The Story of French (19 page)

But the seeds of francophilia were spreading even beyond Europe. French made remarkable progress during that period in a region of Moldavia and Wallachia that was under Turkish influence, the future Romania. Romanians already spoke a Romance language, making it easier for them to master French. The language gained wide currency through their contacts with francophile Russians and the Greek administrators of the Ottoman Empire, who were also ardent francophiles. In 1859 Napoleon III helped bring about the union of Wallachia and Moldavia to form modern Romania. And in the first decades of the twentieth century, France’s support and the strong francophilia of the Romanian elites were critical in establishing an independent Romania. The Romanians as well as the Moldavians would retain strong emotional links to French even while they were under Soviet rule.

Although Antoine de Rivarol wrongly argued that English was the last language that would ever displace French (because, he said, it encouraged “disorderly thinking”), some learned observers of the time were already predicting that English would one day become the world’s universal language. According to Ferdinand Brunot, there was more interest in English ideas than in the language itself, but it was already showing signs that it could rival French. Jean-Christ Schwab believed that even if English lacked in appeal—he said it was not “polite” or “mannered” like French—it was one of the easiest languages to learn (from a German point of view). The main problem with English, Schwab wrote, was that it hadn’t succeeded in spreading itself. But he predicted that that would change when English acquired its “prodigious empire” in America.

Schwab would turn out to be right, but by that time the reputation of French would no longer based be exclusively on refinement, or even on international influence. French was about to take on a new personality—as the language of revolution.

Chapter 6 ~

Revolutionary French

In August 1790, a year after the French Revolution began, France’s new National Assembly commissioned the world’s first language survey. They appointed Abbé (Father) Henri Grégoire, a popular revolutionary priest, to carry it out. Grégoire sent fifty doctors, lawyers and professors to villages all over France to see whether people were speaking French, other languages such as German and Italian, or a patois—a pejorative term for local dialects. If they spoke a patois he wanted to know what it was like, whether it was similar to French, how vulgar or repetitive it was, whether children in the villages were schooled in it and whether priests preached in it; he even wanted to know if people swore in patois.

The project was ambitious, but Grégoire managed to compile his answers and present a report in four years. It was a stunning achievement considering the scale of the survey and the detailed information he had to process, not to mention the fact that the country was in the middle of a revolution and small-scale civil war the whole time he was gathering his data.

Grégoire’s report, submitted to the National Assembly in 1794, paints a picture of France that still surprises foreigners today. France in the 1790s was a potpourri of different cultures and languages. Of a population of twenty-eight million, only three million French citizens spoke French well, and even fewer wrote it. Another six million could carry on a conversation, and at least six million didn’t speak French at all. The thirteen million others probably had a shaky understanding of French at best. Grégoire discovered no fewer than thirty dialects being spoken across France. And more than two centuries after the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was passed, French still had not pushed other languages out of the state apparatus. On the borders with Italy and Germany, Italian and German were used for everyday communications, in courts and in the administration. In other words, the young Republican general Napoleon, who learned French only when he was fifteen and spoke it with a Corsican accent all his life, was typically French.

The impact of the Revolution-and-Empire period on the French language was tremendous. It spawned a vast new vocabulary to describe new political categories and institutions. The function of French in France also changed radically, and practically overnight. During the Revolution, language became a tool that the French government would use to centralize the country. And through this process the French language became, for the first time, the foundation of a French national identity. The Revolution also changed the role of French outside of France, giving it a double personality: It reinforced the status of French as an elite language while giving it the new label of “universal language of liberty.” And all this happened while France was being crippled by civil and foreign wars and Napoleon was draining France’s resources in a vain attempt to carve out a French Empire in Europe.

Although decades—some even argue a century—of political conditions in France explain how France ended up with a revolution, its outbreak was sudden. The Revolution is widely considered to have begun with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789; the political crisis that provoked it began ten weeks earlier, in May. At the time Louis XVI was staring bankruptcy in the face. After three years of bad harvests his subjects were rioting, so raising taxes was no longer an option. He had no choice but to consult the Estates General, a parliament composed of three distinct estates, or chambers, with representatives of the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The Estates had not been summoned since 1614, and their gathering unleashed a wave of recrimination, especially on the part of the commons, who resented not only the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy, but also the arbitrary rule of the King himself.

The commons, which had already declared itself the sole representative of the people, forced the French regime to transform itself overnight. On June 20 the commoners swore an oath that they would not disband until they had a constitution to define their rights, and they proclaimed themselves to be the National Assembly. Six weeks later, this National Assembly—which had also attracted progressive members of the clergy and the nobility—abolished aristocratic privileges, destroying the feudal regime. A violent chain of events followed that would draw France into civil war, dictatorship and imperial conquest.

Historians still argue about how the French Revolution actually unfolded. Between 1789 and 1815 the country went through roughly five phases. From 1789 to 1792 France was a constitutional monarchy. During that time Louis XVI came to be seen as a despot, and in 1792 he was tried and beheaded. That marked the beginning of the most radical period of the Revolution, called the Terror, when France was run by the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety), headed by Maximilien de Robespierre. Robespierre quelled civil war within the country and waged war on the neighbouring countries hostile to the Revolution. Some seventeen thousand opponents of his regime were beheaded and another thirty-five thousand jailed, but in 1794 Robespierre himself was led to the guillotine in a counter-coup.

In 1794 things calmed down under the bourgeois (but increasingly corrupt) government of the Directoire (Directory), until 1799, when a young general and popular hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power and declared himself first consul, or dictator for life. Napoleon ran things competently for five years and re-established order in France. But in 1804 he decided to crown himself Emperor of France and wage wars of conquest to expand his country’s territory. Napoleon’s regime became increasingly despotic until the British defeated him once and for all at Waterloo in 1815; he was sent into exile on Saint Helena’s Island to finish out his days.

