The Story of French (32 page)

Of course, these technology-based anglicisms also highlight how much French Canadians and Acadians had been missing out on the important technical and intellectual developments that were taking place in France in the nineteenth century. Even while France was being outpaced by competing nations, Paris was still at the cutting edge of modernity. French culture, scientific and technological advances attracted millions of tourists, earned the admiration of the world and made the whole world hungry for French.

Part Three ~

Adaptation

Chapter 11 ~

The Power of Attraction

Most teachers of French we met and interviewed during the research for this book confirmed to us, with regret in their voices, that French was indeed waging an uphill battle against English in the war of second-language studies. Naturally we were curious to find out what kept them and their students so enthusiastic about French. The teachers cited a wide variety of motivations, ranging from extremely practical reasons to a kind of generalized idealization of the language. But one striking theme shone through in almost all their answers: People learn French to get access to French culture—or a certain idea of it—whether it’s France’s lively literary and artistic scene, French cuisine, French intellectuals, French films or just the French way of life.

In the history of any international language, there are two reasons why it spreads: It is either forced on people or people are interested in learning it. The global growth in French speakers in the nineteenth century owed a lot to French colonialism. Yet during the same century, the language continued to gain speakers outside of France’s colonial empire, in places as diverse as Argentina, the U.S. and Germany. The reason? People wanted to speak French because it gave them access to what was modern, sophisticated and state-of-the-art.

This chapter, admittedly, is not as much about the French language as it is about how French gained its mass appeal. Few people studying French today realize to what extent their motivations are rooted in nineteenth-century developments in France. In that century French went from being an elite language to a being language with mass appeal. It became definitively associated with luxury products, artistic innovation, tourism, cuisine and sophistication in just about every field, as well as scientific and technical progress. At the same time, French continued to develop the double personality it had gained during the Revolution-and-Empire period, and became even more strongly associated with universal values and human rights.

Nineteenth-century France was an amazing centre of creativity and innovation, and its tremendous artistic, scientific and intellectual production boosted the prestige of French across the planet. From Europe to South America and beyond, people knew French would give them access to the cutting edge of almost everything, and they wanted it. It was in this century that the French began speaking of the
rayonnement
of their language—a difficult term to translate, meaning a mixture of influence, spread and appeal. The French would later build on that appeal to construct widespread networks of associations and organizations that promoted French—many of which are still in place today (as we explain in Chapter 12).

The source of France’s early mass appeal is very little documented. One of the rare books on the topic is Harvey Levenstein’s
Seductive Journey,
which recounts the history of American tourism in France from Jefferson to the Depression. As Levenstein explains, tourism in eighteenth-century Paris consisted mostly of small-scale travel for personal cultivation. It became increasingly recreational over the next century as the number of travellers grew. The development of steam power enabled people to get to France by land and by sea faster than ever before. As many as a quarter of a million Americans visited the country each year before the First World War, and the number of English and German visitors was much larger.

French was still the language of high-level politics and diplomacy in Europe, and this status, unchallenged until 1919, inspired considerable interest in France. But the nation was also considered a window to the future. The thirst for novelty and progress attracted unprecedented numbers of visitors to the four world’s fairs that France hosted in the nineteenth century. Between the fair of 1855 and that of 1867, attendance tripled from five million to fifteen million people. In 1889 it more than doubled to thirty-two million, and in 1900 it reached fifty million—considered a good turnout for international exhibitions even today.

The Anglo-American elites, couldn’t get enough of France, to which they began travelling en masse. By the 1880s the community of American and British expatriates was big enough to support Paris’s first English-language paper, the
Paris Herald,
created in 1887. And Paris’s influence shone as far as the American West, where people went to saloons (a corruption of
salon
) and enjoyed lively French operettas by the likes of Offenbach—and the French cancan.

The reasons for this interest in Paris were complex. For a long time Paris had been a mandatory stop on the grand tour, as the British called their cultural pilgrimages across Europe (the source of the term
tourism
). Nineteenth-century developments in arts, tastes, science and industry made Paris even more tantalizing. French taste in food and design set the standard for the world’s elite. Luxury items from the realms of fashion, perfume, wine and cuisine, already a French forte, acquired even more renown. Demand for these goods led an ambitious French merchant, Aristide Boucicaut, to buy the Paris store Au Bon Marché in 1852 and turn it into the first of the
grands magasins
(department stores), an idea that soon made its way abroad, notably to New York City.

Everyone looked towards France for the latest developments in everything. To keep the public informed and to transmit information to the capitals of Europe, a translator, Charles Émile Havas, created Agence Havas, the world’s first news agency, in 1841; one of his employees, Julius Reuters, started his own telegraph wire service in London in 1851. A Russian Jewish refugee in Paris, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, was so impressed with the French daily
Figaro
that he decided to recreate and modernize the Hebrew language so it could be used for modern communications (more on this in Chapter 17).

The popularity of French cuisine grew in step with the development of tourism. Even today, the French word
cuisine
is the universal synonym of gastronomy in every language, and
cuisine
is cited as one of the best reasons for learning French. France was already famous for food before the Revolution, although most people today would be surprised by a French meal of the time. Dishes were prepared a couple of
days
in advance and laid out in serving dishes on the table—individual servings became popular only in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Russian-style service.

