The Story of French (23 page)

Apart from these few exceptions of vocabulary and usage, Belgians, like the French, on the whole embrace a very purist conception of language. The main reason is that their education system was strongly influenced by the French system (more on this in chapter 8). So, unlike Quebeckers, many Belgian writers and intellectuals enter the French cultural sphere quite seamlessly. It was a Belgian schoolteacher and scholar, Maurice Grévisse, who published the definitive grammar of French,
Le bon usage,
in 1936.

The history of Switzerland is far more complex than that of Belgium. It started as a confederacy of German-speaking cantons in 1291, but France’s influence on Switzerland has always been strong. When François I crushed Swiss ambitions in Italy at the battle of Marignano in 1515, he gave the Swiss trading privileges with France, and France remained their main market until the French Revolution. The western, francophone cantons of Vaud, Valais, Fribourg, Neuchâtel and Geneva were originally outside Switzerland, although they frequently allied with the Swiss to defend themselves against the Duchy of Savoy, France, Italian city states or German principalities. These francophone and semi-francophone cantons progressively joined the confederation until 1815, when the Congress of Vienna formally integrated them into Switzerland. During the same negotiations, Switzerland’s neutrality was recognized, making it a virtual sanctuary of peace in the middle of Europe.

Unlike Belgium, which influenced French because of its economic and cultural dynamism, Switzerland’s impact on French came about through the peculiar fate of one city—Geneva. In the history and geography of Switzerland, Geneva sticks out like an appendix, sharing about 118 kilometres of its border with France but only seven with Switzerland. During the Protestant Reformation, the exiled French theologian Jean Calvin established the political and religious doctrine that transformed Geneva into an autonomous city state. Calvin preached an ascetic form of Protestantism that became very influential in England and America among the Puritans (who called him John Calvin). During the wars of religion in the sixteenth century, Geneva became a refuge for the French Huguenots. The first wave of eight thousand doubled the population of the city between 1549 and 1587, followed by a second wave after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—after which Geneva became the centre of French Protestantism. The Geneva Huguenots became important in the textile industry, and as goldsmiths and watchmakers.

Over the centuries, business got so good that Swiss banks in Geneva (as well as in Zurich and Basel) accumulated huge reserves of capital. In the eighteenth century Geneva developed a reputation as a banking centre. Swiss bankers demonstrated an uncanny talent for investing abroad. One of them—Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s last finance minister—was the father of Madame de Staël, and she held a famous salon on the shores of Lake Geneva (in French, Lac Léman), which was already a refuge for the rich and famous. This had a spillover effect all the way to Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud, which was also on the shores of Lake Geneva—an area still known as the Swiss Riviera. The accumulation of wealth transformed Geneva into an important intellectual centre. As a printing centre, Geneva was not as important as Holland, but it did remain French, whereas the Huguenots in Holland assimilated in the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, and returned there in 1754 after he became famous in Paris. Voltaire was frequently seen in Geneva as well; he went there seeking refuge from the French authorities, who often threatened to jail him for his irreverence.

Although there have always been far fewer francophones in Switzerland than in Belgium—today about 1.4 million, compared to 4.4 million in Belgium—Switzerland’s francophones, especially Genevans, have played a remarkable role in the development of internationalism. Geneva’s prestige in watch-making and industry was eroding by the mid-nineteenth century, so the city reinvented itself by creating a completely new form of international activity—humanitarian aid. Geneva had long been a popular travel destination for the French and English elite. Its neutrality also made it an ideal location for representatives of countries such as France, Germany and England—always rivals—to meet to consider their common interests. Starting in 1853, the International Sanitary Convention (which later became the World Health Organization) and the World Meteorological Organization were established in Geneva to find ways to control epidemics and coordinate efforts on weather forecasts.

Henri Dunant (1828–1910), the founder of the International Red Cross, was an important player in developing Geneva’s new international vocation. His story is a film waiting to be produced. Although a Genevan, he left Switzerland in the 1850s to run a colony of Swiss citizens living in Algeria. In order to get the proper papers to open a grain mill in the colony, he tracked down Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon’s nephew, who was briefly president and then France’s second emperor from 1852 to 1870), following him all the way back to Italy, where he was fighting the Austrians. In 1859 Dunant arrived in the wake of the battle of Solferino, where forty thousand men died, mostly because of lack of medical care. In 1862 he published
Un Souvenir de Solferino
(
Memories of Solferino
), which recounted the horrors he had witnessed. In this book Dunant called for an international body for the care of the wounded.

The idea snowballed, and by 1863 the International Committee of the Red Cross had been created, thanks to the support of four influential Geneva francophones, including General Dufour and Gustave Moynie, who would run the organization for its first forty years. The next year, sixteen countries signed the first Geneva Convention. This accord obliged signatories to take care of the wounded and to protect medical personnel, regardless of their nationality, during conflicts. It was the first move to civilize modern warfare and has remained the basis of humanitarian law ever since. Dunant went bankrupt the same year and lived in obscurity until a journalist rediscovered him in a poor-house in the late 1890s. He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

The spillover effect of this burgeoning internationalism was almost immediate. In 1865 Geneva was made the headquarters of the International Telegraphic Union. Berne became host of the Universal Postal Union in 1874 and the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1886. In 1915, as the First World War was raging, Pierre de Coubertin moved his International Olympic Committee from Paris to Lausanne, where it enjoyed the protection of Swiss neutrality. Geneva has gone on to attract some 250 other international organizations of all sizes.

