The Story of French (24 page)

Education had been one of the great obsessions of the revolutionary period, but because of lack of teachers, resources and interest, many projects fell flat, and teaching effectively remained in the hands of the Church in the decades that followed. In addition, France was still predominantly an agrarian society where children were required to work, so few could be spared for studies. Under Jules Ferry, teaching became “universal” in 1881. The national education system would be the greatest tool for spreading French inside France. Yet its approach was anything but neutral; France’s education system was put in place during a return to the ideals of classicism and language purism, and French would bear the imprint of this influence from then on. Under national education, purism entered the schools and spread throughout the French populace. That’s why French writer André Gide (1869–1951) would later write, “
En chaque Français, il y a un Vaugelas qui sommeille
” (“There is a dormant Vaugelas within every Frenchman”), referring to the famous seventeenth-century grammarian who created the central doctrines of purism and
bon usage
(see chapter 3).

Although Jules Ferry made public school mandatory in 1880–81, the poster should actually be called “A School before François Guizot.” Fifty years before Ferry, it was Guizot (1787–1874), the most important minister of the last French king, Louis Philippe, who took the first crucial steps towards creating a universal school system in France. Guizot was minister of public instruction between 1832 and 1837. A historian and a Protestant, he understood that reading skills were necessary to unleash the potential of a nation in the middle of an industrial revolution. He also understood that to build a state, the French needed a competent bureaucracy, and for that they needed schools.

Guizot began his program by making reading and writing skills a requirement for all public jobs. In 1833 he passed a law that required all towns to build a primary school for boys, and all Départements to have a teacher training college to transmit basic knowledge, including religious and moral instruction, reading and arithmetic. He made school obligatory for boys, opened up education to all classes of society (including girls), and created a body of school inspectors. His successors maintained the program, and by 1880 the number of primary schools had grown from 1,700 to 75,000. The number of
instituteurs
had risen to 110,000, and 6.5 million boys and girls were attending school. So by the 1880s, most French children had been exposed to at least some French.

In 1880–81 Jules Ferry, a pillar of the newly formed Third Republic, created the Ministry of National Education and made public school mandatory, free and secular. Schooling was organized into three cycles: primary, secondary and
lycée.
Part of Ferry’s objective was purely
républicain
—he wanted to get the clergy out of public-school teaching for good. Even after the Revolution the Church had been encouraged to run schools, but clerics were known for rejecting the values of the Republic and advocating autocratic rule. In many regions, Brittany in particular, the clergy maintained and even encouraged local languages as a form of resistance to the Republic. Ferry’s secular teachers came to be dubbed
les hussards noirs de la République
(“black soldiers of the Republic”), partly for their severe black uniforms, but mostly because they were trained to fight obscurantism and actively promote the values of the Republic.

Although Ferry was really building on the work that Guizot began, there is a reason that the French today speak about school before and after Jules Ferry rather than Guizot. Guizot was a conservative who thought that democracy should be limited to the landowning class (that is, those who paid at least two hundred francs in income tax—a fortune). He also advocated a strong role for the clergy in education. Ferry, on the other hand, favoured the modern, secular conception of the Republic, where everyone would vote and where the clergy would be relegated to running churches—ideas that are fundamental to the French Republic to this day. So Ferry went on to become an icon of republican education and Guizot didn’t.

Thanks to both their efforts, however, education dramatically increased the number of people who had some understanding of French. At the time of the Revolution, not even half of France’s population spoke French fluently, and another twenty-five percent had no understanding of it at all. By the Second World War virtually all of the French understood the language, and most of them spoke it well—although fifty percent of the population still spoke their regional language as a mother tongue. The switch to French strengthened the French state and democracy, and dramatically increased the size of the public that both French writers and the media were able to reach. That created a powerful French popular culture in the nineteenth century, a novelty in the history of a language that had been confined to urban, aristocratic and bourgeois circles for centuries (more on this in chapter 11).

National education not only taught French but also largely determined how the French—and, by extension, all francophones—came to see their language. After the abuses of the Revolution-and-Empire period, the French monarchy, which was reinstalled in 1815, strengthened both the academies and their thinking (known as
académisme
). The monarchy pushed the notion of classics and classicism partly because they were comforting and not challenging. Authors such as Molière, Racine, Corneille and Pascal, who were believed to conform to these standards, soon came to form the canon of French literature. Their language was thought to be pure and their ideas did not challenge the monarchy. More than ever, the Academy of Fine Arts and the French Academy were setting the standards for beauty and language use.

This return to purism was happening precisely when Guizot began building the education system. Between 1820 and 1840 most French people still did not speak French, so French teaching in schools was literally second-language teaching and, as a result, highly normative and rule-based. The influence of the new academism amplified this tendency. Between 1800 and 1860 no fewer than a thousand French grammars were published. The most influential was
La nouvelle grammaire française,
by François Noël and Charles Pierre Chapsal, published in 1823. It was followed by an abridged version, and the book went through more than eighty editions, including two translated American versions, one abridged and the other full-length.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century the flurry of activity in language instruction materials was phenomenal. In 1834 the Bescherelle brothers came out with another grammar,
La grammaire nationale.
Although
Le Bescherelle
now specializes in verb conjugations, it is still one of the most important names in French grammar. In 1849 an enterprising school director, Pierre Larousse, came out with the
Lexicologie des écoles primaires,
the first full method for teaching French grammar and spelling ever published. Three years later he published the
Dictionnaire complet,
which bore the motto “A dictionary without examples is a skeleton.” At about the same time the lexicographer Émile Littré published the
Dictionnaire de la langue française.
With its original definitions, etymology and examples from authors, it set a new standard in the field. Larousse and Littré are still among the biggest names in today’s dictionary business, and until the creation of
Le Robert
in 1967,
Le Larousse
enjoyed a virtual monopoly in schools.