Things started to change with the development of the restaurant at the end of the eighteenth century. The term
restaurant
originates from a shop near the Louvre Palace in Paris that in the 1760s served a meat-based broth known as a
bouillon restaurant
(restoring broth). The term gave birth to the idea of a
restaurateur,
the person who owned the establishment. But the big shift came with the Revolution. Prior to that, most chefs cooked for bourgeois or aristocratic families and their numerous guests. When their bosses fled abroad to avoid jail or the guillotine during the Revolution, these chefs and
maîtres d’hôtel
found themselves out of work, so they started opening their own establishments. The number of restaurants in Paris had multiplied sixfold by 1810. By 1830 there were more than three thousand restaurants in Paris, of varying quality—some already of a high standard. The word
restaurant
entered the dictionary of the French Academy in 1835. Since not everyone in France could afford to eat at the expensive table of a great chef like Auguste Escoffier,
brasseries, bistrots
and
cafés
began to multiply in order to cater to different clienteles.

Haute cuisine,
already a big draw by the nineteenth century, became a tourist magnet, especially for wealthier Americans visiting France (middle-class tourists tended to stick to modest hotel restaurants); this was when the word
menu
appeared in the U.S. At the same time, the British took to drinking claret, as they called Bordeaux. The French fed the new demand for high-end products, developing brands such as Lu cookies and Schweppes sparkling water. Near the end of the century they developed the system of
appellation d’origine
(label of origin) to classify French wine—and later extended the appellation concept to other produce such as Roquefort cheese, onions, lentils and meats. Escoffier and Swiss hotel owner César Ritz began a policy of exporting French cooking by placing French chefs—about two thousand in all—in hotels and restaurants across the world. French became essential for any chef with ambition, and remains so today, which is why people still speak of
entrées, hors d’oeuvres, casseroles, vinaigrettes
and
meringue,
to name but a few French gastronomic terms used in English.

Grave political upheavals shook France over the nineteenth century, although they did little to damage France’s attractiveness. Between 1830 and 1871 the French changed regimes no fewer than four times, each time violently. Paris was partially destroyed during the Prussian siege of 1870 and during the Commune uprising of 1871, but the tourists kept coming anyway. Not even the catastrophic invasion of phylloxera, an American parasite that almost wiped out the French wine industry, was enough to kill interest in French cuisine and winemaking.

Curiously, while the French language came to be associated more and more with elite culture and tastes, it also became the language of human rights. It remained the language of the European elite throughout the nineteenth century despite the competing influence of English and German. But the Revolution of 1848, an insurrection that ended the rule of King Louis-Philippe and ushered in the Second Republic, spread anti-monarchical rebellion to all the European capitals except London, associating French once again with progressive, reformist circles, as in the early years of the French Revolution. The association of French with anti-conservative politics got even more impetus from the rise of great French literary stars such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Alphonse de Lamartine—all reformist thinkers who played a role in the Revolution of 1848. It is something of a semantic miracle that French kept its elitist reputation while surfing the wave of democratization. One of the keys to this double identity probably came from the development in France during this century of the outspoken public intellectual. Even today France manages to be an aggressive player in the globalization movement while articulating a coherent anti-capitalist, pro-socialist discourse on the international stage.

Strangely, although France experienced political upheavals throughout the century, it also benefited from a period of peace in Europe that lasted from the 1815 Treaty of Vienna to the beginning of the First World War (even the 1870 Franco-Prussian War failed to drag in other powers). In France this unleashed creative energies that had been suppressed for at least a generation, which in turn reinforced the importance and prestige of French in the world. The progress of French in France through education (recounted in chapter 8) was critical. It created a bigger domestic market for the consumption of culture, but also dramatically increased the number of French-speaking potential artists, writers and scientists whose success would feed the demand for French.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in literature and the visual arts. There is much debate over the actual definition of Romanticism, but its central tenet—the expression of an enhanced sense of self and feelings of revolt—impelled France’s literary ideals for most of the century and beyond, spawning generations of literary masters (until the 1970s the French won a fifth of all Nobel prizes in literature). Even after the First World War, a generation of young American writers—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them—flocked to Paris for inspiration. Hemingway’s autobiographical
A Moveable Feast
shows how a young American hoped to learn from the French capital even when he didn’t write in French.

The figure of Victor Hugo (described in chapter 8) stands tall in this century, but he was not alone. A dozen other French authors could have made a solid claim of having surpassed him in literary production, although none could claim equal status as a public figure. Whereas the previous century had been characterized by a generation of philosophes whose artistic output was rather thin, the nineteenth century produced a score of great writers who made significant contributions to world literature—some of whom became famous internationally in their lifetime. While Alexandre Dumas invented the popular historical novel, Honoré de Balzac invented the novel series. In a space of twenty years, between 1827 and 1848, Balzac wrote the ninety novels that composed his
Human Comedy.
Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and Émile Zola (1840–1902) invented literary realism; Zola, the founder of naturalism, brought literary craft to social inquiry. Their friends the Goncourt brothers developed a parallel academy to compete with the French Academy, and their literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, is today considered pre-eminent. Zola and Flaubert were so widely read during their lives that they became familiar names in capitals all over Europe and beyond. When Zola was tried for accusing a number of French officers of forgery in the famous Dreyfus affair, thousands of people demonstrated in London and New York to support him.