French Language Policy: Centrism, Orwellian dirigisme,

French Language Policy: Centrism, Orwellian dirigisme,

or Economic Determinism?

Harold F. Schiffman

Dept. of South Asian Regional Studies

University of Pennsylvania

October 20, 2000

To students of language policy, France has what can be considered to be the most centrist of centrist language policies in the world.¹ The idea that centrism can be effective as a language policy rests upon some notions, however, that need to be examined. Centrism means of course that decisions are made at the center, i.e. the center of power in the polity, and as far as France is concerned, the center/periphery dichotomy is perfectly represented by the language situation: at the geographic center of the hexagon is the French language, while at the periphery---Bretagne, le Midi, Corsica, Alsace---there is almost no region where French is native. The history of France is the history of the spread of French (le francien) out from the Ile de France into these marginal territories. This can be seen quite clearly in Figure 1.

Dirigisme is defined in my dictionary as the attempt to direct and control things from one central place, in particular to centrally direct and control a nation's economy. That is, dirigisme is economic centrism. Though France was never part of the Soviet bloc, the idea of central planning of the economy involved strong state intervention in economic and financial affairs, going so far as to construct and attempt to carry out five-year plans, to move and relocate industry around the country, and do other kinds of things that are more typical of the Soviet economic model than, e.g., the American one. The idea that language could be controlled in this same way, by central decision-making, has been around in France for a long time, dating to the promulgation of the Ordonnance de Viller-Cotterêts in 1539. The French Revolution gave us other kinds of intervention on behalf of language, such as measures to annihilate the idiomes, patois, jargons and other kinds of non-standard French, deemed counterrevolutionary or even worse. The decrees and ordonnances of the Revolution appropriated and perpetuated the monarchic view that language could be controlled from the center, and it the view that central control of language was just possibly undemocratic (as it would be seen, e.g., in Anglo-Saxon countries) has never been part of French language policy.

1 Goal of this paper

It is one thing to think of decisions being made at the center that affect French banking, or agriculture, or the railroad system but when the matter is a linguistic one, one must ask oneself whether any government can realistically expect to control the linguistic habits of its citizenry in any meaningful way. Though the term dirigisme is used by no-one in France to refer to its linguistic policies, the parallels between economic dirigisme and what I will call linguistic dirigisme (or dirigisme linguistique) are striking. Using his own system of analysis that looks at most social interaction as a set of economic exchanges, Bourdieu (1982) has placed the economic language model at center stage, so my plan here is to examine both the historical attempts to control language overtly from the center in France, and the more subtle system of controls that Bourdieu delineates.

My overall goal is to show how my own notion (Schiffman 1996), namely, that language policy is embedded in and proceeds from what I call linguistic culture², is a larger framework through which to view the role of dirigisme linguistique, which I see as an unquestioned assumption³ of French language policy and the culture in which that policy is embedded.

2 Review of the Literature

French language policy, broadly speaking, has been studied by Ager 1990; Bédard and Maurais 1983; Breton 1999; Catach 1991; de Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1975; Flaitz 1988; Gordon 1978; Guilhaumou 1989; Hell 1986; Lévy 1929; Philipps 1975, 1978, 1982; Schiffman 1996; Tabouret-Keller and Luckel, 1981; and Vermes and Boutet 1987. It seems clear to me that many writers about French language policy impute results and outcomes of the policy to the strong overt language policy direction that the French state supposedly exerts; as I and others have shown, however, until recently, France actually lacked the explicit directives on language that many thought it possessed, but because they and the French public at large (Catach 1991) believe a myth about these directives and their explicitness, the French tend to submit to policies they believe to be in effect, when they were not in fact part of French law.

As for Bourdieu's thinking about language and language policy, we can discern also a dirigiste view, but with different effects. His ideas on this topic, expressed most cogently in his 1982 work (Ce que parler veut dire) throw a different light on this issue; but though he takes a `marketplace' approach and sees language as a commodity with symbolic value that is exchanged for value in a larger marketplace of symbolic values, I will try to show that there are aspects of his analysis that could only be true for a polity like France, where the centralized control of 'cultural products' (as he puts it) and the creation of a 'unified market' in 'linguistic products' have, in his view, made the explicit language policy work. That is, because of economic determinism and the desire to participate and attain upward mobility in this marketplace, French citizens accept standard language as part of the cultural capital that increases their personal worth, resulting in behavior that appears to be controlled by the central authority. But Bourdieu specifically denies the power of the state to make people speak a certain way, imputing the power of this policy instead to much more subtle pressures of social structure.

