The Story of French (28 page)

The case of the Belgian Congo shows this problem in even more vivid terms. The Belgians were not interested in teaching French. They tended to educate students in local African languages and favoured technical training rather than providing a general education. They feared that if they created an elite, it would rise up one day and demand independence. By 1920 only ten percent of the schoolchildren in Belgian colonies were learning French. The teaching of French there, as in the colonies of France, was done through the ineffective “direct” method.

French made more progress in the Belgian colonies than Flemish did, primarily because it became the language of social promotion (as it was in Belgium). But French wouldn’t have a large presence until after the Second World War, when the Belgians made a systematic effort to organize school systems. As a result of the Belgian preference for technical education, when it became independent, the newly formed country of Zaire (Belgian Congo) had only four native university graduates.

The most cost-efficient agents for teaching French were, by far, the missionaries. Decades, in some cases centuries, before European powers began to officially claim colonies, missionaries had been travelling to remote lands to establish their presence and convert pagans. Among the European powers, France was a leader in this work throughout the nineteenth century, sending missionaries to build schools and hospitals and teach French in French West Africa, Indochina and the Pacific islands. In fact, France sent more priests, nuns and monks into foreign missions in the nineteenth century than any other European country. In 1900, twenty-eight of the world’s forty-four missionary societies were French; of the seventy thousand missionaries active in the world, fifty thousand were French.

In the nineteenth century, France’s attitude towards the missionaries was in complete contradiction to the one it held towards religious organizations on the Continent. The Republic was radically antireligious, but it encouraged missionary work abroad. The French kicked the Jesuits out of France twice, in 1880 and 1901, but during the same period subsidized them heavily to continue their work abroad, particularly in Lebanon. The reason was simple: Even with the subsidies, missions cost less than public schools. As language teachers, missionaries got better results than regular teachers did because they tended to learn the local languages where they worked. Speaking the language of the people helped them convert local populations to Christianity, which was their primary goal. In effect, they applied Jean Dard’s mutual method. In addition, teaching French was usually part of their civic mission. The French state supported them financially, and expected this service in return.

In the age of imperialism, with its project to “civilize,” European rulers were very conscious of the role missionaries played as precursors of colonial expansion, and they monitored their efforts closely. Napoleon III encouraged Catholic missions in the Pacific islands in order to counteract Anglo-American colonial expansion. The missions played a crucial role in the Pacific Ocean, especially in Polynesia. Missionaries arrived in the Pacific islands of Wallis and Futuna in the 1830s, fifty years before France laid claim to them. In the decades that followed, Catholic missions were established in Tonga and New Caledonia. The French missionaries were in a hurry, since Protestant English missionaries were already well-established in the Pacific, notably in Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand. By 1854 there were already 117 Catholic missionaries in the Polynesian islands, and soon French Protestant missionaries joined the fray—which is why France today still controls the largest section of the Pacific Ocean.

According to Professor Pascale Barthélémy, the total number of children in mission schools in all of Africa was almost equal to all those in government schools. In Africa, le Levant (the Middle East) and Indochina, missionaries ran thousands of schools. In the Ottoman Empire alone, one hundred thousand students were enrolled in French missionary schools by 1900. The Belgians relied almost entirely on missionaries. When he was private owner of the Congo basin, King Leopold II paid Catholic missionaries to go to Africa and open schools. The Belgian government maintained the same approach when it took over the country in 1908; Belgian Roman Catholic mission schools were given generous subsidies to continue their work. By 1920 some 185,000 children were studying in Catholic and Protestant missions, but fewer than 2,000 were in state schools.

Missionaries were not effective everywhere, though. European missionary presence in Indonesia began in the seventeenth century when the French tried, without success, to establish spice trading. The missionaries transcribed the Vietnamese language into the Latin alphabet (chapter 14 shows how this writing system would feed anti-French nationalism). But as in Algeria, the teaching of French faced several obstacles. Indochina had a strong history of Chinese education before the French arrived, and that made the Indochinese resistant to French schools. Also as in Algeria, the local population never bought the idea that the French were bringing “civilization.” They already had civilization. The French implanted an education system in Indochina in 1919, but neither the missionaries nor the French state could overcome resistance.

Another problem in Indochina was that few French people ever migrated there. In 1937 there were thirty thousand French inhabitants in a population of twelve million, and half of them were soldiers. A great number of the rest were teachers and their families. The French writer Marguerite Duras was a daughter of one. Her famous novel
L’amant
(
The Lover
), which was made into an excellent film, tells the story of her torrid relationship with an
évolué
in the waning days of France’s dominion over Indochina.

But the French language made surprising progress in Indochina. As in Algeria, indigenous merchants and functionaries picked it up and it quickly became a language of social promotion. Governor General Paul Doumer (1897–1902), considered the architect of French Indochina, reinforced an aggressive French administration. His policy pushed people to learn French so they could deal with the administration, though Doumer’s actions later provoked resentment and fostered the rebellion that would lead to Indochina’s independence movement. In the 1930s, one in ten Indochinese was bilingual; most were concentrated in the cities. Some famous francophone Indochinese people include Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Norodom Sihanouk. A pidgin of French, Tay Boy, was used all over Indochina.

The situation of French in Syria, and more particularly Lebanon, was a mirror image of that in Indochina. In 1919 Greater Syria became a protectorate of France, rather than of Britain, largely because French had made so much progress there over the centuries. In a way, France’s colonial expansion had started in Syria. The French presence dated back to the Crusades in the twelfth century, when Maronite Christians in today’s Lebanon fought alongside Frankish Crusaders. In the sixteenth century King François I struck a deal with the Ottoman sultan, who made France the protector of Maronite Christians (and all Christians) living in the Ottoman Empire; this is partly why the Greeks remain strong francophiles to this day. French missionaries began working in Syria in the seventeenth century, and in 1816 France forced the Ottoman Turks to set up an autonomous territory for the Maronites in Mount Lebanon, laying the groundwork for the creation of Lebanon in 1943.

