Though French people pay lip-service to the notion that le franglais must be stopped, if a dirigiste strategy is to work, French speakers must change their stripes, since the French readily admit that they are unwilling to do what they are told to do. In other words, resistance to franglais will come about if each French citizen not only pays lip-service to the official policy about it, but also exercises self-control in their consumption and exchange of such illegitimate linguistic commodities. But if speakers do not do this, the only recourse governments then have is to set up an Orwellian police-state such as existed during in the Nazi-occupied Alsace during World War II (when people speaking French in public were deported' to the interior of France, or worse.) It is not clear that any French citizen wants a linguistic police-state, which in any event would require a gendarme linguistique to shadow every French citizen eighteen hours a day, to make sure all utterances were grammatically acceptable; only E. Germany, with a StasiStasi is the abbreviation of the term Staatssicherheitsdienst or State Security Service. agent shadowing large numbers of its citizenry, ever achieved this level of control, and never in the linguistic realm. It would entail secret denunciations, electronic surveillance, perhaps deportations, re-education camps, and state terrorism, in short, all the trappings of a totalitarian state. No polity has ever managed to erect such a draconian language policy, and French citizens certainly do not wish to pay this price. Is there no way out of this conundrum?
Perhaps by now it is clear that it is not state dirigisme that works to control language, but other social forces; and that attempts by the center to totally control language are not going to succeed in eliminating regional languages, non-standard forms of French, or contraband linguistic products (French corrupted by franglais) any time soon. Other social forces may act to do this, but they will be social forces outside the control of the government, such as urbanization, computerization, the channel tunnel, the globalization of the economy (and the concomitant spread of the English language), perceptions about the cultural capital that standard language provides and so on. The creation of a more open European Union, if and when a unified currency goes into effect, may in fact have even more profound effects on the regional languages, and indeed on the French language.