We will examine his ideas in more detail below; first, I would like to look at the historical background of dirigisme linguistique.

3 Dirigisme and Jacobinisme

Though the French do not use the term dirigisme for all examples of the central controlling of much of French material life, they do have a term for this tendency, namely, Jacobinisme. This term has its origin in one of the revolutionary factions that had various names ('Friends of the Constitution,' or 'Friends of Liberty and Equality',) that met in a former Dominican convent in Paris, the Dominicans being known locally as Jacobins. The popular term Club des jacobins was then applied to this faction, which, though not originally pro-republican, gradually became more and more radically revolutionary, losing its more conservative or moderate members after 1792 and the elimination of the monarchy, and in fact becoming, through its dominance of the Committee of Public Safety, and its association with Maximilien de Robespierre, chief architect of the 'Reign of Terror', emblematic of revolutionary excess and of arrogation of central control through state-sponsored violence and terrorism. After the fall of Robespierre (9 Thermidor, an II, or July 27, 1794), the Jacobins were temporarily, and then eventually permanently, banned. Jacobinism, however, whatever its name, still seems to remain a feature of French political life, and some features of it, such as attempts to control language (an enduring project of the French Revolution), persist to this day. Breton (1999) has pointed out that though jacobinisme began as a broad centrist approach to governance, it has become over time more narrowly focused on defending the French state against any attempt to recognize regionalism of any sort, such as regional identities, regional languages, or any kind of federalism. Indeed, federalism has been seen from the earliest days of the revolution as counter-revolutionary, as a kind of pseudofeudalism, as an evil to be resisted at all costs. Early on in the revolution federalism was equated with other enemies such as foreign interventionism, clericalism, superstition, monarchism, and the goal of maintaining the term federalist as a kind of bugaboo has remained a primary one to this day. The pronouncements of the former Abbé Grégoire, of Barère, and of other jacobins against the evils and deficiencies of regional languages, equating them with superstitution, clericalism, and counter-revolutionism, are well known.[3]

As I have tried to show (Schiffman 1996), the French Revolution adopted a policy on language that was very different from the kind of policy that other democratic nations see as appropriate. I am not the first to notice that the outcome of the American and the Soviet revolutions were to either disengage government from control of language (i.e. establish in the US a kind of laissez-faire language policy), or to empower previously unempowered linguistic groups (such as in the Soviet Union), whereas in the French revolution, as is well known, languages other than French were disenfranchised, and were treated as counterrevolutionary activities.⁴ In fact, Brunot, in his monumental history of the French language, declares the chief linguistic accomplishment of the French Revolution to be the firm establishment of the Monarchic language policy, rather than the elimination of it, as everything else associated with the monarchy was eliminated.⁵ That monarchic policy was dirigiste, centrist, authoritarian, controlling, and after the fall of the monarchy, more inflexible than before. As in other things, it involved the notion of divine right⁶, and as we can see from almost any discussion of French language policy, a similar notion pervades the topic to this day.⁷

3.1 Who Controls what?

One solution to the language control problem is to control that which can be controlled, i.e., the written language, and this is of course what many polities, including France, have fallen back on. The French sociologist Bourdieu has written extensively about how language, especially language in France, has come to occupy a place where not only is language controlled, language controls. His view of language and culture is that they constitute a system of exchanges, operating in a sort of linguistic market, and by constituting a unified market-place where only one kind of language is permissible, no French citizen can escape the system.

Bourdieu's point of view, as far as official language in France is concerned, converges, in certain ways, with mine, so my thesis, that linguistic dirigisme is related to economic dirigisme is not so far-fetched. Bourdieu is at great pains to point out that though centralism is indeed a characteristic of the habitus of the country, it is not through decrees and ordinances that the state controls language.

“The official language is linked with the State. And that is true both in its genesis and in its social usage. It is in the process of state constitution that the conditions that constitute the unified linguistic marketplace are created and dominated by the official language: obligatory at official occasions and in official spaces (the school, public administration, political institutions, etc.), this State Language becomes the theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are measured objectively. No-one is able to ignore the linguistic law, which has its body of judges, the grammarians, and its agents of imposition and control, the teachers, who are invested with the power to make their speaking subjects submit their linguistic performance without exception to examinations and juridical sanctions of the scholastic kind.”¹² (Bourdieu 1982:27)

But, he goes on to note,

“For one mode of expression among others … to impose itself as the only legitimate one, the linguistic market must be unified and different dialects (class, regional, or ethnic) must be measured against the standards of the language or by legitimate usage. Integration into one single ‘linguistic community’ … is the [necessary] condition for the establishment of the state of linguistic domination.” (Bourdieu op.cit. p. 28.)

