French dictionaries have fewer words. On the other hand, the definitions are infinitely more precise. If French dictionaries included all words—the way English dictionaries do—the number of entries would be much larger. But they don’t, and that’s because of the principle of
bon usage,
according to which only words that are used (or deemed useful) find their way in; the rest are relegated to specialized dictionaries. In other words, if the English dictionary is like an inventory, the French dictionary is like a tool-box, with words divided up into categories, each with specific instructions about how to use it. The mandate? To help users speak pure French.

The dictionary question aside, the purist approach had two hidden traps, and over the centuries French speakers have fallen into both of them. The first was that the plainness they sought led to extreme dryness. That’s the term that comes to mind when one reads French poetry from between the 1600s and the arrival of the Romantic movement in France in 1830. Before 1600, French poetry had been praised for its refinement and inventiveness. But the influence of Malherbe led creative people to eschew the very things that help a language develop, such as wordplay and neologisms. In other words,
bon usage
had a castrating effect. “
On a appauvri la langue en voulant la purifier
” (“The language was impoverished in our effort to purify it”), wrote French Academy member Henri Fenelon in 1716. His observation came fifty years too late, and it raised very few echoes in the next century. The damage had been done.

The other trap of purism was to create a gulf between
bon usage
and scientific and technical language. The seeds had already been planted when Furetière was quarrelling with the Academy. He maintained that “an architect speaks as good French when he uses technical terms like plinths and stylobate…as a courtier who speaks of alcoves, stands or lustres.” But his view did not prevail. For the next two centuries the Academy put cultural and court language on a pedestal and relegated scientific language to a sort of linguistic ghetto. The problem that promoters of French had with scientific language came mainly from their opposition to jargon and their anti-Latin stance (the influence of Latin was strong in scientific circles). Language promoters also dismissed legal vocabulary as outdated, as much of it had been created along with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. French science remained strong throughout that period, but the separation between the idea of
bon usage
and the rest of society meant that the people at the top didn’t pay any attention to what was going on below them. So the Academy inadvertently deprived French elites of a major source of linguistic and cognitive renewal.

Yet the prescriptive approach of French dictionaries had one positive outcome: What “pure” French lost in lexical richness, it gained in lexical precision. Because it was defined, French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was regarded as easier to learn. People using
Le Richelet
and
Le Furetière
and the
Grammaire raisonnée
of Lancelot and Arnauld could pick up the basics of the language. For that matter, the Academy’s dictionary had much more success outside France than inside, because it allowed people with no access to the French court to get a good idea of the correct usage that was the rule there. Because French was the first European language with a fully developed written system of spelling and grammar, France was also the first country to develop a group of literary stars (later called philosophers or intellectuals), a phenomenon that would help boost the great admiration that Europe developed for the French language.