This close succession of revolutionary and imperial governments between 1789 and 1815—more appropriately called Revolution-and-Empire—was a period of almost constant political, economic and military crisis that brought out the worst and the best in people. Maximilien Robespierre thought terror was the only way to deal with political dissent and preserve the Republic. At the same time he was an ardent democrat and defender of human rights, supporting the abolition of slavery no matter what it would cost France. Napoleon was a dictator and imperialist who did his best to reinstate slavery, yet he created such institutions as the Civil Code and a system of public administration, which are still in place in France and went on to become models for nations across the world. Then there were characters such as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who simply kept reinventing himself in order to ride France’s political roller coaster. Talleyrand was Bishop of Autun (in Burgundy) when he joined the Revolution. When things got extreme, he went into exile. In 1797 he returned, became foreign minister under the Directoire and remained there under Napoleon. But in 1807, as Napoleon’s ambitions began to become alarming, Talleyrand turned against the Emperor. In 1814 he represented France during the peace negotiations of the Congress of Vienna, as foreign minister during the brief reign of Louis XVIII. And in 1830, after a long period of retirement, he returned to advise King Louis Philippe during the July Revolution (when the latter seized power from Charles X). He ended his career as France’s ambassador to London.

Abbé Henri Grégoire was perhaps one of the most principled and consistent personalities of the Revolution. He was well-known for writing a progressive essay titled “The Regeneration of the Jews” in 1788. His tremendous intellectual energy led him to support causes ranging from the Bureau des longitudes (Navigation Office) to the emancipation of Jews and slaves. As a clerical representative to the Estates General, he was one of the first to cross over to the commons side when they created the National Assembly. During the Revolution he was an ardent nationalist and republican who insisted on being the first cleric to pledge allegiance to the Republic. When clerics were being dragged to the guillotine during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Grégoire brazenly walked the streets in his priest’s gown. He defended the nationalization of the Catholic Church and later openly opposed Napoleon’s reconciliation with the Vatican. At Grégoire’s funeral, students unharnessed the horses and pulled the carriage themselves, leading a procession of twenty thousand mourners.

Within months of the creation of the National Assembly, its members already understood how important language was to their project. In fact, the issue came up as soon as the revolutionary government tried to impose its authority. To be understood by as many people as possible, the National Assembly initially decided to translate its decrees and laws into the local languages spoken across French territories: German in Alsace, Breton in Brittany, as well as Catalan, Italian and others. But there were many problems with this approach, not least of which was the fact that many regional languages did not have clear rules, grammar or a defined vocabulary. But more important, the National Assembly really had no idea what people spoke or where. The initial reason they asked Grégoire to carry out the language survey was simply for him to assess France’s linguistic situation and make recommendations on how the National Assembly should proceed with respect to the question of language.

But thinking on the issue evolved quickly. For one thing, the National Assembly did not have the means to translate all its decrees and laws. It also realized that, for practical reasons, it needed to establish a common tongue in order to enforce the new values of the Republic and its laws. In 1791, long before Grégoire’s results were in, Talleyrand—then a parliamentarian—declared, “French must become the universal language used in France.”

National Assembly members quickly began to see language as a way to create and solidify a national identity. In the
ancien régime,
the king had inspired such loyalty that the nation held together even though it was in effect multilingual. Now the legitimacy of the regime was based on popular support (that is, in the ideal scenario—this new democracy would switch modes several times, from monarchy to dictatorship to empire, before it became a reality). To win that support, the National Assembly set out to turn the French language into something with which all French citizens would identify—in other words, to make it into a French institution, on a par with the National Assembly itself.

When we lived in France, we were a little puzzled to hear people refer to the French language as an institution. To us the term applied to public services, buildings, corporate entities or foundations. But of course, in its pure meaning (even in English),
institution
really refers to anything that has been instituted: established, set up or put in place. And that’s exactly how the French came to see their language—as a fixed and immovable part of the state apparatus. This view goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental cultural differences between English speakers and the French. The British tend to understate their institutions; their constitution is unwritten and their legal system is not codified into a whole. Strangely, their attitude towards language reflects this. The English language has rules (and many exceptions), but English speakers downplay the rules, especially when they are comparing their language to French. The French, meanwhile, proclaim and embrace their institutions with all their officialdom—and their language with all its rules.

French revolutionaries soon understood that to make French an institution, they had to get people to speak it. They quickly homed in on education as the means to this end. Article 1 of the first constitution, written in 1791, defined the “principal social goal” of the Republic as public education, available to all citizens for free. The National Assembly then created a Committee for Public Instruction. The main objective was to teach children to read and write in French. Through education, French would become
institué
(made into an institution), so teachers were known as
instituteurs
—a word used for primary schoolteachers in France to this day.

The plan had the added benefit of taking teaching out of the hands of the clergy and reducing their power—outside Paris, the clergy were predominantly monarchist and anti-revolutionary. Revolutionaries also hoped that by “instituting” French, they would get rid of the galaxy of patois and
idiomes
(foreign languages) spoken across French territory. Local languages had been labelled as patois long before the Revolution. A century earlier, in his
Dictionnaire universel,
Antoine de Furetière had defined a patois as “corrupt and vulgar language, such as used by peasants and children who don’t know how to speak properly.” In fact, patois were not seen as languages in themselves but, falsely, as corruptions of French. Although most regional languages were not just mispronounced French but languages in their own right, the term
patois
threw them all into the same bag and labelled them a sign of ignorance. Until the 1980s the idea remained ingrained in the French psyche that regional languages were corruptions of French, not its source languages, as they in fact are.