“Until the French Revolution, the process of linguistic unification was indistinguishable from the process of the construction of the monarchical state.” … “The dialects … [especially in the north of France, or pays de langue d'oil ] begin to give way, progressively, from the 14th century onwards, … to the common language which was being elaborated in Paris in cultivated domains, and promoted by a statute of official language … i.e.) utilized in the form that educated use had given it, i.e. the written form.” (op.cit. p. 29.)

During the revolution, he points out, the dialects were unusable as the ‘langue pratique’ for decrees etc. because the available vocabulary didn't have common meanings; revolutionaries were thus forced to “forge” a common language [langue moyenne] with particular attention given to spelling. Thus the fixation on meanings, of trying to control the official language so that it could be inculcated into the heads of the new citizens, making them think more clearly, etc. This concern with these fussy issues still goes on today, resulting in the the movements concerned with the “défense de la langue,” which he calls a kind of “mind control.” (Bourdieu ibid.)

“The imposition of the legitimate language against the idiomes and patois is part of the political strategies destined to assure the perpetuation of the gains of the Revolution by the production and reproduction of the new man [l'homme nouveau.]”

Language becomes a “method” which allows people to identify the revolutionary language with revolutionary thought: to “reform language, purge it of usages linked to the former society and [re]impose it thus purified, is to impose a thought process itself purged and purified.” We must not think of political and linguistic unification simply as a technical process, of communication, or simply to see it as a kind of statist centralism intent on crushing local particularisms, however. “The conflict between the French of the revolutionary intelligentsia, and the idiomes or patois is a struggle for symbolic power over the formation and re-formation of mental structures.” (emphasis mine, hfs) (Bourdieu op cit.p.31.)

Thus,

“it is not just a question of communicating, but of recognizing a new discourse of authority, with its new political vocabulary, its terms of address and of reference, its metaphors, its euphemisms, and the representation of the social world which it authorizes, and which, because it is linked to the new interests of new groups, is inexpressible in the local speech forms fashioned by usages linked to specific interests of peasant groups.” (Bourdieu op cit.p.31.)

“While one must not forget the contribution which political unification movements (which are visible in other domains, such as that of the law) bring to the fabrication of the language that linguists accept as a natural given, one must also not impute to it the entire responsibility for the generalized use of the dominant language, (a) dimension of the market unification of symbolic goods that accompanies the unification of the economy, and also cultural production and cultural circulation. It is easy to see in the case of the matrimonial exchange market” (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)

What he is referring to here is the marriage market, where linguistic ‘products’ until then destined to circulate in the protected enclosure of local markets are perceived to be suddenly devalued and revalorized as “peasant values”, resulting in the collapse of the peasantry (especially its male component) who are then condemned to celibacy/bachelorhood; this is because women won't marry men who speak like peasants if they can marry men who speak the ‘legitimate’ language.

Confirming Labov's observation (Labov 1972) that lower-middle class women are the quickest to adopt linguistic features of higher prestige, varying more widely between their informal and formal speech than any other class or gender, Bourdieu goes on to describe why French women are the first to adopt standard speech in rural areas:

“and since women are quicker to adopt the legitimate language (or the proper pronunciation) … especially because they specialize in the domain of consumption (of various products, especially the language) and by the logic of marriage, which is for them the principal route to social mobility, where they move upward, they are predisposed to accept, beginning at school, the new demands of the symbolic capital market. (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)

Here Bourdieu points out what is the real causative factor in promoting official language, namely, that the imposition of another language does not happen because the state decrees it, but because of other social factors correlated with the officialization.

“Thus, the effects of domination which are correlated with the unification of the market are not exercised except by means of a whole complex of specific institutions and mechanisms, of which language policy proper, along with the intentional interventions of pressure groups, are only very superficial factors.” (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)

In other words, you don't have to have the “overt” kinds of pressure associated with officialization, because they are only superficially effective; the market and other institutions allied with it do the job for you.