In 1835 the French Academy published the sixth edition of its
Dictionnaire,
which got its usual lukewarm reception. However, partly because of Guizot’s influence, the French government decided at this time that candidates for the civil service had to pass written and oral tests. That meant that the government needed a standard, so it turned to the French Academy. This was the first (and only) time the work of the Academy took on a genuinely official character and, predictably, this became the heyday of its influence. Lexicographers even published unauthorized versions of the Academy’s dictionary on their own. In 1836 and 1837 no fewer than four of these abridged (basically bootleg) editions of the dictionary came out. Joining the movement, publishers edited and republished the classic French authors, including Molière, Racine and La Fontaine, with the new, official spellings. Ever since then, francophones have entertained the myth that classic French authors wrote exactly like the French bourgeois of 1830. This linguistic revisionism fed (and still feeds) a quasi-religious belief among francophones that the French language had been
fixé
(set) since the time of Louis XIV. That’s patently false, but most French speakers and many foreigners believe it.

While the Academy’s work had achieved official status, the real drive behind the purist movement came from the schools. Possessed by the idea of a pure language, teachers began pushing an idealized, bourgeois version of French on schoolchildren. They started a tradition of drilling generations of kids to write purely and perfectly by imitating the classics. This is why francophones—particularly, but not only, the French—are known for trying to speak as they write (formally, with rules), rather than write as they speak (informally, favouring effective communication, an approach widely associated with the writing of English speakers).

Although language purism has been drilled into the French for centuries through education, it is by no means exclusive to them. But francophones outside of France are perhaps more tolerant of linguistic variation, mostly because the French they speak differs from the
norme
imposed by French education. North American francophones are also influenced by a cultural tolerance for language mistakes that is more typical of the English-speaking majority around them, who tend to value communication over form. Yet all francophones—and even non-francophones—are subject to the pressures of purism.

The ideology of purism was so strong that it crossed the language barrier. Many French teachers in the United States accept as an article of faith that the French spoken in France is “purer” than that in, say, Belgium or Canada. Even the hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Canadian parents who go to the trouble of educating their children in French immersion programs (ironically, to make them more employable in Canada) tend to think there is an ideal French spoken somewhere else, and they imagine it is in France—more specifically, in Paris. What they are reacting to is the power of the
norme
: an ideal French that nobody really speaks. In fact, purism has never been able to eliminate accents and regional variations, because its primary object is the written word, which is why French is so uniform wherever it is written. No place or group speaks pure normative French; there is only a broad range of speakers across the planet who adhere to the ideal in differing degrees. For instance, we met many Africans who speak extremely normative French—at least they did with us, in public—and we responded in kind. But we don’t speak that way at home, and neither do they.

More than anything, this attitude is explained by a particular concept that developed in the nineteenth century:
la faute
(fault). A
faute
in French is not just a mistake (which is literally translated as
une méprise
).
Faute
has a moral stigma, contrary to
erreur,
which is more neutral. Until about the fifteenth century the term referred to the sins of the flesh, as in “original sin.” In the seventeenth century, language purists gave the connotation of sin to mistakes in speech or writing, and it became common to speak of a
faute de goût
(error in taste). In the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau still spoke of his language
incorrections
(improprieties). It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, when the French built their education system around a very strong purist doctrine, that the stigma of
fautes
was implanted in the minds of millions of French speakers, where it remains to this day.

The stigma was reinforced during that century by the introduction of
la dictée
(dictation exercises), a technique that has survived until the present. All cultures use dictation as a language-teaching method, but francophones rely on it, and until quite far along in their studies (Jean-Benoît did his last dictation in college when he was nineteen). French TV personality Bernard Pivot turned dictation into a sport throughout the francophone world when he began his famous annual dictation contest in 1986. Literally hundreds of thousands of people from dozens of countries competed to win the Dico d’Or (Golden Dictionary) prize. Pivot’s dictations are really a series of grammar and spelling traps that have very little to do with how French is actually used. But usage is not the point. The whole idea of dictation is to prove that one can write
sans faute—
even at a level of language and vocabulary that has no use in the real world of conversation, culture or work (unless you’re a lexicographer).

An anecdote told by author Christophe Traisnel shows that changes in how people wrote took longer to develop, in spite of the strong ideology of purism. He tells of a boring reception at Fontainebleau in 1857, during which Empress Eugénie asked her friend the author Prosper Mérimée to organize a game. Mérimée came up with the idea of a dictation. The results were surprising—the Emperor had seventy-five
fautes,
his wife sixty-two, and Alexandre Dumas twenty-four. It was the Austrian ambassador, Prince Metternich, who won, with only three mistakes! Purism was obviously not a monopoly of the French; evidently even second-language learners had adopted a strong sense of correctness.

For generations now, French has been taught with an emphasis on exact spelling and grammar and avoidance of
fautes.
Francophones constantly remark on, or correct, one another’s speech and writing. Where language is concerned, they can demonstrate a righteousness that is quite similar to the way the Puritans confronted (as some puritans still do) the notion of sin. Like sin,
fautes
are inevitable. So the idea functions as a kind of regulating principle that makes speakers nervous about how their transgressions will be perceived. It takes a particularly strong personality to free oneself from the fear of committing a
faute.
As professional writers we can testify that one of the strongest factors inhibiting francophone writers everywhere is the fear of making
fautes,
which is seen as being not only unworthy of the language, but even a traitor to it.