The Story of French (53 page)

However, although France looks to Quebec for terminology suggestions, Quebec’s terms don’t always go over well with the French. In the late 1990s the French Academy refused the term
courriel
for about five years, on the grounds that it was just a regionalism. It preferred the homegrown
mél
(a contraction of
message électronique
), even though the French terminology commissions had proposed
mél
only as a written short form for business cards, like
Tél
for phone number. The Academy finally endorsed
courriel
in 2004, but is still holding out against
pourriel
and
clavardage.

Why do French institutions balk at Quebec expressions? There is more to it than plain old snobbery. For one thing, the French have a serious hang-up about neologisms (which we discuss in chapters 8 and 17). They will accept a neologism only if they are certain that there isn’t an existing word that will do. Beyond that, this obsession is hard to explain. The French have a special category of words they call
les mots mal faits
(poorly made words), which basically describes anything they don’t like. With this circular, and circuitous, reasoning, they accepted
bogue
(computer bug) but not
blogue
(blog), for which they prefer
bloc-notes
(notepad). This latter choice was made despite the fact that the term
bloc-note
means something entirely different and is difficult to turn into verbs and nouns, unlike
blogue,
which has already produced
bloguer
(to blog) and
blogueur
(blogger).

Still, Quebec remains influential in the field of terminology in France and throughout the francophone world. Most francophone countries look to Quebec as an inspiration, including Belgian and Swiss francophones, even though these original domains of French have little to boast of when it comes to defending French against English. Language planning in Belgium and Switzerland is primarily designed to protect French from other national languages, and vice versa. Francophones in Africa and elsewhere also look up to Quebec and tend to be hard on the French for lacking a coherent response to English. Yet they too have little to show in terms of language policies. Of course, this is more understandable in the case of developing countries. For nations whose native languages are in competition with French and whose school systems are failing, the issue of defending French against English is secondary, as indeed it should be.

Though the French might be considered soft on language protection, they do set the standards in terms of cultural policy among francophones and, arguably, in the world. And this has obvious benefits for the French language. Again, though, francophone societies are not the only ones with cultural policies. Because the entertainment industry can translate into billions of dollars everywhere, most advanced countries have clear cultural policies—clearer, in fact, than their language policies—partly because it’s easier to put a price tag on culture and entertainment than on language. Even the United States, the only developed nation without a ministry of culture, applies cultural policies. The National Endowment for the Arts spends tens of billions of dollars every year subsidizing museums, artists and other creative people. Many states have their own film policies, and support for the arts is generally ensured by generous tax credits.

Yet France, followed by Canada and Quebec, is regarded as extremely innovative in the cultural policy field. Since François I the French government has been a very active player in the development of culture, as both patron and promoter of the arts. Its policies became more protectionist with the development of the mass media, starting with cinema. In France, the first modern cultural policy was developed to protect national film production in the wake of the First World War, when the war effort had nearly destroyed France’s lively film industry, along with most of Europe’s. The American film industry had reacted by flooding Europe with cheap silent movies such as Charlie Chaplin comedies. Europeans reacted in turn by slapping quotas on American film productions. The French cinema industry benefited greatly and produced many original filmmakers. Even while France was occupied during the Second World War, its film industry enjoyed a second golden age.

But the Americans didn’t give up. After the Second World War, major American producers organized into a powerful lobby, the Motion Picture Association of America, and lobbied the American government to wipe out the quotas. The opportunity popped up when the French asked the U.S. for financial aid for postwar reconstruction. American diplomats responded by demanding what amounted to a reverse quota: At least thirty percent of screen time had to be allotted to American films. With their backs to the wall, the French, like every other country in Europe, had no choice but to accept. They immediately regretted their decision and spent the next decade developing other means to encourage national film production. In 1947, with the creation of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), Europe managed to get the film industry excluded from trade talks. Over the years they managed to do the same thing with the TV industry.

