The Story of French (44 page)

Quebeckers refer to assimilation as
la louisianisation
(Louisianization), and much of the activism of French Canadians and Acadians in the 1960s was driven by their fear of ending up like Cajuns. But Cajuns also became politically active during this period—in fact, just when their culture was about to disappear. The 1960s were full of contradictions. Author Shane K. Bernard pointed out in his book
The Cajuns: Americanization of a People
that one driving force of the Cajun renaissance in the early 1960s was not a Cajun but a British-born Canadian historian, Raymond Spencer Rodgers. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Rodgers embraced the struggle of all ethnic minorities, whether black, Indian, French Canadian, Acadian or Cajun. He moved to Louisiana to teach at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1966, and within weeks went public to denounce Cajuns’ lack of concern over the disappearance of their culture. Rodgers shook people up at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, particularly one Cajun lawyer and former representative to Congress, James Domengeaux.

Domengeaux spoke French but couldn’t read or write it. He was sixty-one at the time and already planning his retirement when he suddenly took up the cause of French in Louisiana with the fury of the newly converted. He and the chamber of commerce successfully petitioned the state Senate and House of Representatives to pass a series of regulations stipulating that French would be taught for five years in high schools and that universities would train French teachers. In 1968 Louisiana created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) to coordinate initiatives to promote and teach French. When non-Cajun (and often anti-French) representatives opposed its creation, Domengeaux argued that French would boost tourism in Louisiana and improve the state’s image—and he was right.

Contrary to what most people believe and what Louisiana’s tourist brochures now suggest, French never became an official language in Louisiana. However, the state did give CODOFIL broad powers to develop a language policy. With his characteristic energy, Domengeaux managed to bring about two hundred foreign teachers to Louisiana from France, Belgium and Canada. He met French president Georges Pompidou in 1969 and reportedly told him, in his Louisiana French, “
Monsieur le Président, si tu m’aides pas, le français, il est foutu en Louisiane
” (“Mr. President, unless you help me, French has had it in Louisiana”).

CODOFIL did have some serious self-imposed limits, though. The most obvious was political. Being, as a Southerner, attuned to the legacy of the Civil War experience, Domengeaux was allergic to radical Quebec-style nationalism. In fact, he blackballed the most vociferous French-language activists who sprang up in Louisiana in the 1970s, starting with singer Zachary Richard. Richard, who would become one of Louisiana’s best-known musicians, went on to a bilingual international career and was more popular abroad than in Louisiana. Early in his career he travelled to France and Quebec and discovered radical francophone activism. He also discovered that, outside Louisiana, language was a political issue. Back in Louisiana Richard tried to push his compatriots to become politically radical, but Domengeaux suppressed him, essentially pushing him out of Louisiana by refusing to invite him to events and concerts. For Domengeaux language was an issue of culture and education, but no more. He refused to give it a political dimension as Quebeckers and Acadians had.

The Cajun French dialect is very distinct from Parisian French or even Quebec French. The influence of English is strong, not only in vocabulary, but in calques such as
laisser les bons temps rouler
(let the good times roll). In the same spirit, Cajuns call rednecks
cous rouges.
But aside from anglicisms, Cajun French has many peculiarities that make it beautiful. Cajuns preserved different archaisms than those found in Canadian French. They say
nic
for
nid
(nest),
amarrer
for
attacher
(to tie up),
avenant
for
gentil
(friendly), and gave their own spin to many other expressions. For
oncle
(uncle), French Canadians say
mononcle
(a construction similar to monsieur), but Cajuns trim it to
nonc
or
ti-nonc.
They also developed lively expressions of their own, including
lâche pas la patate
(literally, don’t drop the potato, meaning don’t give up). Cajuns call thier non-Cajun compatriots
les Améritchains.

However, the power of the French
norme
is such that Domengeaux, though far from being a brilliant literary figure, still looked down on the Cajun dialect and everything associated with it, including Cajun music. That’s why he imported teachers from France, Quebec and Belgium instead of trying to hire locally. The foreign teachers, who often had little teaching experience and even less knowledge of the local culture, openly criticized the Cajun dialect. This obviously sparked resentment among the grassroots Cajuns. After a century of oppression they needed support from other francophones, not criticism, and the situation actually increased their feeling of alienation.

According to the thesis developed by Shane K. Bernard, which our own interviews with CODOFIL support, things began to change in the early 1980s. After a number of studies showed that CODOFIL had achieved little in improving the situation of French, Domengeaux had an epiphany and realized that Cajun French was legitimate French. CODOFIL began hiring more local teachers. At about the same time, Domengeaux and other representatives of CODOFIL visited French immersion schools in Montreal, where they saw how children could be taught all subjects
in French.
Within a couple of months CODOFIL started testing immersion programs in Louisiana, and today there are roughly three thousand children in the program. The heading on CODOFIL’s press documents now reads “
Quoi c’est le Codofil?
” (“What’s Codofil?” in Cajun French; in standard French it would be “
Qu’est-ce que le Codofil?
”). It’s a strong statement of how Cajuns are cultivating their local variety of French.

Yet the results of CODOFIL’s work are still controversial. CODOFIL made French teaching a government priority. It played an active role in defending Cajun rights and promoting the region as a tourist destination. It also developed strong ties with France, Belgium and Quebec—CODOFIL was given the right to sign agreements with foreign governments on its own initiative. But through its early efforts to push standard French, CODOFIL actually built an identity crisis back into Cajun culture. When we met the poet David Cheramie, now the acting director of CODOFIL, he gave us a perfect illustration of this conflict. Cheramie’s parents were Cajuns, but Cheramie was raised in English and learned French as a second language, thanks to CODOFIL. He is now married to a Frenchwoman. “My neighbour has a boat and spends every minute of his spare time in the swamps hunting deer, squirrels and ducks and catching
barbues
[catfish]. He dances, and he knows everything about Cajun food. But he doesn’t speak a word of French. And then there’s me, who does none of this, who never hunts or fishes, but who speaks French. Who’s the real Cajun?”

