The Story of French (26 page)

Victor Hugo entered the French Academy at a youthful thirty-eight, as recompense for his poetry and theatrical works, not for his novels. When the president, Prince Louis-Napoleon, staged a coup in 1851 and proclaimed the Second Empire, Hugo fled with his wife, children and mistress to the Channel Island of Guernsey, sister Island of Jersey (discussed in chapter 1). While in exile he reinvented French poetry and produced another masterpiece,
Les Misérables,
which was immediately translated into a dozen languages (the English editions even kept the French title).

On the reverse side of our poster “A School before Jules Ferry” is a poster titled simply “Victor Hugo.” Hugo, of course, is an icon of the French Republic. In the poster he is shown with his trademark snow-white beard, surrounded by a group of children. Because of his uncompromising political stance (he refused to return to France after Napoleon III’s general amnesty to exiles) and because of his literary genius, he became a sort of grandfather of the French Republic—a curious fate, since he started out as a royalist. Yet, more than any other French writer, Hugo stands as the prototype of the militant intellectual so idealized in French culture. Hugo was so admired that half a million people paraded under his balcony on his eightieth birthday, including a band with 5,500 instruments! When he died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, three million people came to pay their last respects at the Arc de Triomphe, where his body was laid.

In the history of the French language, Hugo is significant for more than his political activism, or even his literary genius. Hugo stood at the forefront of a movement of nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights who, in the name of realism, had their characters use popular language, including
argot
(slang). The roots of argot go back as far as those of standard French. In the fifteenth century, Argot was the name of a crime syndicate of brigands, thieves and killers who spoke together in
jargon
(a deformation of the Norman word
garg,
throat). Jargon was not a language so much as a system of words that criminals used so they couldn’t be understood by anyone outside the group, in particular the bourgeois and aristocrats they robbed and the authorities who pursued them. By the seventeenth century the bourgeois referred to this criminal jargon as argot.

What is argot exactly? Semantically it is French, but argot borrows its vocabulary from regional and foreign languages and masks French words with suffixes.
Roupiller
(to slumber) is from Picardy;
zigouiller
(to kill) is from Poitiers;
pognon
(money) is from Lyon and
ringard
(corny) is from a northern dialect.
Loustic
(rascal) is from German,
gonzesse
(girl) is from Italian,
flouze
(cash) and
souk
(disorder) are from Arabic and
berge
(years of age) is Romany. Argot deforms standard French words with suffixes such as -
iergue, -uche, -oche
and
-igue,
which are the most common. So
vous
(you) in argot is
vousiergue,
and
moi
is
mézigue.

Writers began using argot in the 1830s, around the time French authorities broke the crime syndicates that spoke it. In Hugo’s novel, thieves living in the Paris sewers do not speak like Madame de Pompadour. Hugo shocked his contemporaries in 1830 when he had convicts in the novel
Dernier jour d’un condamné
(
Last Day of a Condemned Man
) speak argot. In his 1862 masterpiece
Les Misérables,
he wrote two detailed chapters—quite fun to read, but edited out of English editions—describing how the common and criminal elements of society expressed themselves. In adopting argot, Hugo proved that it was not only a legitimate form of French, but often a more expressive one.

By Hugo’s time argot already had the double meaning of both criminal jargon and
bas langage
(low, impure French)—and it only underlines the elitist mentality of purism that a single term describes both
.
Hugo himself hesitates between the two meanings. But by the time Émile Zola published
The Drunkard
in 1877, all popular forms of speech were called
argotique.
Argot, still alive today, has long been the hammer and anvil of French lexical creation. Singer Edith Giovanna Gassion’s stage name, Piaf, meant
sparrow
in the argot of Paris between the wars. Paris butchers later developed a jargon called
loucherbem,
which consisted of replacing the first letter of a word with an L and moving the initial letter to the end, then adding an
argotique
ending such as
-em, -oque
or
-igue. Loucherbem
is itself a
loucherbem
term for
boucher
(butcher). And the process remains a lively one: A term still widely used today is
loufoque
(zany) from
fou
(crazy). But the meaning of
argot
became somewhat diluted over the last century. It is generally used as a synonym for
French slang,
but many French trades, or
grandes écoles,
refer to their own specialized terminology as
argot de métier
(trade jargon).

It’s strange to think that, by using
fautes
as a source of creativity, Hugo and his contemporaries would go on to enhance the prestige of French more than anyone before them (more on this in chapter 11). Paradoxically, though, their influence never made one dent in the
norme.
Throughout the nineteenth century the
norme,
and the idea of
le bon français,
remained as powerfully rooted in French education as ever, and education in turn was powerfully associated with the goal of teaching French.

As the century progressed and European countries entered the race to build colonial empires, the French, more than any other power, used education to try to consolidate their possessions. They taught French to local elites with the aim that they would support the colonial regime, ultimately hoping that education would assimilate Africans, Arabs, Polynesians and Asians to French culture. But, as they slowly realized, the methods that had been effective on French soil could not simply be grafted on to foreign populations.

Chapter 9 ~

Tool for an Empire

Tlemcen, Algeria, has always been proud of its links to Europe. Just east of the Moroccan border, the small city’s Spanish-style architecture, flowing fountains and leafy streets give it a distinctly Western flavour. A university town with about twenty-five thousand students, Tlemcen has a long and vibrant history as one of North Africa’s intellectual centres. Its cultivated atmosphere, combined with attractions such as a twelfth-century mosque and an ancient citadel, also made it a popular tourist destination, at least until civil war broke out in Algeria in the 1990s.

