AND ANOTHER THING
A French cry for help to repel American verbal borders
PAUL JOHNSON
The latest sign of French official despair at the state of their language is a preposterous proposal from Maurice Druon, perpetual secretary of the Academie Frangaise, that the French and English should make common cause against the threat posed to them by Ameri- canisms, and that we should signify our new solidarity with the frogs by creating an English Academy. Monsieur Druon is a nice old boy and probably quite harmless but his proposal strikes me as cheek. Indeed, it reminds me of the plea from Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister in June 1940, that the British should fling all the resources of the RAF into the Battle of France, already manifestly lost, instead of reserving them for the Battle of Britain.
The cause of the French language as an instrument of state policy is a forlorn one. When Cardinal Richelieu instituted the Academie 361 years ago in 1634, he had a clear aim in view. Spoken and written French was still fairly chaotic, with few agreed grammatical rules and little unifor- mity of spelling. All that had to be clarified and ordered, and gradually it was done. Equally important — probably more important to his Eminence — was the fact that barely a majority of the inhabitants of what was then France, and less than half of those living within France's modern bor- ders, actually spoke French.
The aim of French policy was to Frenchi- fy all the area between the Pyrenees in the south, the Alps to the east, and the Rhine to the north-east. In Richelieu's day, and for long after, `the French' spoke a variety of tongues, and it was not until the second half of the 19th century that speaking French became the norm throughout the territory of metropolitan France. French failed to advance as far as the Rhine, and the battle for supremacy between French and Flemish in Belgium is still raging liable, indeed, to explode in violence any moment. The French eventually, after much bloodshed, won the battle against German in Alsace, but in the Saarland they finally lost it, quite recently. But on the whole I think it can be said that Richelieu's long-term demotic strategy succeeded.
Richelieu, however, did not foresee the threat from modern mass-communications, specially radio, pop, movies, television and magazines, which have allowed English not even a competitor in the 1630s — to carry out an airborne invasion of French. Ordinary speech is not merely demotic, it is democratic. It is an area where the masses decide and their decision is transmitted upwards, not the other way round. The Anglo-Saxon tongue beat French in Eng- land finally in the 14th century, though originally French had all the resources of the state and the ruling class behind it. Now Anglo-Saxon is moving, on the airwaves, across the Channel.
The Academie's efforts to fight the inva- sion are likely to prove counter-productive. In trying to curb popular trends, it has always lost every set-piece battle, usually demoralising its own supporters in the pro- cess. In the years 1815-30, for instance, it waged a full-scale campaign, under its fero- cious perpetual secretary, Louis-Simon Auger, on behalf of entrenched classicism in literature, against the advancing forces of Romanticism, led by the works of Byron, Scott, Goethe, Schiller et al. On 24 April 1824, Auger delivered a monumental speech at the Academie, accusing the for- eign romantics, and their fifth column in France, of subverting the laws of French lit- erature and dividing the national genius. Five years later, it was apparent to all that the Academies campaign had failed utter- ly, and Auger committed suicide in despair.
The French young are not going to take any notice of the Academie, whose absurd antics on behalf of `official' French are an embarrassment to French traditionalists who deplore the growth of Franglais. Last year, the Academie backed a vicious law which tried to use France's enormous pub- lic sector to punish the use of banned Anglo-Saxon words by huge fines. The French constitutional court ruled it unlaw- ful on the ground that it infringed the Dec- laration of the Rights of Man (1789). But
`So the salt's we Croatians, the pepper's the Serbs, the mustard's the Moslems, the sugar's the UN and what we really need now is the ketchup.'
the law would have been defied anyway. The French young are introducing English words even for common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs because they find them more expressive and exciting than the old French terms: they are new, modern, `in'. The only way the invasion can be repelled is by France producing great writ- ers who use the traditional tongue even more compellingly. No sign of that, howev- er: French literature is now crushed beneath the dead weight of state subsidies, the largest in the world.
We find no comparable threat from America. Many Americanisms are, in fact, attractive and are skilfully employed by the best young English writers, just as they seize on the many good Australianisms. World English literature and language is a system of mutual colonisation. We influ- ence America just as much as she influ- ences us. I lecture a lot to American audi- ences, commercial, political and academic, and, having taught myself to articulate in a way they can understand without effort — a lot of British speakers in America don't trouble to do this — I find them apprecia- tive. They often congratulate me on the `purity' of the way I speak and pronounce English. If anything, it is now the British who are colonising the American media, especially in its upper reaches.
As for Britain founding an academy on French lines, that would collapse at the first hurdle: choosing the `Forty Immortals'. Imagine what a hash John Major would make of it. Who would he appoint the first perpetual secretary — his friend Jeffrey Archer? The English have always opposed French-style cultural centralisation and state bullying. William Hogarth, who virtu- ally created the English school of painting, was even opposed to the foundation of the Royal Academy — and who can now say that he wasn't right? There is currently an attempt, by the modern art dictator and brickie-in-chief Nicholas Serota, to create a suspiciously froggy type of centralised empire controlling all the national muse- ums of art. I shall be writing about this shortly and I am quite certain it will eventu- ally be defeated by the English spirit. As for an English Academy of Letters, laying down the law about split infinitives and dressing up in uniforms with gold braid and swords and fancy hats, with a few token women and a statutory black — let us laugh that one off the stage.
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