All Swiss francophones—a fifth of the population, known as Suisses Romands—are spread over half a dozen cantons, and there is not really a unified Swiss Romand dialect. Historically their cantons belonged to a dialectal area known as Franco-Provençal, a Romance dialect spoken in a pocket around Geneva, but stretching into Besançon, Lyon, Grenoble and Val d’Aoste. (Franco-Provençal is in a category of its own, neither
langue d’oc
nor
langue d’oïl.
) For instance, Genevans spoke a Franco-Provençal dialect related to the dialect spoken in Savoy. Language purism is strong among Swiss francophones to the extent that many outsiders believe the Romand dialect is dead. In fact, the Swiss tend to present a very standardized French to the outside world while maintaining their dialectal variations among themselves, especially in rural areas.

Like the issue of the Belgian accent, that of the Suisse accent is complicated. Many French people swear that there is a typical Swiss accent. In fact, what is assumed to be a typical Swiss accent is actually the accent of a German Swiss speaking French as a second language. As for the Suisses Romands, they have roughly the same accent that one would hear in France near the Swiss border. They have a reputation for speaking slowly, but the real difference is where they put the emphasis in their words and sentences. Whereas standard French stresses the last syllable of words and sentences, Swiss French stresses the penultimate (second-last) syllable. This produces a musicality that is instantly recognizable, though it is more typically Franco-Provençal than Swiss per se. Like Belgians and Quebeckers, Swiss francophones also pronounce vowels in a way that distinguishes homonyms (Belgians and Quebeckers distinguish vowels sounds too, but different vowels). Words like
peau
(skin) and
pot
(pot) sound the same in Paris, but in Switzerland they are differentiated as
po
and
pah.

Features that are more genuinely Swiss than French are primarily in vocabulary. The German influence is obvious although not as great as one might expect. The Swiss say
chlaguer
(from
schlagen,
to smack) and
poutser
(from
putzen,
to clean). They say
rösti
for the grated-potato pancake and
foehn
to describe a warm wind, and also a hairdryer. Swiss purists decried the use of Germanisms in the early twentieth century, blaming constructions like “
Il a aidé à sa mère
” (“He helped his mother”) on Germanic influence. In reality, the use of the preposition
à
is merely an old form of French. As we saw in the case of pronunciation, the Swiss, like the Belgians, use resources that the French have forgotten. For instance, they say “
Il veut pleuvoir
” (“It wants to rain”) to mean “It’s about to rain.” Like Belgians, they use a specific verb tense called
passé surcomposé
(the equivalent of the past perfect) to mark a past action that has ended, as in “
Il a eu neigé
” (“It had snowed”); Parisians regard this construction as weird. Rousseau sometimes pointed out the Swiss French “mistakes” in his own writing, though in
The New Eloise
he came to the conclusion “
Qu’aurait-on à gagner à faire parler un Suisse comme un académicien?”
(“What have we got to gain from making a Swiss speak like an academician?”).

Because they use some of the same vocabulary to talk about very different political systems, political conversations between Belgians and Swiss (not to mention Quebeckers and French) are minefields for misunderstanding.
Fédéralisme
doesn’t have the same meaning in Switzerland as it does in France, Belgium or Canada. For the French it evokes medieval anarchy; for Belgians it describes the separation of powers between the Walloons and the Flemish. For the Swiss it refers to the integration of different parts into a whole. There are less confusing examples of Swiss institutional terminology. In Switzerland a vote is
votation
instead of
vote,
as in France and Quebec. Rescuers are called
samaritains
rather than
secouristes. Lycées
(the equivalent of grades eleven to thirteen) are called
gymnases,
like the German
gymnasium.
And the diploma given at the end of high school is not a
baccalauréat
but a
maturité.

The Swiss have preserved a number of old French expressions, such as
dent-de-lion
(dandelion), long replaced in France by
pissenlit.
One of their most endearing regionalisms (except to Parisians) is the Swiss term for Parisian French:
françouillon,
a derogatory term that evokes Belgian expressions such as
Franskillon
and
Francillon.
They also count the way Belgians do; in fact, they have fully rationalized their numbers and more commonly say
huitante
instead of
quatre-vingts
for eighty.

In spite of the ways in which the Swiss, the Belgians and even the Haitians have shaped the story of French, it’s surprising that they have been able to hold on to their own idiosyncratic pronunciations and vocabulary. The same century that saw the birth of these new homes for French also saw the birth of a powerful new home for language purism: France’s national education system. Through the education system, language purism would reach new heights and gain new influence, beyond anything the seventeenth-century purists could have dreamed of—to the extent that virtually no francophone on the planet today can escape its influence.

Chapter 8 ~

French without
Faute

During our stay in Paris we decorated our offices with cheap artifacts of French culture. The most interesting were a series of large colour posters we purchased in Lyon. These quaint illustrations of episodes from French history were at least fifty years old and had been created to hang in schoolrooms. Each contained a moral and was clearly designed to drive a principle of the French Republic into young minds.

Our favourite was called “A School before Jules Ferry.” It depicts a group of children of various ages receiving a math lesson. The classroom is a shack and the scene is one of disorder and chaos, with chickens and dogs running around among the students. In the foreground a schoolmaster appears to have been carving wooden clogs while delivering the day’s lesson. He is swinging a stick at a child who is trying to perform an addition exercise at the blackboard, either as punishment for getting the wrong answer or, more likely, because he is irritated at being interrupted in his work. At any rate, the message of the poster is clear: School before 1880 in France was a disorganized, unprofessional business, and French children should be thankful for the work of France’s first minister of national education, Jules Ferry, revered for putting in place France’s public school system.