“And the fact that [juridical or quasi-juridical constraints] presuppose political and economic unification, which they contribute, retroactively, to the strengthening of does not at all imply that one should impute the progress of the official language to the direct efficacity of [these] constraints, (which can only impose the acquisition ([my emphasis, hs] of the official language but not the general use of it, and at the same time, the autonomous reproduction of it.) Every symbolic domination presupposes on the part of those who submit to it a form of complicity, which is neither passive submission to an exterior constraint, nor free acceptance of its values. The recognition of the legitimacy of the official language has nothing of a belief deliberately professed and therefore revocable, nor of an intentional act of acceptance of a “norme”; it is rather inscribed in the practical state of dispositions which are subtly inculcated, as part of a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic marketplace and which are often adjusted, without any cynical calculation or of any consciously resented constraint, to the chances of material and symbolic profit which the laws of the price-formation characteristic of a certain market objectively promise to the possessors of a certain linguistic capital.”

This means, he adds in a footnote (op. cit, p. 37), that “linguistic customs [moeurs] cannot be modified by decrees the way partisans of a volunteerist policy involving “défense de la langue” seem to believe.

3.2 Bourdieu and Whorf

It is also interesting to note that Bourdieu specifically discerns a kind of folk-Whorfian (Mertz 1982) world-view at work in the imposition and functioning of this model. Teachers in French schools are on the front lines, as it were, working constantly to “inculcate a clear faculty of expression and of each emotion,” i.e. through language. They work to replace the patois, which is nothing but a jumble of confusion, with standard French, itself the only “clear and fixed” thing that deserves to be in their heads, and trying to get them to perceive and feel things in the same way. The work of the teacher is “to erect the common conscience of the nation.” Bourdieu calls this a Whorfian or Humboldtian theory of language, which sees scholarly action as “intellectual and moral integration.” (Bourdieu op cit.p.32.) Teaching language, therefore, is a kind of ‘mind control;’ instilling the standard language in the heads of children will reprogram them to think clearly.

3.1 Written Language and Spoken Language

Bourdieu's work does not always distinguish between written and spoken language, but it is clear from his writing that the kinds of controls he talks about (above and elsewhere) are primarily of the written kind, though control of spoken language, i.e. correct pronunciation of official French is also involved. That the French state is much better at controlling a linguistic marketplace of written language, rather than spoken language, however, is clear even from the above presentation. Given what else he says about the evaluation of ‘linguistic products’ it is also clear that written tokens of language will be more harshly evaluated than will spoken ones, and because they are also scarcer, they have higher symbolic value. But attention to subtle differences of pronunciation will also result in evaluations that can only benefit those speaking the ‘legitimate’ language, in its standard (Parisian, or at least northern) pronunciation.

“Though a large part of language is invariable, there exist, whether in pronunciation, lexicon, or in grammar, a whole set of differences associated meaningfully with social differences which, though negligible to the linguist¹³, are pertinent from the sociological point of view, because they enter into a system of linguistic oppositions which retranslates a system of social differences.” (Bourdieu op. cit. p. 41.)

4 Problems with Bourdieu's analysis: the Linguistic Black Market

Though Bourdieu takes great pains to establish that there is a unified marketplace for language, and that the state creates and controls this market (thus excluding everyone who does not participate in it) he fails to explain why it is that in the end, some people continue to use non-standard languages, the ones known in France as patois, idiomes etc. Despite the relentless march of centrism, and the domination of this market, a sort of linguistic black-market continues to persist, with values (Labov (1972) calls this “covert prestige”) attached to these ‘products’ that seem to be determined by other factors, perhaps beyond the pale of the centrist control. Once we begin to think of ways that official markets are undermined or resisted, we can imagine, not only a black market, but markets purveying linguistic contraband, stolen or illegal goods, or other kinds of under-the-counter activities. In economic terms, we know that black markets exist because they can provide things that are scarce; illegal substances are sold because people want to buy them, whether or not they publicly admit it. Perhaps we need to think of franglais[4] as one token of a black-market linguistic commodity, illegally imported and ‘consumed’ because it has covert prestige, and consumers in the linguistic market place want it, irrespective of its legality. Thus the economic model seems to call for more a way to deal with more than just the official products of the linguistic marketplace, but contraband commodities that have their own symbolic value must be taken into consideration, too..

4.0.2 An Orwellian Language Policy?

Though French people pay lip-service to the notion that le franglais must be banned, 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 Stasi¹⁴ 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.

4.1 The fallacy of linguistic dirigisme

The fallacy of linguistic dirigisme, therefore, is based on supposed parallels with economic dirigisme, which controls the economy by controlling the money supply, the means of production, wages, prices, exchange rates, interest rates, imports, or any and other commodities, currencies, or things and substances of value, the supply of which is finite, or can be made finite by state control. Language, however, is not a finite substance or commodity that can be controlled in this way, for a number of reasons.

1. Utterance Supply: One is that each speaker (of any language whatsoever) in the polity generates his/her own supply of utterances. This is a basic fact about language and how it works that is often misunderstood, and not just in French culture.