We visited Tlemcen in 2002 to attend a UNESCO-sponsored conference on plurilingualism. The gathering, organized by a French organization called Le Monde Bilingue / The Bilingual World, was the first international event to be held in Algeria in a decade, and we were the first group of foreigners Tlemcen had seen since the beginning of the civil war. Back in France, our Algerian friends were alarmed by our plan to attend the conference. Tourists had been kidnapped sporadically over the previous decade, and killings were still going on in major cities.

A French colony for 130 years, Algeria still bears the scars of civil war, the fallout from its violent war of independence from France, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. As a result, the country refuses to admit to its French heritage, at least officially. Unlike many former French colonies, it did not make French one of its official languages after independence.

The heritage of French colonialism is complex, and nowhere more so than where language is concerned. We met a young fundamentalist in Tlemcen who said he refused to speak the language of the colonizer and went as far as pretending he only spoke English (though he spoke it with a French accent). But the hostility towards France doesn’t translate neatly into a rejection of French. Among the former colonies, Algeria actually has the highest proportion of French speakers, to the point that French is hardly even a second language there. Half the population speaks French fluently, eighty percent of Algerian newspapers and most of the TV channels are French, and nearly everyone has some understanding of it.

The fact is, despite how painful Algeria’s colonial history was, the country is a striking example of how successful the French were in spreading their language during the second colonial push, which lasted roughly from 1830 to 1960. In many ways the second colonial era was the second great historical opportunity for French.

If French today is an official language in dozens of countries and territories and is widely used in Africa, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Polynesia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and even Latin America, it is because France and Belgium succeeded where other richer and more powerful countries failed. All European countries participated in colonialism, but France managed to carve itself out a vast empire, second only to Britain’s. In the colonial heyday of the 1930s, the French flag floated over a good third of Africa, the larger part of Indochina, a section of India, a huge swath of the Pacific, islands in the Caribbean and a chunk of South America. France also expanded its sphere of influence to Egypt, Turkey, China, Palestine and beyond. Mexico was France’s only large-scale colonial failure of the second wave, and even there it managed to attract the elites. Belgium’s possessions in central Africa—the Congo as well as Rwanda and Burundi—added to the extension of a French language empire on which, in a way, the sun still hasn’t set.

Why and how did France and Belgium succeed where Germany and the Netherlands failed, and where France had failed a century earlier? Both France and Belgium had strategic advantages such as direct access to the sea and proximity to Africa. They were also highly motivated to build empires. By the end of the nineteenth century France was falling behind its neighbours demographically and Belgium had very few natural resources left to fuel its economy. Both countries were looking for ways to compensate for these weaknesses. In the second colonial push, France adopted a more coherent approach than it had in the first. It also had remnants of the first empire—for example, Senegal and Pondicherry—that it was able to put to use as bases for the second push.

Neither the French nor the Belgians were particularly original in how they went about colonizing. Like every other colonial power—including the United States and Russia—they invoked a “mission to civilize” or some variant of that as justification for empire building. Historians still compare French colonialism, which was based on the principle of assimilation, to so-called British paternalism in order to show the relative merits of either approach (depending on which side they’re on). In our opinion, this is nothing more or less than historical revisionism. There was nothing better about the British “white man’s burden” than there was about the French “civilizing mission.” They were the same thing: a pretext for dominating and exploiting foreign peoples. All the European powers colonized for their own ends. In 1885 Georges Clemenceau, France’s leader during the First World War and an outspoken opponent of expansionism, nailed it when he said, “To speak of civilization is to join hypocrisy to violence.”

The French, like all colonial powers, performed some ambitious semantic pirouettes to try to hide the ugly face of the civilizing mission. They called the elites they created in their colonies
les évolués
(the evolved). The colonial administration developed a special status called
indigénat
(from
indigène,
native). The
indigènes
were given their own special justice system, as stated in the Code de l’indigénat, which authorized a new form of servitude,
le travail forcé
(forced labour), and so on. In Africa the broken French spoken by the
indigènes
was called
petit nègre.
Another racist term, more colloquial but still heard today, is
bougnoul,
a Wolof term that originally meant
black person.
The French used it pejoratively to refer to the
évolués
in Senegal, and today apply it to Arabs.

But the real difference in French colonial techniques was not the so-called civilizing mission, it was the way they went about it. For the French, the ultimate objective of colonization was cultural assimilation. They believed, or said they believed, that this could be achieved through mass education. More than any other colonial power, the French were explicit, if not adamant, about the importance of educating their colonial subjects and teaching them French. So the French language became a tool for empire building.

Of course, there was often a gap between the official discourse and reality. In Algeria, Senegal, Congo, Indochina and Lebanon, French and Belgian education policies were unevenly applied, with uneven results. In western Africa, particularly in Senegal, teaching began early in the nineteenth century, while in the Congo and central Africa there was virtually none until a century later. In some areas education was the work of the State, in others only missionaries were involved; in many, it was a combined effort. All in all, the French policies failed to educate the masses. But they succeeded in training an elite of so-called
évolués
who would act as colonial auxiliaries for the French and take over after independence—this would become the trademark of French colonial techniques.

On the whole, France’s effort to educate its colonial subjects does not explain how it succeeded in spreading the language so widely during the second colonial push. The main reason was that, as opposed to the first colonial push, the French this time sent settlers abroad. In the Pacific Ocean, where New Caledonia became a French colony in 1860, the French sent forty thousand convicts—four times the number of settlers and
engagés
they had sent to New France. Tunisia had attracted about 150,000 Europeans (mostly French and Italian) by 1906, still a considerable number. And the one million Europeans who had settled in Algeria by the 1930s were as numerous as all the settlers in all the other French colonies together. Not surprisingly, the second colonial push had a lot more impact on mainstream French than the first did.