The Story of French (55 page)

In fact, the Agence universitaire francophone is only the official face of a multi-pronged international network of two hundred thousand francophone scholars and at least as many researchers. Over the past few decades different French-speaking countries have solidified their relationships through this networking, again often completely bypassing France. The Canadian government funded the school of journalism at the University of Dakar, and for about fifteen years all Senegalese students in journalism—and many from other western African countries—went to Montreal, Quebec City or Jonquière for training periods of months, or even years. One of these graduates, Senegal’s star political reporter Abdou Latif Coulibayi (whom we discuss in chapter 14), started West Africa’s first private school of journalism, where he now trains 172 students from a dozen African countries.

While these intellectual networks were growing, francophone artists from different countries also started increasing their interactions. Now that Quebec performers, Arab singers, African writers and Belgian filmmakers have large audiences in other francophone societies and beyond, francophone festivals have multiplied in all fields—cinema, music, humour, visual arts and more—showcasing big acts and fostering new ones. These festivals play an important role in francophone culture: In a world dominated by the Anglo-American media and American entertainment, events such as the Festival of Francophone Film in Namur, Belgium; the Francofolies of La Rochelle, France; and the Panafrican Festival of Cinema in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, are powerful avenues for the promotion and development of entertainment in French. In TV, francophone programming used to be strictly national, with very little international exchange, but since the middle of the 1990s, French, Belgian and Quebec TV companies and channels have been buying each others’ concepts, a totally new phenomenon.

Though it is in many ways a world of its own, French literature is, in fact, a global literature. During our trip to Senegal we had the opportunity to sit in on a French class in a private Catholic school in downtown Dakar: the Institut Notre Dame. The school was a yellow stone open-air pavilion with an inner court shaded by baobab trees. When we arrived, the class of tenth-graders, mostly Muslim, were engrossed in analyzing an excerpt from Flaubert’s
Éducation sentimentale,
which is set in the turbulent decade of 1840s France. Just as we were about to deplore the fact that these African students were studying European literature, we noticed that the textbook the students were using was actually an anthology of francophone literature that included selections of poetry and prose, not only from African authors such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, but also from French-Canadian novelist Gabrielle Roy, among others. Evidently the latter has given many students a taste for snow. The teacher told us that his students now dream of going to university in Canada. Their other choice is Belgium. For students who aspire to leave Senegal, France is no longer the only, or the mandatory, first choice.

While cultural exchange is growing among the francophonie, so is business. Francophones are not preceded by their reputation in business, and even in France people have tended to think of French capitalism as an oxymoron. But that’s a mistake. Four of the richest members of the Francophonie are advanced industrial countries that play leading roles in critical industrial sectors, including the automobile industry, agribusiness and the energy sector. Stephen Jarislowski, a Germanborn financier who manages billions of dollars of pension funds from his Montreal office, is known in his field for his no-nonsense stance on everything from the new economy to corporate governance. When Jarislowski published his autobiography, he claimed, “The Francophonie is one of the most surprising things that happened.”

Business ideas do circulate in the French-speaking world, and again not necessarily just between France and its former colonies. In the late 1970s Franco-Ontarian businessman Paul Desmarais, who had built his fortune in transportation, began looking for a way to expand his empire into Europe. His search for a partner didn’t land him in Paris, but rather in the Belgian town of Charleroi, where he struck up a partnership with Belgian business tycoon Albert Frère. Desmarais’s New World savvy was evidently a good fit with Frère’s Old World wisdom. The two formed a holding company, Pargesa, which went on to buy substantial shares in the German multimedia empire Bertelsmann, which is active in fifty-eight countries, as well as in Total and Suez, respectively water and construction multinationals.

Business is business and francophone companies, always seeking ways to cut costs in a global environment, often look to other francophone countries for opportunities. Outsourcing call centres is an oft-quoted example of globalization, and a prime example of how globalization is happening in French. For several years now, following an American trend, French businesses have been outsourcing their call centres to francophone countries where labour is fluently francophone but less costly than in France. Their countries of choice: Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal and even Israel.

In some ways the French have been partly oblivious to this activity. Why? There are two reasons. First, the French relationship with the francophonie is paradoxical. On one hand, the French have grown remarkably tolerant of foreign accents, particularly in the seven years between when we went to France to study the French in 1999 and when we published this book in 2006. Back in 1999 we saw a documentary about Céline Dion on French TV in which her family and entourage were being interviewed. To our amazement her Québécois friends and family were subtitled (in French), because it was assumed that French viewers could not understand people speaking with a Quebec accent. Six years later, this is no longer considered necessary, nor is it required. Thanks mostly to the increasing distribution of Quebec music and films, the French have become familiar with the Quebec accent, not to mention various African accents. In the past fifteen years the development of African literature in France has also been remarkable.

At the same time, while the French are not ignorant of the francophonie, they are uneducated about it. Journalists rarely bother to make distinctions between the Francophonie (institutional) and the francophonie (linguistic and sociological). Articles on the topic in the French press are almost unintelligible because reporters, journalists and editors regularly confuse the two. In a country where journalists can nitpick for days about the exact significance of a word in their president’s speech, such lack of subtlety regarding the francophonie shows how far behind the French are in integrating the idea. The president of the Agence universitaire de la francophonie, Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, describes France as the “Wild West” of the francophonie—in other words, uncharted territory.

