War Of The Words: The Battle Over The French Language

Jousting over a new museum and the movement to make the language gender neutral.

la Cité internationale de la langue française

The French language is back in the news, though it is never far from it. The mother tongue of France is constantly under assault from threats foreign and domestic. The fight to preserve and purify it, and perhaps even restore a glimmer of its former glory on the global stage, remains as fierce as ever.

Last month, the French government filed complaints against the European Union for using English too much for job applicants, according to Politico:

Brussels is currently hiring new officials in fields such as space, defense and economics, using a selection process involving some tests that are only given in English. Paris contends that those criteria favor anglophone candidates over their rivals, and has filed two complaints before the EU’s top court; one of them was made public on Monday.

The linguistic legal sparring comes just as France took the wraps off la Cité internationale de la langue française, a new museum in the North of France dedicated to the French language. Now, other countries may have built museums to their languages, but I couldn’t find any. Some dude is trying to pull one off in the UK, but it doesn’t look like the idea has taken off. So, France stands alone. (If I’m wrong, scream at me in the comments.)

At the inauguration last month, President Macron gave a wide-ranging speech that covered the history of the €209 million (woof!) restoration of the Château de Villers-Cotterêts in the Aisne department that is now home to the museum. (Read his blabla all in French here, if you dare.) This shack was where François the First signed the edict in 1539 that made French the official language over Latin.

Château de Villers-Cotterêts

Decidedly not in attendance at the ceremony were the majority of stuffed shirts known as the L’Académie française, the institution created in 1635 to officially define and protect the French language. It’s an organization that frequently falls on the wrong side of the self-parody line, moaning about the French using English words and whatnot. The Academy is presided over by members who are humbly called “the Immortals,” and each one looks like they responded to a casting call for actors to play the most extreme caricatures of stuffy, conservative, and reactionary French elites and intellectuals.

Can you even imagine such a thing in the U.S.? Some 130-year-old pointy-headed snob sitting in a Washington DC office and telling people in Alabama that “y’all” wasn’t proper English? It just ain’t gonna happen.

Anyhoo, Academy members pretty much hate everything about the modern world, including now the whole language museum thing, which is 100% on-brand for them. The first salvo was launched by author Jean-Marie Rouart, 80, who began publishing in 1974 and barfed out a book a year until 2009. Rouart wrote a column in the conservative Le Figaro newspaper in which he denounced Macron for committing treason against the French language.

"You have to look far into the history of France to find a political leader who has done so much harm to it,” Rouart wrote. “A failure all the more surprising given that this mission was self-evident. Isn't it dizzying to have accessed the supreme office of a country which has the fabulous originality of having been built by its writers and whose language has always been the admiration of people and intellectual elites around the world?”

What’s his beef? Rouart said the mission of the museum is unclear. And worse, because it acknowledges and accepts the idea of the French language being spoken and evolving in other countries, and therefore condones absorbing non-French words, he accuses it of not stopping “the gangrene of Franglais but instead encouraging it.” He also finds Macron guilty of using…gasp!… English at times in official settings, such as when he organized the “One Planet Summit” in Paris or proclaimed that he wanted to “Make our planet great again”* or held the “Choose France” business summit at Versailles or said he wanted to make France “une start-up nation.” (*This was a missed branding opportunity because if Macron had just said “Make Earth Great Again,” then it would be “MEGA” and he could have sold t-shirts and hats with that logo: MEGA vs MAGA. Oh well).

Rouart called Macron the “tartuffe de la langue française.” The word tartuffe can mean imposter or hypocrite, but it is also the name of a play by Moliere. So Rouart is dunking on Macron while trying to show off his big brain.

This call to arms was soon joined by other humorless academy members who whined that protecting the French language is supposed to be their turf, and they don’t like the Prez walking on their lawn. As one anonymous member told a French newspaper, “He will have done more harm to the French language in two 5-year terms than his predecessors did in sixty years!”

Macron, no stranger to showing off his big brain, made more historical citations in his museum speech than you’d find in the average PhD dissertation. At the inauguration, he acknowledged the elitist hullabaloo, even mentioning tartuffe and Molière and noted that there is “sulking at the Academy.” To the Immortals, he said, “Suck it,” though in French and with much more nuance.

“Language has always been a controversial subject, and that there are heated debates about the French language is a sign of good health,” he insisted. “Few countries have such heated debates over their language.” Um, yes, there is a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure, but perhaps not the one Macron thinks.

Macron insisted that the French language remains central to maintaining the French cultural identity. Indeed, forcing the disparate tribes of the regions outside of Paris to speak French over the centuries rather than their local barbaric tongues was crucial to forging the identity and concept of a French nation.

“The French language builds the unity of the nation because the French language is a language of freedom and universalism,” Macron said. “And these two reasons, in the moment we live in, are enough to justify the importance of this project and the moment we share. Our unity first, at a time when divisions are returning, when hatred is resurfacing…the French language is a glue. It explains our relationship to both the nation and the Republic.”

During his 2017 campaign, Macron became known (and was mocked) for using the expression en même temps (at the same time). As he tried to carve out a centralist image, he would try to reconcile various seemingly contradictory policies by saying en même temps. Like, I’m going to blow up a building en même temps I am going to build new buildings. We are going to reform labor laws to make it easier for French employers to fire your lazy ass en même temps we will increase training and the social safety net.

At the museum inauguration, he totally en même temps-ed the French language (though he did not utter the phrase). While embracing tradition and the language’s conservative history, Macron also said the language should be a symbol of diversity by accepting the variety of accents and new words. He said it can exist comfortably alongside the 72 regional languages in France. (cue conservatives losing their minds!)

But the Prez did throw the rightwingers a verbal bone by rejecting the movement known as Écriture Inclusive.

What is Écriture Inclusive? I’m so glad you asked…

I’m Okay, You’re Okay

Macron has been getting hammered by conservatives since his first presidential campaign in 2017 for sprinkling in English words, or even at times giving entire speeches in English.

Amid this backlash, a radical proposal dubbed Écriture Inclusive was gaining momentum. This idea dared to rethink one of the core principles of the French language: gender. Écriture Inclusive calls out the French language for being inherently sexist because it favors masculine usage. Proponents have outlined a complex, if awkward, remedy that its adherents argue is essential for correcting the subtle ways the French language creates stereotypes that are biased toward men over women.