France: Parlons, Enfants de la Patrie!

“The French don’t care what they do, actually,” remarked Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins, “as long as they pronounce it properly.” The jest was of the blunt Anglo-Saxon variety, but it sums up the reverence that every cultivated Frenchman feels toward the language of Voltaire and Racine. Since the war, it has been a matter of grave concern that the international community no longer shares this high regard. Gone are the days when Tolstoy’s Russian aristocrats conversed and the Congress of Vienna convened—in French. Today France is waging a discreet campaign to reinstate—or, as one exhortation puts it, “maintain”—la langue française as an international tongue.

Galled Gauls. At first it was mainly a case of rear-guard fighting. Professors and newspaper columnists have long defended their language’s purity against such ugly expressions as le weekend and le drugstore. With the coming of the Fifth Republic, defense evolved into offense. Next year the Quai d’Orsay will spend $101 million (up 25% since 1964) for the propagation of French culture and language abroad. France pays for the distribution of French books and magazines, provides 13,000 university scholarships for foreign study in France, and supports 32,000 French teachers in former colonies from Algeria to Viet Nam. The government occasionally uses other tactics. In 1963, the Foreign Ministry tried to get West German schools to teach French as a second language—with small success.

What galls the Gauls, of course, is the recent triumph of English. Time was when French was the tongue of “international”—meaning Continental—diplomacy. The 20th century’s two world wars, however, helped shift international politics to a global arena, and the emergence since of dozens of independent powers in Asia and Africa has completed the process. French is still popular within the purlieus staked out by France’s masterful 17th century diplomat, Cardinal Richelieu; it is used in Common Market areas * and is popular among Eastern European emissaries.

But in the world at large, English is the language of some 300 million Britons, Canadians, Australians and Americans, and the international means of expression for 700 million present and former denizens of the Commonwealth. By comparison, French is native to only 65 million Belgians, French, Swiss and Luxembourgeois, besides being the second tongue for 140 million residents of present and former French and Belgiancolonies. In a recently concluded U.N. debate, 56 speakers addressed the General Assembly in English, 27 in French.

Language & Logic. Hélas, English is spoken by Russians, Germans, Japanese, Italians and Swedes alike at virtually every international scientific gathering, whether on space technology or information theory. Partly because so many of the major postwar breakthroughs have been made in American or British laboratories, 44% of all chemical abstracts are printed in English (v. 5% in French), as well as 68% of all physics abstracts (v. 7% in French). Paris officialdom deplores “this fetishism about English,” but no French scientist can avoid it. Though the quasi-official Académie des Sciences firmly suggests that all French scientists ought to parler français at international conferences (a requirement that often leaves them ad dressing rows of empty seats), the National Research Center’s eminent physicist, Professor Raymond Daudel, confessed recently that “I find it is often in English that I learn about the work of my colleagues of the Sorbonne—and the National Research Center.”

The official campaign to disseminate the glories of French, however, receives enthusiastic popular support. At the convocation of the 35th French Medical Conference in Paris last week, the opening address of Lucien de Gennes was not entirely about medicine at all; instead, the professor took the opportunity to proclaim that “French remains the language of the mind, of logic, of simplicity, of precision and of good sense.” Over at the National Assembly, Deputy Xavier Deniau meanwhile harrumphed about “French functionaries who unfortunately, after long service in international organizations, allow themselves to use English.” Said he: they should be brought back to France periodically for “re-acclimatizing.”

There are encouraging signs. This month Paris was enchanté when one Vatican diplomat who received his training around World War I chose to address the U.N. in a medium appropriate to his lofty goals. POPE WILL PRONOUNCE IN FRENCH A SOLEMN APPEAL FOR PEACE AND HUMAN DIGNITY, proudly headlined Le Figaro.

* Mostly. When France’s Pierre Messmer and West Germany’s Kai-Uwe von Hassel get to gether, however, the two defense ministers speak English, because neither knows the other’s tongue.