The Story of French (36 page)

France’s cultural diplomacy is so effective that the French language continues to be attractive even where France isn’t. We visited one of the seven AIU schools in Israel, the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild, located in a comfortable neighbourhood of Tel Aviv. Known simply as the Alliance, it is one of the best-functioning schools of the AIU network. Many students who arrive here as young adolescents speak Hebrew and either English or French. They spend seven hours a week learning French—which is mandatory—as their second foreign language. When they graduate, they can carry on a conversation in French.

Although it is a little-known fact, Israel is the home of a large French-speaking minority; seven hundred thousand francophones live there (ten percent of the population), many from North Africa, but also sixty thousand French immigrants living in Jerusalem. France lost popularity in Israel when it supported the Palestinians in the 1967 war, and its reputation among Israelis has been declining since, particularly in recent years, as tensions between the large Arab and Jewish populations in France have led to attacks on Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and even businesses. Yet France is still the number-one tourist destination for Israelis, and French tourists make up the largest group of visitors to Israel—even larger than the number of Americans. French is not a very popular second-language choice in Israeli schools, partly because of tense relations with France, and partly because most students choose Arabic as their first foreign language after English.

So what compels Israeli students to attend a French
lycée
(or their parents to send them)? French culture still has such a good reputation that Israeli parents continue to want their children to get a French education. As Colette Bitton, a teacher at the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild, explained to us, the Alliance schools have a reputation for providing a “classic” education as opposed to the down-to-earth approach of the Israeli school system. The school is public—and free—but it happens to be located in a upper-middle-class neighbourhood, so it is attended by better-than-average students. As Jacques Wahl, director of the AIU in Paris, told us, “Parents send their children to study at the AIU schools not
because
of French, but
in spite of
French.”

Practically speaking, even in Israel, learning French has its advantages. Many students of the École Edmond-Maurice-Edmond de Rothschild find good summer work as tour guides and interpreters for French tourists. In 2002 the Tel Aviv Chamber of Commerce deliberately sought to hire students from French
lycées
for summer jobs in tourism. They were given special training to master the vocabulary of hotels and restaurants. Many of the
lycée
students also go on to do university studies in France.

The popularity of the 1,074 Alliances françaises spread across the planet defies conventional logic; in spite of the rapidly growing appeal of English, the Alliance française is still expanding. In some countries, such as Brazil, attendance is growing because French programs in schools are being cut (Alain Marquer, director of foreign development at the Alliance française in Paris, told us that some AF schools are catering more to children and teenagers, and overall attendance has been growing five percent a year since the mid-1990s). In India, demand has exploded in the last ten years because of the country’s growing interest in foreign trade. “In New Delhi, we turn away two hundred to three hundred people
a day,
” says Marquer. The organizations operate differently, not only from country to country, but also from one local organization to another, adapting to local conditions and cultural differences wherever they spring up. In Madagascar the Alliance française is under contract to train French teachers for the public school system. In Lesotho it offers courses in Sesotho, the national language, for the few foreign aid workers and diplomats who still make it there (the British Council closed its office in 1998 but the Alliance is sticking it out). Some Alliances, such as San Francisco’s, even offer English courses for French nationals. The teaching of local languages in addition to French distinguishes the Alliance from other international language networks.

To this day Alliance française schools remain mostly a product of local initiatives, as they were intended to be from the start. The French government supports the organization with subsidies and by lending personnel—perks that are available to small countries that can’t afford them, such as Lesotho, but also to high-profile showcase organizations such as the Alliance française of Miami. The Alliance school in Miami has three thousand students and enough resources to build a $1.5 million new facility, which it opened in the spring of 2005. The largest Alliance française in the United States is in New York City, with an impressive staff of sixty teachers, seven thousand students and a library of thirty-five thousand books. Some of the Alliances are run by directors who are on the payroll of the French foreign affairs ministry.

In the fall of 2004 the Délégation générale de l’Alliance française, the umbrella organization for American Alliances, in Washington D.C., organized a book tour for us to speak at twelve local Alliances in the eastern United States. It is almost impossible to generalize about the American Alliances, beyond the fact that many members are French teachers. Some local Alliances, for example Miami and Boston, are large, professional language schools and cultural organizations. On the other hand, the Providence, Rhode Island, school is housed in the basement of a church. Like the one in Lubbock, Texas, a number of U.S. Alliances offer no language classes, but are just French clubs where members meet regularly to practise their French or discuss French affairs. Or, as in Norfolk, Virginia, Alliances serve as networks for French teachers.

The American Alliances demonstrate how French cultural diplomacy has retained its power. Interestingly, though, this power is not necessarily tied to France anymore. Some Alliances, particularly the older, more established ones, have a strong bias towards “French from France.” Members of these groups consider France to be the definitive and exclusive source of French culture; they usually had difficulty (or said they had difficulty) understanding Jean-Benoît’s Quebec French. But many of the newer Alliances have adopted a broader franco-phone philosophy that is, in fact, more in line with the present orientation of the overall organization. The members of these Alliances know a lot about Quebec and Canada, are interested in the rest of the francophonie, and in terms of culture and dialects tend to place all francophone countries on equal footing. The Alliance in Lubbock, Texas, was particularly attuned to French-Canadian culture: It was run by an Algerian who could cite Quebec authors and singers by heart. He also knew a great deal about African literature.

