I have just visited the brand new International City of the French Language in Villers-Cotterêts (Aisne), inaugurated on October 30 by Emmanuel Macron, and, frankly, it generally “disappointed me in a good way”, as our Swiss friends say. We could fear a dusty conservatory to the glory of the imperfect subjunctive and the hemistich caesura. It’s quite the opposite ! In this castle built by François I, long abandoned and superbly renovated, we have fun, we laugh, we play with our national idiom. And we discover ideas that are often bold and rarely disseminated to the general public. Let’s say it bluntly: the whole thing is both daring and successful. The only problem – but it is a big problem – is that the contested idea is once again being spread according to which the ordinance signed by François I in 1539 would have imposed the French alone in justice. I will come back to it.
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Let’s start with the positive, which dominates. The compliment goes in particular for the form, resolutely surprising, inventive and playful. Thanks to the knowledge of specialists in historical phonetics, we can hear, for example, the way in which… Joan of Arc, Madame de La Fayette or Alexandre Dumas spoke. Striking!!! (See, below, the “to listen” section.)
But it’s the substance that excites the most. The tone is set from the reception hall, topped by a glass roof decorated with words from the different registers of French: “camemberer”, “carabistouille”, “éloquence”, “kif-kif”, “poetry”, “synonym “, “tchatche” (but also, unfortunately, the stigmatizing “patois”)… Shall we discover the permanent exhibition? We are welcomed by The Mona Lisa parody of Marcel Duchamp, whose title, LHOOQ., reads “she’s hot in the ass”. This, we learn, is an allograph, in other words a “sequence of letters which, pronounced one after the other, produce the sound of a sentence with meaning”. Personally, I have already undergone razor-sharp grammar lessons!
Boldness again in the room dedicated to the entry of French into the Constitution, in 1992. Agreed exercise? Not at all because, in the same space, a large panel irreverently lists the… anglicisms fiercely promoted by the public authorities: from “Paris design district” to “fashion week”, including “French Touch”, “Oh my Lot”, “Just Dijon” or “Montpellier Unlimited” (I’m not making this up). We will still say that journalists have misplaced minds, but I would be curious to know the reaction in situ of Emmanuel Macron, tireless promoter of the “start-up nation” and the “culture pass”…
This museum, unlike any other, also has the merit of reminding us that French is in no way a “pure” language, contrary to a common cliché. “Avatar” (Sanskrit), “jewel” (Breton), “helmet” (Castilian), “cherub” (Hebrew), “liner” (English) or “robot” (Czech): so many words today at home and yet come from elsewhere. The movement is of course true in the other direction. “Gherkin”, “neckline”, “metro”, “lieutenant”, “toll” (we are not the world champions of taxes and duties for nothing) were exported to our neighbors. “French has always been in dialogue with other languages,” summarizes the main curator of the permanent course, Xavier North.
The role of colonial conquests
In Villers-Cotterêts, we also do not hesitate to evoke the less glamorous side of our national idiom. Because, if French is today one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it does not owe it only to the influence of the Enlightenment and the talent of our great writers. Like English, Spanish, Portuguese or Arabic, it was first of all through violence that it imposed itself, whether in the “empire”, with the colonial conquests, but also in mainland France, with the punishments inflicted by teachers on children “guilty” of speaking Alsatian or Basque.
If the Cité internationale de la langue française invites you to think, it generally does not take sides. Inclusive writing? Spelling reform? On most subjects, it simply describes the diversity of uses and lets the visitor form their own opinion. With one exception
As might have been feared, the permanent route in fact promotes the traditional vision of the Villers-Cotterêts ordinance, supposed to have “imposed French in justice”. However, this interpretation is today contested by the majority of specialists. The text, in fact, has a clear objective: that legal acts are now understood by everyone. And he in no way recommends replacing Latin with “French”, but with “language maternal françoys”. However, at that time, 80 to 90% of François I’s subjects spoke Provençal, Picard or Gascon!