In defence of the French, some of their misgivings about the francophonie owes to the fact that (non-French) francophones play on language solidarity to gain entry to France as immigrants. During our travels to Africa many people commented bitterly that France was not as welcoming to immigrants as it used to be. In 1999, at the Monaco conference of ministers of the economy of the Francophonie, the question was raised with the French minister of economy and finance, Dominique Strauss-Khan, and his response was categorical: “Francophonie will not be about France admitting foreigners who speak French.” It’s hard to feel sympathetic to the French attitude, but the fact remains: Francophone countries’ attempts to use language to further their particular ends have not endeared the francophonie to the French public. This only reinforces the prejudice in France that the Francophonie is a front for post-colonialism.

There is another reason that France seems to be missing out on the activities of the francophonie. A sizeable portion of the French intelligentsia not only believe their language is losing its international role, but seem to believe that the fight was over before it even started. The result is that, in some ways, they are willingly turning themselves into a mental colony of the English-speaking world. There are signs of this defeatism everywhere. In Parisian legal circles, the new fad for 2005 was
les class actions.
The French press presented this as an “Anglo-Saxon concept,” ignoring the fact that Quebeckers have been pursuing
recours collectifs
in French for thirty years. In fact, Quebec long ago coined the vocabulary necessary to launch class-action suits in French in a civil code environment like France’s. Laurent Personne, cabinet director of the French Academy’s
secrétaire perpétuel,
told us that it was silly to speak of baseball terms in French, since this was obviously an American sport. It’s only silly if you don’t know that Quebeckers have been playing baseball in French for fifty years.

But French CEOs, entrepreneurs, scholars, researchers and diplomats often echo the belief that French is losing ground and that it has no future. Even when they don’t say a word, the actions of the French elite speak volumes. One of the most eloquent examples comes from a famous book series titled
Que sais-je?
(
What Do I Know?
), published by the Presses universitaires de France (University Presses of France). Created in 1941, this collection of about four thousand short handbooks provides the fundamentals on subjects ranging from mushrooms to thermodynamics. They have been translated into forty-three languages. In 2004 the publisher came out with a new book, titled
Investments.
The entire book was written in English, even though there is a perfectly good word in French for the same thing:
investissements.
In a communiqué the publisher explained: “The field is taught mostly in English today. We took the initiative because it answers a need and makes the collection more modern.” In a way the move was not surprising. Parisians who follow the stock market speak of
les traders
instead of
les courtiers.
France Telecom, France’s national telephone company, named its Internet service Wanadoo (“wanna do”). Other prime examples of this Paris pidgin are businesses with meaningless but distinctly English-flavoured company names such as Speed Rabbit Pizza and Leader Price (no one has yet been able to explain to us exactly what a speed rabbit is).

But the reasons for French defeatism go much deeper than a failure to plug into francophone culture beyond their borders. It would be an exaggeration to say that the French are the only French speakers who feel that their language is disappearing from the world, or the only ones who are contributing to the trend. We have identified about half a dozen reasons that may explain the lack of confidence in French among francophones from all countries.

The most obvious is simply that francophones have absorbed the idea that English is
the
language of science, business and diplomacy. In scientific circles, those who defend French are familiar with what is called the
dilemme des congrès
(conference dilemma): Delegates can either speak French and address a small group, or deliver in English and fill a big room. Given the options, many ambitious people choose English; the decision is justified on the grounds of “realism.” A second factor, which applies mostly to the French, is the dilution of nationalist sentiment. Given the wars it has caused, nationalism has bad press in Europe. In France only the far right indulges in the kind of flag-waving that would be considered a normal expression of patriotism in the U.S. Since language is an important feature of nation building, a fair chunk of the French elite has distanced itself from French as a political topic, even though, paradoxically, members of the elite tend to be language purists. In other words, for the French, speaking English in international forums and declining to defend French have to some extent become ways of showing that they are not succumbing to the sirens of nationalism and Gaullism.

A third cause that also applies mostly to the French is anglomania. The French are very down on France at present—they themselves call this a period of general
morosité
(gloom). They went through a similar phase in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they perceived all sorts of defects in their society and were seeking ways to remedy them. When this happens they look elsewhere for solutions, and right now they are looking to English-speaking societies. Record numbers of French people are going to Great Britain to work, and the ambient influence of English caused by this migration is probably one reason the French create so many faux-English terms. This anglomania is particularly strong in French business sectors. Even an emblematic company such as France Telecom produced a 2006–8 business plan with the title “Next.” In the document, written in French to its French clients, it announced a series of new services and products with English names, including Family Talk, LiveCom, Business Talk, LivePhone, LiveMusic, LiveZoom, Mobile & Connected, and Homezone.

To combat such abuses, in 1999 a group of four French associations for the defence of the French language created the Académie de la carpette anglaise (literally, the English Rug Academy, but the term
carpette
also means
doormat
). The academy gives an annual “award of civic indignity” to representatives of the French elite or institutions who distinguish themselves for their unremitting servility to English. Predictably, France Telecom won the 2005 award. Past laureates include the CEOs of Renault and Vivendi, a minister of national defence, the editor-in-chief of
Le Monde
and the head of France’s most prestigious business school, HEC. In all fairness, not all members of the French elite share this anglomania. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry made a first survey on the issue in 2002 to try to measure the phenomenon. In 2005 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s national library, proposed a European plan for a digital library to compete with Google. And since 2002, France has required the CIA to use French as the working language for the new liaison office, named Alliance base, it shares in Paris with the Délégation générale de la sécurité extérieure (the French version of the CIA).