So has French cultural diplomacy begun working to the advantage of other French-speaking countries? There is no doubt that France has been very successful in cultural diplomacy and in projecting “soft power” by promoting its language and culture across five continents for the last century and a half. The surprising result seems to be that the French language today is more popular than France itself.

Chapter 13 ~

A New Playing Field

At the same time the French were busy establishing a system of cultural diplomacy all over the planet, geopolitics was not working to the advantage of the French language. Between 1850 and 1945 France declined as a European power in contrast to Germany and Britain, which were steadily climbing. The world wars were devasting both to French morale and to France’s international reputation, and logically should have spelled the end of French as an international language.

But exactly the opposite happened. At the beginning of the twenty-first century French has a unique position among international languages. French ranks only ninth in the number of speakers today, well below international languages such as English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Russian. But it has official status in more countries than any other language besides English. Two G8 countries are French-speaking; two francophone cities, Brussels and Geneva, are important centres of internationalism. Francophone countries have even gone on to create their own version of the British Commonwealth, the Francophonie, which has fifty-three member countries (see table 6 in Appendix).

What happened? In a nutshell, the world changed, and French adapted to it rather nimbly. The same events that brought about the collapse of France as a world power in the first half of the twentieth century ushered in a new world order where language became a source of shared identity that transcended geographic borders—and would soon become a tool that nations would use to further their influence. Partly because of the work France had already done in spreading its language across the globe, partly because of the creation of new French-speaking states after Napoleon’s defeat a century earlier, and partly as a result of post-war decolonization, French was able to take on a surprisingly forceful role in this new internationalism.

The clouds were already gathering by 1850. Until the eighteenth century French had benefited from being the language of Europe’s largest country and strongest continental power. The next biggest competitors, German and Italian, were spoken in hundreds of city states, principalities, duchies and bishoprics. This lack of unity favoured the language of the continent’s biggest nation, France, especially in the courts and among the urban elites. Then, in the nineteenth century, the Germans and Italians created unified countries, and French lost two of its main “markets.” French intellectual, industrial and technical supremacy was now challenged by equally good, often better, production in other languages. As British commerce, German science, American industry and Soviet ideology established their influence, the cultural lustre of French faded. France compensated by pursuing influence in other regions (namely Romania), but the glory days when French did not need to share the field were clearly over.

During the same period France’s population growth slowed. By 1914 there were only forty million French people—a small increase from the twenty-eight million at the time of the Revolution. The British population had tripled to forty-three million by this time and the German to sixty-seven million. The populations of Russia and the United States, meanwhile, were close to 125 million and 100 million respectively. With stunning foresight, Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted in his book
Democracy in America
—published in 1835—that America and Russia would one day share dominion over the world. By 1919 this was already happening.

The French, however, had developed ingenious strategies to compensate for geopolitical and demographic stagnation. Seizing their second chance after the failure of their first colonial push, they carved out a new empire in Africa and Asia that would be second only to Britain’s. They began granting automatic citizenship to people born in France, a policy that made France the most welcoming country in Europe, and a country of immigration rather than emigration. France also sought to strengthen its position by building alliances, first with Britain, but also with Russia; Paris’s majestic Pont Alexandre III (Alexander III bridge), dedicated to Czar Alexander, is testimony to this new approach.

But France went to war against Germany three times in three generations, in 1870, 1914–18 and 1939–45, and each conflict hit the French worse than the previous one. The human and material cost of the First World War damaged not only France’s economy, but also Belgium’s—most of the fighting took place precisely where Belgium’s industrial base was located. On paper France was better off than Belgium; it had withstood the German assault and won. But it was a pyrrhic victory, more crippling to the victor than to the defeated. The country had lost 1.3 million soldiers in battle, and as many more were maimed or permanently injured. The civilian population had endured four years of privation, with two hundred thousand killed in warfare and another half million by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. German reparations didn’t cover the cost of reconstruction and France got little assistance from its former allies; the Americans, who had sworn to protect the French against Germany, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. So France had to rearm itself alone, against an enemy that was twice as big.

The war seriously undermined French capitalism, which had been a dynamic force up until then. Investment had been reduced in all economic sectors that were not necessary to the war effort, inflation soared and France lost much of its edge in the two high-tech industries of the time: aviation and cinema. France remained an important manufacturer of airplanes, but soon lost its status as leader to the Americans (a situation that might have come about whether or not there had been a war). The effect on cinema was even more devastating. French film production (except for propaganda) ground to a halt during the First World War, and after the war the Americans flooded the Continent with cheap silent productions that appealed to speakers of all languages.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 also took a heavy toll on France’s financial sector. One of France’s great diplomatic successes of the
belle époque
(1890 to 1914) had been to strike up an alliance with Russia in order to contain Germany. As part of the deal France had promised to invest heavily in the Russian economy. The French populace gambled millions of francs in high-return, high-risk loans to Russian industry, loans that the French government encouraged and the Czar guaranteed. Everything seemed rock-solid until the Bolsheviks destroyed the Czar’s regime and refused to honour debts incurred to the bourgeois capitalists of France. Overnight, half a century of French savings vanished. France gained tens of thousands of White Russian (anti-Bolshevik) refugees out of the deal—the French Academy’s present
secrétaire perpétuel
is a descendant of one such family—but it was little compensation for the destruction of so much French capital. (This is the main reason why, to this day, the French are touchy about investing in the stock market.)