Much as I love France – the culture, the people, the landmarks, the atmosphere, the scenery, the music – I have to confess that I’ve never taken much interest in its history. It just doesn’t interest me, for some reason, even half as much as the history of many more obscure countries. And to be honest, I don’t really know all that much about it, to my shame.
My number one favourite thing about France is (and has always been) its language. I love the accent, and I love the sexy, smooth, soft sounds of the words. I studied French from age 11, right the way through until the end of my first year at university, when I was about 19 or 20. At that time, I was practically fluent, thanks mainly to ‘Skippy’, my serious and very strict GCSE/A-Level teacher, whose constant pushing and drive for perfection turned out to be a good thing despite my moans and groans to the contrary when I was translating long, difficult passages and conjugating twenty new verbs per day. Secretly, I loved it. It was such a pleasure to be able to put my hard work into practice, and chatter away in another language, or read a book in it. It is a beautiful language, and I’m sad that I’ve let my knowledge of it fade away.
I was recently very surprised to discover that at that the time of the French Revolution, the French didn’t actually speak French. I’ve had to go and read up on this, because it seemed somewhat odd to me. Didn’t Richelieu set up the Académie française over a century prior to the Revolution?! This was a very official body that was put together in order to preserve the French language and protect it from the horror of anglicanisation. I distinctly recalled writing an essay discussing this for an A-Level History exam, by the way, which is how I know all this. It’s not that I am a learned authority on the subject, in case I appear to be trying to give that impression and someone attempts to catch me out.
Anyway, I have now looked into the matter and discovered that French was very much the “educated” language throughout the 17th and 18th centuries – which basically means that hardly anyone outside of the main cities could speak it, let alone read or write it. France was full of dialects, and at the time Richelieu set up the Académie in 1634 there were serious concerns that “proper” French would gradually die out. The Académie’s purpose, therefore, was to strive for the purification and preservation of the language. It still exists today, and presumably still has to work quite hard given the constant introduction of English words. The French vocabulary is surprisingly small when compared with English, and, put quite simply, French speakers often don’t have the right word! So they “borrow” the appropriate English word, hence the curious “franglais” that you’re likely to hear if you spend enough time in the company of French people.
So, it seems that in 1789, the Académie fouded by Richelieu had been fighting a long, difficult battle for 155 years, as although the French language was still alive, it wasn’t spoken at all by around half of the population of France! Worse still, only 12 or 13% of the nation spoke it fluently and in a way that would have met the Académie’s standards. Mind you, after an increasingly exasperating decade or so in the lol-land of the UK, where it is apparently acceptable to use txtspk and call it “proper” English, I can see how easily such a situation could come about. Apparently, French was never spoken outside of cities – and even there, it wasn’t unusual to find that people in the suburbs didn’t speak it.
And so, until very recently, the French did not speak French. I think this is fascinating – much more so than battles and wars and politics and suchlike, at any rate. It was only really in the 19th century that France became more united as a nation, leading to the need for a common language, and thus consolidating the use of French. Or perhaps it was the other way around, I can’t quite get it straight in my head. Feel free to explain it to me. In any case, In the century or so after the Revolution, there gradually emerged a clearer concept of a united nation, a French citizen, and a common language.
So now the French do, in fact, speak French. I like it when things all come together in the end.