Throughout the nineteenth century France increased its commercial relations with the area—the railway line between Jaffa and Jerusalem and the digging of the Suez Canal between 1854 and 1869 were among the most spectacular of those efforts. By mid-century, French was being taught along with English at the Collège Maronite Romain in a modern languages program. At the end of the nineteenth century a dozen French congregations taught seven thousand students in some fifty schools. With funding from the French government, in 1875 French Jesuit priests opened the Saint Joseph University in Beirut, where they ran schools of medicine, engineering and law before the French Protectorate was established.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, the area was placed under the military administration of the Allies. Because of language, France was an obvious candidate for getting the League of Nations mandate over Syria (which still included Lebanon). The mandate, directly inspired by the “civilizing” colonial doctrine of nineteenth-century Europe, was meant to prepare the area for eventual independence, though the process turned out to be rockier than expected. At the beginning of the 1930s, with independence in sight, Christians made up half the population of what is now Lebanon, but feared being overwhelmed by the Muslim population. So they convinced France to create a separate state of Lebanon that would give them control over Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre and some areas in the south. France divided Syria into two states in 1943, reducing Syria’s access to the Mediterranean and sowing the seeds of future conflict between the countries.

The French presence in Lebanon led to a curious migration that has lasted to this day. Even before the protectorate, the Lebanese started to settle throughout the French colonial empire. In the colonies they were often sought as middlemen, in much the same way that the British Empire relied on Indian merchants. In Africa, in particular, Lebanese brought the settlers much-needed new blood. In Senegal at the time of independence they numbered more than seventy thousand, and in many colonies they greatly outnumbered the European settlers. The extent of this Lebanese diaspora was phenomenal—today Lebanese communities are spread across the planet. Famous members include the U.S. activist Ralph Nader, the Canadian René Angélil, manager and husband of pop singer Céline Dion, and Carlos Gosn, a Brazilian-born Lebanese who is now CEO of Renault-Nissan.

When we visited Senegal in May 2005, our hotel in central Dakar was directly across the street from the Mission Libanaise (Lebanese Mission). To get a better understanding of the community, we met with Samir Jarmarche, an energetic businessman and head of the local Lebanese cultural organization. Jarmarche showed us his scrapbook of pictures of his family, who were part of the second wave of Lebanese immigrants to Senegal. His father was actually on his way to America in the 1920s when, as Jarmarche put it, “fortunately or unfortunately the boat stopped in Dakar, he met some people from his village and ended up staying in Senegal.”

The Lebanese had first come to Senegal in the 1880s, when they were fleeing the Ottoman Empire. In Senegal, as in all the French colonies, they ran textile and furniture factories, real estate and grocery businesses. They also reinforced the “French” presence in the country’s interior by operating peanut factories and depots where the French rarely went. The most successful opened businesses in other parts of French West Africa, and their families are spread today over the entire area. In fact, Lebanese belong to the economic elite of every African country where they are established. The richest of the Lebanese Senegalese, the Shararah family, run businesses in every country of former French West Africa.

In 1948 Senegal’s Lebanese community opened a Lebanese mission in Dakar to school children in French and Arabic and to maintain their religion, the Maronite faith. The mission became the backbone of the community. Since Senegalese independence, however, the Lebanese population has dropped from seventy thousand to twenty thousand. Although most Senegal-born Lebanese speak Wolof and Arabic, relations between the Lebanese and the Senegalese are not always harmonious. The Lebanese continue to educate their children in French and rarely intermarry with the Senegalese. The Senegalese are critical of this, and hotly contest the huge role the Lebanese still play in Senegal’s economy. But the complex heritage of French colonialism has given the Lebanese a triple identity that will probably last for many decades to come. As Mr. Jarmarche told us, “I am French, I am Lebanese and I am Senegalese, and this is my home.”

While the French never came close to achieving their goal of assimilation during the second colonial push, they did manage to create a solid French-speaking base in all of their colonies. In a few areas, like Syria, newly independent states quickly adopted aggressive anti-French policies that would virtually wipe this base out. But, ironically, in most of the colonies French progressed more after independence than it had before.

In the meantime, French speakers in France’s first colonial empire in North America were facing aggressive assimilation efforts by British, Canadian and American authorities. Against all odds, the people of this dynamic French-speaking Lost World found ways to survive.

Chapter 10 ~

Lost Worlds

On May 18, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States wrote to Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. It was the darkest moment of the Second World War, when Nazi Germany and Japan seemed unstoppable and the world was ablaze. But Roosevelt had another problem on his mind. Three weeks earlier, Canada had conducted a national referendum on conscription. Although a majority of Canadians had said yes, seventy percent of French Canadians refused to be conscripted for overseas service. Riots even broke out in Montreal over the question.

The White House was worried that this controversy would be detrimental to the Canadian war effort. In his letter to the Canadian prime minister, Roosevelt bragged that French Canadians who had migrated to New England were finally converting to “Anglo-Saxon ways” and speaking English in their homes. He proposed that Canada and the U.S. join forces and do “some sort of planning…perhaps unwritten” to assimilate the remaining French speakers in Canada.

It’s surprising to find that Roosevelt was grappling with the issue of French Canadians while there was a war going on. Yet the fact was, two centuries after France’s defeat and withdrawal from the continent, and despite overwhelming odds, French remained an American language. Like Roosevelt, many people wondered why. And like Roosevelt, many people still wanted to see French in North America disappear as a native language.