The Story of French (13 page)

One effect of this success was that most of the courts of Europe (and overseas) wanted to develop their own clones of the French Academy. Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Philadelphia all created academies modelled on the French Academy. The most successful clone, Spain’s Real academia española de la lengua (Royal Spanish Language Academy), became a model of effectiveness, and remains so. Created in 1713, it issued its first Spanish dictionary after thirteen years of work; the twentieth edition was delivered in 1984. Better still, it published eight editions of a Spanish grammar between 1741 and 1815, accomplishing a complete reform and rationalization of the Spanish language. The French Academy never got close to those results. Over the centuries most countries would establish their own form of language institution, whether they called it an academy, an institute, a commission or a committee.

One of the great enigmas of the period is why the English never followed the trend and created an academy—all the more so since many of them viewed the French Academy with envy. The English intelligentsia complained bitterly about the corruption of their language, from about 1660 until publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. People wrote as they spoke; nobody seemed to follow any fixed rules. This was perceived as a great problem by men of science, and the Royal Academy of Science created a committee to tackle it. Many writers joined the movement. Jonathan Swift, the most outspoken promoter of an English academy, wrote: “Some method should be thought for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever.” Daniel Defoe went even further, at least rhetorically, writing that it was “criminal to coin words as money.”

Yet the project of an English academy never materialized, probably because it went against the grain of society. Unlike the French, the English never felt it necessary to define their language (or their civil law, or even their constitution, for that matter). After they gained their independence, the Americans toyed with the idea, but rejected it as a royalist institution. Robert McCrum suggests in his book
The Story of English
that plans for an English academy may never have materialized simply because the idea was so obviously French. That explanation is a bit reductive, since most languages have some form of academy, but the concept of a language academy would become a classic illustration of the different spirits of English and French.

In the same century that the French Academy was created, the age-old rivalry between English and French would be carried over land and sea. And it would determine the fate of French on an entire continent.

Part Two ~

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Chapter 4 ~

Far from the Sun

A swift twenty-minute ferry ride from Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, the island of Gorée is an ideal place to get away from the commotion of the West African metropolis for an afternoon. Tourists and well-off Dakar residents flock to this peaceful, sandy haven to admire its steep rocky cliffs, historic forts and the hundred or so colourful colonial houses that line its cobblestone streets. The tiny island is dense with history and activity. On one side, residents have transformed two Second World War bunkers into dwellings. In the centre is an exclusive college where young girls study under the chubby silhouettes of baobab trees. Near the port, children swim and play on the beach all day while their parents sip sodas at quaint beachside cafés.

The idyllic atmosphere is almost enough to make one forget the island’s turbulent and horrific history as a slave port. The Dutch first claimed Gorée in the seventeenth century; its name comes from the Dutch
goede raede
(good harbour). It was later claimed by the Portuguese, Danish and English, finally ending up in French hands. The Europeans vied for Gorée because it was an ideal location for holding slaves and as a stopover before the journey across the Atlantic. It had plenty of water and was close enough to the shore to allow commerce with the mainland, yet far enough to be protected from threats from the continent. Most visitors who arrive there today are herded straight from the ferry to the Maison aux esclaves (slave house), where a local guide recounts a short history of the island’s role in holding slaves and shipping them to the Americas. Although Gorée’s real importance in the slave trade is a matter of controversy among historians, the island has become a kind of living museum of the two-hundred-year period when Europeans tore apart African society to supply labour to their colonial plantations.

In writing the history of the French language (or of any European language), authors tend to brush over colonialism and skip the European slave trade, probably because the issues seem too painful to be reduced to episodes in the story of a language. We are not writing an apology for French colonialism or its methods, but the subject cannot be avoided. If French became not only a European but also an African, Asian and American language, it is because France became an important colonial power.

The first colonial push, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution, was not even remotely about exporting language (unlike the second colonial push, in which Europeans attempted to export “civilization,” as discussed in chapter 9). Early colonialism was strictly about importing (often stolen) wealth. Throughout the colonial period the nature of the treasure changed according to fashion and new tastes—from gold to beaver fur to luxury products such as coffee, cocoa and, of course, sugar. Europe’s crowned heads saw the world as a zero-sum game: Whatever territory they didn’t snatch, others would surely scoop up in their place. But no one had a master plan. They started out by sending adventurous trader-explorers and giving them charters—basically trade monopolies—in exchange for a cut of their profits and a promise to take settlers to the new territories. In effect, the entrepreneurs were given royal charters to loot and plunder the local natives and raid their competitors.

The French were no exception to this pattern, even though, like the English, they got started relatively late. Both countries sent merchants, navigators and pirates overseas during the sixteenth century, but neither established trading posts or permanent settlements until the beginning of the seventeenth century, a good 110 years after the Spaniards and more than 150 years after the Portuguese. In the seventeenth century the French pushed with some success into Africa, India and the Caribbean. They occupied Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion) in 1638, then opened their first trading post in Senegal and began sending colonists in 1687. They opened a trading post in Pondicherry in 1674—few people know that this section of India remained French until 1954. They colonized Île-de-France (present-day Mauritius), off the coast of Mozambique, in 1712.

By the time the French got to the Caribbean, the Spanish and the Portuguese had already claimed most of the islands. All the French could do was grab what was left over and try to seize territory from their European rivals. In the end, some islands changed crowns a dozen times. The French occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, but the real prize was the western part of the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti, which the French called Saint-Domingue. In 1665 Saint-Domingue became a formal colony of France, and in 1697 the island of Hispaniola was formally partitioned between France and Spain (into today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic). Nobody suspected it at the time, but this was quite a coup for the French; Saint-Domingue would turn out to be the most profitable of all European colonies during the eighteenth century.