From then on the French got more creative at finding ways to protect their national film industry. One of their best measures is an eleven percent tax applied to all movie tickets; the money is redistributed only to national producers. Other European countries maintained a laissez-faire approach to the question. The result is that France’s film production amounts to twenty-five to fifty percent of overall screen time in France (depending on the year), while national cinema in Britain, Germany and even Italy has virtually vanished. (So it is no wonder that half of the non-English films seen in the United States are French. In all, foreign films amount to only two percent of the U.S. market. Quality or lack of interest from the public is often an issue, but the fact that Hollywood controls distribution is not unrelated to these difficulties.)

In 1994 the French introduced quotas for francophone content on radio, following the same logic they had applied for films. By and large this was the work of a French senator, Michel Pelchat, whom we met at the restaurant of the French Senate, in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. As Pelchat told us, “In the early nineties, French broadcasters saw French music as corny. The new radio stations had names like Skyrock and FUN.” In 1994 he proposed forcing French radio stations to play fifty percent francophone content. The senator received strong endorsement from creative artists and from the head of Virgin France and the former president of Warner France—unlikely allies. As it turned out, the French branches of major U.S. music companies wanted to do more than make millions by selling American pop music; they could make millions
and
develop francophone talent. Even though broadcasters and the Anglo-American press vociferously opposed the measures, Pelchat’s bill was adopted by unanimous votes of the Senate and the National Assembly, with a minor modification: The quota of francophone music would be forty percent rather than fifty percent.

In the end, the radio quotas worked to everyone’s advantage. The broadcasters’ fear of losing their audience proved to be unfounded. The law was also a great boost to the careers of some (now) famous Quebec singers. Céline Dion, for example, was making her re-entry into the French market that very year with a new French repertoire. With her powerful American singing style she was perceived as a welcome change from the usual treacle-voiced French pop singers and (sometimes) corny old-fashioned
chansonniers.
Senegalese rapper MC Solaar’s career began to take off around the same time. Today about sixty percent of record sales in France are of francophone musicians. And the top-selling exports of the French music industry are now francophone, not just French, musicians. Aside from English, no other European language has matched the success of francophone music on the French market and abroad. When the law was reviewed in 1999, even more French branches of international music companies gave it their support.

Canada and Quebec didn’t figure out that cultural policy should not be left to the private sector until the 1960s, although since then they have become innovative policy makers and outspoken defenders of the principle along with France. The Canadian market is small, but both governments learned that to have their own homegrown cultural products, they needed a toolkit of subsidies, quotas and special laws for the production of magazines, books, music, TV and film.

In Quebec the government worked actively to resurrect its music industry, starting in the early 1980s. In those years Quebec singers could not find a record company because the international record companies had all closed their Quebec offices in a wave of consolidation. The government reacted by creating venture capital funds and special subsidies to develop homegrown music labels. They even created their own music award, the Félix—named after poet Félix Leclerc. In the 1990s Quebec began developing export programs, so when the French radio market opened up in the middle of the decade, Quebeckers were ready to deliver. Since then Quebec has adopted that approach for the book industry, film production and dubbing.

Although Quebec cultural policy is often aimed at defending local turf against American entertainment, the United States is not the only threat. Quebec’s policies are directed just as much towards France. Quebec’s tax credits for dubbing are aimed specifically at encouraging American film producers to dub their films in Quebec rather than in France. In 1981 the Quebec government developed a policy that forced Quebec libraries to buy books through Quebec booksellers. (The French may welcome Quebec singers with open arms, but the French public trusts only French publishers. In 2004 Quebec sold more books at the Guadalajara Book Fair than at the Salon du livre de Paris.)

In Canada, since the early 1970s, francophone radio and TV have been subject to French content quotas of sixty-five percent and fifty percent respectively. Pelchat’s law in France was strongly influenced by Canadian practices and by the active Quebec record industry lobby, which saw a market opportunity. In all, Canada spends no less than three billion dollars a year on culture, and Quebec another six hundred million. These efforts have paid off. The Quebec music industry controls twenty-five percent of its home market, and the book industry forty percent. In film, Canada’s performance—five percent of the home market—has more than doubled because Quebec expanded its homegrown film industry from about two percent of the market, ten years ago, to nearly twenty percent in 2005.