Thanks to CODOFIL’s turnaround in the 1980s, most francophones of Louisiana are now convinced that music, grassroots and language are all linked. But linguistic identity remains an issue among them. They now draw a distinction between Cajuns who speak French, whom they call Cadiens, and those who don’t, called Cajun. Yet many Cajuns believe it’s too late to inject French back into the Cajun identity. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of Cajuns who declared themselves French-speaking fell from 250,000 to 200,000. Still, according to recent data, these numbers have stopped falling. So the future of French in Louisiana may be complicated, but it may not be as bleak as people believe. As the famous Cajun folklorist, poet and teacher Barry Ancelet put it, “Every time we’ve tried to close the coffin on the Cajuns, the body’s sprung up and called for a beer!”

Chapter 16 ~

The Francophonie

Jean-Benoît visited Monaco in April 1999, to attend a conference of the finance ministers of French-speaking countries. Between interviews he decided to slip in a visit to the Museum of Oceanography, so he hailed a cab. The driver, as it turned out, was one of the rare true-blue Monegasques. Monaco, a tiny principality of 1.5 square kilometres on the Mediterranean coast, has only five thousand natives. The other twenty-four thousand residents are foreigners who live comfortably off one Monaco’s three main industries: casinos, money laundering and tax shelters. As he chatted with the driver, Jean-Benoît failed to notice that his notepad had slipped out of his pocket, so when he returned to his hotel, he was surprised to see the concierge produce it. “
Vous êtes Québécois
?” asked the concierge. The taxi driver had brought the pad back to the hotel and simply told the concierge it belonged to a Quebecker. Jean-Benoît realized that with an accent like his, he hardly needed a passport.

There was a reason—aside from the beaches and the weather—why the French-speaking finance ministers had decided to meet in this glitzy fiscal paradise. Monaco is the smallest member of the Francophonie, a kind of French commonwealth of fifty-three countries. We have often used the word
francophonie
(small f) in this book in reference to those who speak French, regardless of their nationality. The other Francophonie (capital F) is an institution that brings together the various organizations, associations and media outlets that promote French and the development of French-speaking countries. Much as the U.N. is the flagship among the thousands of organizations that make up the system of international law, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (International Organization of the Francophonie) serves the same purpose for the organizations of the French-speaking world.

The Francophonie is often compared to the British Commonwealth, which started out in 1931 as a sort of informal club designed to maintain links between Britain and its former dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1949 the Commonwealth expanded to include the newly independent India (India refused to accept the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” so the British Parliament shortened the appellation). By 1957 the Commonwealth had been thoroughly restructured, with a permanent office and a budget, and it was ready to welcome former British colonies as they gained independence in the following years. It now has fifty-five member States and governments.

The Francophonie was slower getting off the ground than the Commonwealth, and didn’t take shape until late in the second half of the twentieth century. The original idea came from a Quebec journalist, Jean-Marc Léger, who in the early 1950s had played a key role in creating the Union internationale des journalistes de la presse de langue française (International Union of Journalists from the French-Language Press). At a meeting with the French minister of foreign affairs in 1953, Léger proposed creating a consortium of French-speaking states whose representatives would meet to network, exchange knowledge and develop policies together. Initially Léger’s proposal went nowhere, but he refused to give up. In 1954 he founded the short-lived Union culturelle française (French Cultural Union). In 1961 he created a network of francophone universities that still exists today: the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF). Meanwhile, in 1960 Léger’s idea started to take root and the education ministers of fifteen French-speaking countries decided to establish their own permanent assembly—the first of its kind in the French-speaking world.

At the time the word
francophonie
was not even in use. The French geographer Onésime Reclus had invented the term in 1887, in his book
France, Algérie, et les colonies,
to describe everyone who spoke French, irrespective of nationality. The idea of separating nationality and language was revolutionary at a time when geographers divided the world by race, ethnic type or religion. But the term was forgotten until 1962, when the intellectual journal
Esprit
published a special issue, “Français langue vivante” (“French, a living language”). A number of high-profile intellectuals—including Léopold Sédar Senghor—who contributed to the issue used the word. In fact, they called for the creation of a “francophone” organization exactly like the one Léger had proposed a decade earlier.

By 1965 many French-speaking African countries were keen to organize themselves as a group on the basis of shared language. They received strong support from the government of Quebec, which was just as anxious to start playing a role in international forums with other francophone “nations.” In 1966 the President of Niger, Hamani Diori, laid down in front of President de Gaulle the blueprint for a multilateral organization for the cooperation of French-speaking states.

While the British had been the driving force behind the Commonwealth, at the time the French showed no enthusiasm for a francophone organization. The wars of liberation in Indochina and Algeria had traumatized French diplomats, and they wanted to avoid getting involved in anything that sounded even remotely neocolonial. Jean-Marc Léger, now retired and living in Montreal, thought that France’s position at the time was wise—and still does. “They weren’t recreating the empire under another name. So it had to be very clear that other countries not only wanted it, but demanded it.” French diplomats were also not interested in multilateralism. Like any major power, France preferred dealing with other countries, especially weaker ones, on a one-to-one basis (an approach known in political jargon as “bilateral relations”). A multilateral agency that put everyone on an equal footing would reduce the power of its biggest members. Multilateralism was much more to the liking of a country like Canada, which had never aspired to be a great power.