By the seventeenth century the quest for gold bullion was already giving way to the market for exotic goods and commodities. The political economy had evolved, and the development of trade routes had made bulky items such as tobacco and fur profitable. New products—indigo, coffee and cocoa—became popular in Europe, but when Europeans decided they preferred their cocoa and coffee drinks sweetened, there were not enough bees and berries in Europe to produce all the sugar they needed. This sudden change in taste hastened the development of slave-based sugar plantations and, with them, slave trading and an interest in places like the island of Gorée.

Sugar cane is not actually native to the Caribbean. The Arabs discovered it in Egypt—the word
sucre
(sugar) is derived from the Arabic
sukkar.
Christopher Columbus picked it up on a stopover in the Canary Islands. As Europeans discovered, the Caribbean was perfectly designed for sugar plantations, as the islands were sparsely populated and the weather was the same all year round. The Spanish began building sugar mills in the mid-1500s. After local populations in the Caribbean had been decimated by European-imported disease, the Spanish went looking for manpower, and discovered that African slaves were more resistant to diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever and malaria than the local natives or the
engagés
(European contract workers).

The French were late getting into the sugar trade, but they took to it with a vengeance. The French colonies of the Caribbean soon became part of a single system that linked them to half a dozen African slave-trading posts in Congo, Angola, Guinea, Senegal and Benin (which also supplied slaves to Brazil and the American colonies). Because it was the shortest distance across the Atlantic from the Caribbean, West Africa was hotly disputed between the French, English and Dutch. The French soon got the upper hand. After establishing trading posts on the west coast of Africa, they began building fortresses and warehouses and founded the city of Saint-Louis in 1659. By 1750 they controlled a quarter of the slave trade.

Caribbean plantations produced coffee, cocoa and cotton in vast quantities, but sugar was the backbone of the trade, to the point that the French called their possessions the
Îles à Sucre
(Sugar Islands). Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the other islands combined, even Jamaica, and became the prize that everyone was after—it was dubbed
la perle des Antilles
(the pearl of the Caribbean). Saint-Domingue was the biggest sugar producer in the world by 1750. In the eighteenth century the settlers of Saint-Domingue were rich enough to build theatres, where they watched French plays, and to send their children to school in Paris. For a brief period they even had a local newspaper, the
Gazette de Saint-Domingue.
The colony was also notable for being the Caribbean island with the highest concentration of slaves relative to planters, as the white people called themselves (most of the land was controlled by absentee landowners, so few of the planters owned their land; the majority were artisans, overseers, administrators and the like). This imbalance would have important consequences for the history of French (as we discuss in chapter 7).

This early form of globalization spawned new words, and the effect on the French language was immediate. The Spanish borrowed from the South American Tupi people the word
boucan
(a meat-smoking process), which became the French word
boucanier
(buccaneer)—Quebeckers still use
boucane
colloquially for
smoke.
Other words, such as
igname
(yam) and
macaque
(a kind of monkey) came through Portuguese, whereas
tomate
and
chocolat
came from the Aztecs via the Spanish language. The word
maringouin
(a type of mosquito), which French Canadians swear was coined in Canada, is in fact a borrowing from the Tupi and Guarani languages of South America that was first adopted in the Antilles (French Caribbean), where it is still used today. Hundreds of similar terms from Peru or Brazil came into French via Spanish—for example,
chinchilla, caïman
(cayman)—or Portuguese—
caramel, fétiche
(fetish),
marmalade, ananas
(pineapple). There were also borrowings from Africa, such as
zèbre
(zebra), which entered French via the Spanish
cebra
(meaning a wild donkey, as Spanish explorers couldn’t think of a better word for these strange striped horses).
Banane
(banana) is a Bantu word that became French via Portuguese. And
vaudou
(voodoo) is a word from Benin that became French—and was later borrowed by English through Louisiana French.

The new industries of the time generated terms that were copied freely into all languages.
Sucre
gave
sucrier
(sugar bowl or sugar maker) and
sucrerie
(sugar mill).
Nègre,
borrowed from the Spanish
negro
(black) in 1529, produced
négresse
(black woman),
négrillon
(black child),
négrerie
(a place where slaves were held) and
négrier
(slave trader); racist policies also spawned terms such as
quarteron
(quadroon) for mulattos.

But the Caribbean colonies’ main impact on the French language was the creation, almost overnight, of French Creole. The term
créole
came from the Portuguese
crioulo,
which referred to Brazil-born mulattos. No one knows exactly how the term came to refer to the language of the slaves (there are many widely divergent theories). The term travelled to the New World on slave ships leaving Senegal, which had been a Portuguese colony before the French occupied it. The Spanish, and later the French, used the term for anyone born in the colonies. It generally referred to whites, but later became the name for the jargon that developed among slaves.

A Creole language is born when populations of different origins combine elements of their languages to form a new one. Properly speaking, it becomes a Creole when it evolves into a mother tongue, transmitted from parents to children—that’s what distinguishes it from a lingua franca or a pidgin (trade jargon). Of the world’s 127 Creoles, thirty-five are English-based and fourteen are French-based. There are more speakers of French-based Creoles than all other Creoles combined (including English), thanks mostly to Haiti, the biggest Creole-speaking nation in the world, with a population of seven million (where both Creole and French are official languages), but also Mauritius, with a population of one million. The four other main centres of French-based Creole are Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, which account for another million speakers. Together, the population of these lands is larger than the two biggest centres of English-based Creoles—Jamaica and Suriname—combined.