To everyone’s surprise, Quebec is the only province that is now a net
exporter
of cultural products, with a surplus of 345 million dollars in 2003. (Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, is a net importer of culture, to the tune of two billion dollars a year.) Quebec’s success in exporting is the result of systematic efforts to build a solid local base. In the past five years, local film productions have even begun to regularly out-sell Hollywood blockbusters at the box office. One reason is that Quebec films are getting better. The other is that the Quebec government has got smarter at distributing subsidies to the film industry. Its motivation is still basically the same: Quebec knows that if it doesn’t make its own cultural products, someone else will, and they will inevitably be imports.

In the rest of the francophonie, Quebec is seen more and more as a model for cultural policy as well as for language protection. As Pierre Ansay, consul for the Communauté française de Belgique (Francophone Community of Belgium) in Montreal, said, “Quebeckers have managed to create their own star system, not just in TV but in literature. In Quebec, authors don’t necessarily have to win Paris awards like the Goncourt, the Femina or the Renaudot to be considered great.” By comparison, Belgian authors do have to win one of the six big literary prizes in Paris to be considered great, and they are eligible only if they are published by a Paris publisher. The Belgians, who have to live in the shadow of France, have oriented much of their cultural production towards niche sectors that the French don’t cover well, such as documentary film-making, detective literature and comic books, where they excel.

The cultural policies of Quebec, Canada and France are in turn inspiring non-francophone countries to develop cultural policies. Turkey, for instance, applies France’s ticket tax system at the box office. France inspired South Korea to reserve forty percent of cinema scheduling for local films. The level of national production jumped from thirteen percent to fifty-one percent of the market in just fifteen years, and South Korea now sends films to the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Ministers and heads of state often visit the offices of Quebec’s Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (Society for the Development of Cultural Enterprises, or SODEC). As SODEC’s in-house economist, Marc Ménard, explains, “There is money in culture. Many Third World countries used to think that they could not afford a ministry of culture. Now they realize that they cannot afford
not
to have one. Culture might be their best chance for homegrown development.”

France and Canada, with the strong support of Quebec, Belgium and the Francophonie, are now taking cultural protection to the next level and attempting to translate it into international law. Since the beginning of the 1990s trade law has become so important that the rights of states to develop cultural protection policies have been challenged more and more. The American government and the World Trade Organization regard cultural protection measures as policies that obstruct market forces and prevent the free flow of goods and entertainment products.

To counter this position, French-speaking countries managed to get UNESCO to adopt the oddly named Convention on Cultural Diversity in October 2005. For most of the 1990s cultural diversity was referred to as
l’exception culturelle
(cultural exception), a concept that the French conceived in the final stretch of negotiations at the Uruguay Round of GATT talks in 1993. The Francophonie had given its support to the concept during the Mauritius summit of heads of state the same year. The idea of
l’exception culturelle
quickly gained currency in francophone circles, but very little notice outside of them at first. Even Canadian diplomats regarded it as nothing more than a whim of the Francophonie that didn’t apply to them—a country that was mostly English-speaking, a member of the Commonwealth and a close friend of the United States. Canadians thought that the few clauses referring to culture in the WTO and NAFTA treaties were sufficient to protect Canada’s cultural policy. Their perspective shifted overnight in 1996, when the United States attacked Canada’s measures to protect its magazine industry against American publications. Canada took the issue to the WTO, and the WTO ruled in favour of the United States. English-speaking Canadian diplomats woke up and realized that
l’exception culturelle
was not just a francophone contraption, and France gained its biggest ally in defence of the principle. The Canadians even convinced the French to drop the term
exception culturelle
(which generally irks free traders) and use the more inclusive “cultural diversity” instead.