Faced with this contradiction, those responsible opted for a radical sleight of hand. In the room dedicated to the ordinance, the word “maternal” was purely and simply “forgotten”. And for good measure, a cartridge maintains that, on the eve of the Revolution, “a large part of the population understood French”, which is an absolute untruth. In 1794, Abbé Grégoire’s famous report on “the means of annihilating the patois” indicated that, out of a population he estimated at 15 million, the number of those who spoke French “does not exceed 3 million “. 3 million out of 15: funny “big part”… Nor is it recalled that, before the victory of the sinister “annihilators” à la Gregory, a first revolution had taken shape in the translation of the new laws into the different languages spoken in the territory, so that everyone could understand them. They understood the fundamental difference between French as a common language, which poses no problem to anyone, and French as a single language, synonymous with cultural standardization.
A lack of space, no doubt…
Outraged, some Immortals denounce the vision of language promoted by Emmanuel Macron.
This is what the Minister of National Education declared on October 17, before the Cultural Affairs and Education Committee of the National Assembly. The minister, noting that this position “has not always been supported by his ministry”, cited in particular the example of Réunion, where “85% of students speak Creole at home” and where experiments have shown that the Kindergarten children educated in bilingual classes performed better in French than the others. Also the deputy of Réunion Frédéric Maillot (GDR-Nupes) asked the minister “to follow through on his convictions” and tabled a proposed law on the subject Tuesday October 24. More than two years later the generalization of the teaching of regional languages as an optional subjectthis new text intends to integrate them into the common core of school programs.
Senators adopted in committee on October 25 a bill aimed at “protecting the French language of the excesses of so-called inclusive writing”. The senator’s text The Republicans Pascale Gruny plans to ban this type of writing “in all cases where the legislator (and, possibly, the regulatory authority) requires a document in French”, such as instructions for use, employment contracts or other internal regulations of companies, but also legal acts. All these documents would then be considered inadmissible or void. The senators also spoke out in favor of banning grammatical words constituting neologisms such as “iel”, a contraction of “he” and “she”, or “celleux”, a contraction of “celles” and “those”.
The number of general and school dictionaries sold in one year increased from 1.6 million in 2004 to 568,000 in 2023, according to the GfK institute. A fall of 65%, which constitutes a real shock for the publishing sector.
Linguist Philippe Boula de Mareüil will present his astonishing work on language variations, following the migration route of common cranes, from Lorraine to the Basque Country, on Thursday, November 2, at 7 p.m., at the community media library of Sarreguemines (Moselle). ). An event presented as part of the Mir redde Platt festival.
Do you know what a “funeral” wine is? Could you clarify in which case it is possible to evoke a “jammy” aroma? Do you know the so-called “sexual confusion” method? This information, among hundreds of others, can be found in the formidable Dictionary of wine, beer and champagne, which the lexicographer Jean Pruvost has just written. To be enjoyed without moderation.
Dictionary of wine, beer and champagneby Jean Pruvost (ed. Honoré Champion).
France has said little about it, but September 16 was European Day of Languages. The Council of Europe, for its part, published a children’s book on this subject…
This is one of the many discoveries of the designers of the permanent route of the Cité internationale de la langue française. An inventive device makes it possible to hear the voices, real or reconstructed, of historical figures from the 9th to the 20th century. Listen here to that of François I reading… articles of the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, of course.
The Cité internationale de la langue française also offers short videos on the theme of travel words. From Norman “cuddle” to Italian “alert”, including “poppy”, “pajamas”, “tennis”… And many others.
“Villers-Cotterêts became very important in the construction of the French national novel and of all the mythology around the French language to justify the nation-state, French for all. But these were not the ideas of the monarchy, but those of the French Revolution.” In a few sentences, the YouTuber Linguisticae deconstructs the myth of Villers-Cotterêts in this video – even if, curiously, he takes up the idea that the ordinance would have imposed French in the justice system.
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