Published in a slightly different and shorter version in The National Post, June 9, 2005, p. A-19.
In Defence of the French
by
Pierre Lemieux
Would the bible scapegoat ("confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat" – Lev 16:21) be able to carry all the sins of the children of France? Not sure.
A few days before the French electorate sensibly voted No the EU referendum, the Daily Telegraph reported on a survey of European opinion where the French are seen as "crazy drivers, strangers to customer service, obsessed by sex and food," and other such nice qualificatives. The blog fuckfrance.com jumped on the news like an obese American on a bag of chips.
I am going to defend the French. Not the French state, of course, although even it is now, in many ways, less intrusive, ID-mongering and monstrous than the American state. For example, it was not until a couple of years ago that the French government created a universal identifier number, similar to our social insurance number. But I concede that the French bureaucracy is not to be imitated. What I will defend is the French people and the French culture.
The French are naively statist, and reading Le Monde is like reading La Presse without the bad French. The French are more statist than, although not as naive as, today's Quebecers and Ontarians (who seem willing to re-elect the Liberals). However, French statism is tempered by a Latin disrespect for authority and by a knowledge of history that no French lycéen can (or could) escape.
Collectives like "the French," "the Quebecers," or "the Ontarians" are only rough and dangerous generalizations. But if we agree to play this collectivist game, the French aren't that disgusting.
The French love forms. In France, everyday politeness (you hear everywhere, "Bonjour, monsieur," "Pardon, madame") substitute for our lack of manners. I don't doubt that the French can be xenophobic and arrogant toward one who does not speak (or act) French, but what civilized person doesn't?
French is a most musical and beautiful language. (I am talking about French, not Quebecese.) French literature is, of course, on par with English literature. Guy de Maupassant needs only one sentence to describe the sun rising in the Alps. Through the pages of Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon Père – and in the beautiful film made by Yves Robert after the novel – you can smell the scents of Provence. And where else can one find poetry like Beaudelaire's, Hugo's, or Apollinaire's?
The anti-French see the French language as tightly controlled by the state, identified with the French Academy. This is at best misleading. Recent laws "protecting" the French language were actually copied from Quebec! Yet, the French language itself is quite impervious to state diktats. Just one example: in 1990, the French Academy approved the French government's recommendation that the term "portemonnaie" be spelled without a hyphen, as it had been in the past; now, a google.fr search brings up 3,590 pages for the new spelling, and 184,000 for the traditional one ("porte-monnaie").
Compared to their English counterparts, French authors do wield more influence on the language than the common people, which makes the French language more elitist and conservative. Because of this, French has been more resilient than English (or Quebecese) vis-à-vis political correctness – forbidden words, attenuated expressions, the feminization of language, etc. In 1998, the French government tried to feminize titles in public administration, which had been done in many English-speaking countries long before. The French Academy, which is made up of French authors, did not follow.
French has always been, and remains (for now), less politically correct than English. Just listen to poet/singer George Brassens! And don't forget that the damning survey about the French was conducted by two French authors and published in France (Pourquoi les Français sont les moins fréquentables de la planète, by Olivier Clodong and José-Manuel Lamarque).
Book publishing is less subsidized in France than in Canada. A few years before he was elected the chair of Eugène Ionesco at the French Academy in 1995, Marc Fumaroli published a famous book arguing against the "cultural state" (L'État culturel en France: Essai sur une religion moderne). He noted that, in the early 20th century, cultural and artistic production (as opposed to museums, libraries and education) was little subsidized in France, a happy situation that survived until a few decades ago. The tenants of the Bateau Lavoir, Braque and Picasso, were not subsidized. Nor were, in the 1950s and 1960s, playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, who created their plays in non-subsidized Paris theatres.
Of course, I will also defend French sex. Sensuousness is an essential part of the French culture, from French cuisine to French caryatids, who often look sexier than North American women in flesh and blood. A young Canadian woman living in France once remarked to me that French hotel rooms are conceived not for sleep or work, but for love.
The big problem with the French is what the non-French have been importing from them, that is, their bureaucratic statism and their economic ignorance rather than their love of forms, their critical spirit and their sensuousness. About the things we haven't imported, we could repeat Thomas Paine's sentence: "They order these things better in France."