Protecting French : The view From France. Chapitre 11

Résumé En

France's ideological position is clear, affirmed since the Age of the Enlightenment and strongly advanced by the Revolution of 1789. From a social contract perspective, the nation rests on the political willingness of individuals to live in a society from which flows a common cultural vision. The Revolution of 1789 imposed a unique citizenship, indifferent to distinctiveness and, consequently, to minority groups. The fight for the French language and French cultural values then allowed for the reproduction of the dominant ideology and asserted the legitimacy of the Republic as nation-state. But today, the two oft-brandished sections of the Constitution, section 1 ‛La France est une république indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale' [‛France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic'], and section 2, ‛La langue de la République est le français' [‛The language of the Republic is French'], are largely challenged by values that are considered as threatening, i.e. multiculturalism and multilinguism. We will see in this chapter how French is construed as an endangered language. The French language was constructed throughout the centuries around the unification of the state and territory. The discourse on language has contributed to the construction of the nation-state, and political authorities have always tried to maintain, until the 1990s, the values attributed to French in order to achieve national cohesion and international influence. Fears of seeing the language undermined and corrupted are not new. It is a matter of fighting against the heterogeneous forces perceived as threatening for the public space and for the construction of national order, forces that could run counter to power and the reproduction of the dominant elite. Today, however, the protection strategies used both inside and outside the territory are wearing out and numerous political crises and ideological tensions.