The Decline of French: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)
“As a language of commonplace daily use French had not played a significant role in Europe since the decline of the imperial aristocracies of the old regimes. Outside of France, only a few million Belgians, Luxemburgers and Swiss, together with pocket communities in the Italian Alps and the Spanish Pyrenees, used French as their native tongue—and many of them spoke it in dialect forms disparaged by the official guardians of the Académie Française. In strictly statistical terms, when compared to German—or Russian—French had long been on the European linguistic periphery.
But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites—and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French. Well into the middle years of the century, comparable assumptions were still widely made—if not quite so boldly articulated—in academies and embassies everywhere. The present author can vouch for both the necessity and the sufficiency of French as a medium of communication among students from Barcelona to Istanbul as recently as 1970.
Within thirty years all that had changed. By the year 2000, French had ceased to be a reliable medium of international communication even among élites. Only in the UK, Ireland and Romania was it the recommended choice for schoolchildren embarking on a first foreign language—everyone else learnt English. In some parts of former Habsburg Europe, French was no longer even the second foreign language offered in schools, having been displaced by German. ‘Francophonie’—the worldwide community of French speakers, most of them in former colonies—remained a linguistic player on the world stage; but the decline of French in its European home was beyond dispute and probably beyond retrieval as well.
Even at the European Commission in Brussels, where French had been the dominant official language in the Community’s early years and where native French speakers in the bureaucracy thus exercised a significant psychological and practical advantage, things had changed. It was not so much the accession of Britain itself that brought about the shift—the seconded civil servants from London were all fluent in French—as the arrival of Scandinavians, who were fluent in English; the expansion (thanks to German unification and the accession of Austria) of the German-speaking community, now shedding its post-war reticence; and the prospect of new members from the East. Despite the use of simultaneous translators (to cover the 420 possible language combinations of the 25-member Union), communication in one of the Union’s three core languages was indispensable for anyone wishing to exercise real influence on policy and its implementation. And French was now in the minority.
French authorities did not respond by switching to English in order to ensure their commercial and political effectiveness. Although more and more young French people studied English and traveled abroad in order to use it, the official position became decidedly defensive: no doubt in part because of the uncomfortable coincidence of the decline of French language usage with the diminution of the country’s international role—something the UK had been spared because Americans too spoke English.
The initial French response to intimations of linguistic diminution was to insist that others continue to speak their language: as President Georges Pompidou had put it early in the 1970s, ‘Should French ever cease to be the primary working language of Europe, then Europe itself would never be fully European’. However, it soon became clear that this was a lost cause and intellectuals and politicians opted instead for a siege mentality: if French were no longer spoken beyond the country’s borders, then at least it must have an exclusive monopoly within them. A petition signed in July 1992 by 250 prominent personalities—including the writers Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean Dutourd, Max Gallo and Philippe Sollers—demanded that the government require by law the exclusive use of French in conferences and meetings held on French soil, films made with French funding, etc. Otherwise, they warned, ‘les angloglottes’ will have us all speaking English ‘or rather, American’.
French governments of every political persuasion were all too happy to oblige, if only pour la forme. ‘A battle for French is indispensable’, declared the Socialist Minister Catherine Tasca. ‘In international organizations, in the sciences, and even on the walls of our cities’. Two years later a conservative culture minister, Jacques Toubon, took up the theme, rendering explicit what Tasca had left unstated: that the object of anxiety was not just the decline of French but also and above all the hegemony of English. It would be better if the French learned something else—anything else: ‘Why’, asked Toubon, ‘should our children learn an impoverished English—something they can anyway pick up at any age—when they should be acquiring a deeper appreciation of German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese or Russian?’ . . . but a younger generation reared on films, television shows, video games, internet sites and international pop music—and speaking a mobile French slang full of borrowed and adapted words and phrases—could not have cared less.
Legislation intended to oblige the French to speak French to one another was one thing—albeit honored largely in the breach. But the attempt to require foreign scholars, businessmen, think-tankers, lawyers, architects and everyone else to express themselves in French—or to understand it when spoken by others—anytime they gathered on French soil could only have one outcome: they would take their business and their ideas somewhere else. By the turn of the new century the truth had sunk in and most (though by no means all) French public figures and policy makers had resigned themselves to the harsh realities of twenty-first-century Europe. The new European élites, whoever they might be, did not and would not speak French: ‘Europe’ was no longer a French project.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)