2. Divine Origin of Language: In many cultures of the world the idea that language has divine origins, or stems from some Platonic higher consciousness, leads culture-bearers to assume that language can therefore be controlled (or must be controlled) in various ways, and that the utterances that speakers make can be discounted or devalued if they do not meet some pre-established standard.¹⁵

3. Covert Prestige: It seems to me that French linguistic culture would have it that self-generated utterances of a non-standard sort are like debased currencies or contraband, and must be driven out of existence. The problem is, as Gresham's law has it, bad money drives out good, so the existence of corrupt language has paradoxical effects; people pay lip service to ‘good’ language, but non-standard language also has symbolic value to its speakers¹⁶ because it authentically represents par excellence their personal, social, regional, or even sexual identity in ways that the standard language never can.

4. Belief systems: Though there is no proof that dirigisme is ever effective when applied to language and linguistic habits, the belief that it works is firmly grounded in French ideas about language (Catach 1991; Schiffman 1996). It is now being called upon to save French from the corruption and perturbations brought on by wholesale borrowing of franglais (English and American words and phrases), which bring with them an unsavory ideology and life-style, which, if not resisted at all costs, will undermine and debase French culture beyond recognition.

Notes

¹ “Notre centralisme linguistique, le plus ancien et le plus consommé d'Europe, est bien connu: Philippe le Bel, Fran¸ois I^er, Richelieu, Colbert, la Convention, Napoléon, Jules Ferry et d'autres encore l'ont illustré”. (Catach 1991:7)}

²I have defined this as “the sum total of behaviors, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief sytems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language, and religion-historical circumstances associated with a particular language." (Schiffman 1996:5)

³Some would call it ideology, e.g. Flaitz 1988.

⁴See the words of Barére or Grégroire, e.g. in Schiffman 1996:99; 111.

⁵ Gordon (1978) echoes this view

⁶Miller (1982) shows how in Japan, as certain state-sponsored myths have crumbled, language

myths have become stronger.

⁷The revolution in Turkey in the 1920's however seems to have emulated the French Revolution in linguistic matters, using a ‘purified’ Turkish as a symbol of nationalism, and banning the use of other languages such as Armenian, etc.

⁸As I have claimed, however, it is the implementation of language policy that is usually its achilles' heel; if a decree has no teeth, it will not be implemented, especially if there is a cost to its effective implementation, and no cost (or penalty) for failure to implement.

⁹[The] Académie franςaise, or French literary academy, [was] established by the French first minister Cardinal de Richelieu in 1634 and incorporated in 1635, and has continued, except for an interruption during the era of the French Revolution, to the present day. Its original purpose was to maintain standards of literary taste and to establish the literary language. (Encyclopedia Brittanica, website.)

¹⁰“Depuis le début de ce siécle, l'Académie a fait savoir qu’elle ne se sentait plus ni le droit ni les moyens d’assurer seule ses fonctions. Elle a signifié à plusieurs reprises qu’elle entendait seulement rester de ‘greffer de l’usage’ […]. Elle ‘ne se reconnait pas le droit’, déclarait-elle en 1935, et encore tout récemment, ‘de réformer l’orthographe.’” (Catach 1991:55)

¹²La langue officielle a partie liée avec l'État. Et cela tant dans sa genèse que dans ses usages sociaux. C'est dans le processus de constitution de l’état que se créent les conditions de la constitution d'un marché linguistique unifié et dominé par la langue officielle: obligatoire dans les occasions officielles et dans les espaces officiels (école, administrations publique, institutions politiques, etc.), cette langue d'État devient la norme théorique à laquelle toutes les pratiques linguistiques sont objectivement mesurées. Nul n'est cense ignorer la loi linguistique qui a son corps de juristes, les grammairiens, et ses agents d'imposition et de contrôle, les maitres de l'enseignement, investis du pouvoir de soumettre universellement à l'examen et à la sanction juridique du titre scolaire la performance linguistique des sujets parlants. (Bourdieu 1982:27)

¹³Bourdieu faults most linguists (though he would probably exempt sociolinguists), from Saussure on down for accepting standard language as the domain of their enquiry, and ignoring the fact that they legitimate it by focussing exclusively on la langue and ignoring la parole.

¹⁴Stasi is the abbreviation of the German term Staatssicherheitsdienst or State Security Service.

¹⁵See Schiffman 1996 for examples of mythological ideas about language.

¹⁶Labov refers to this as covert prestige because though speakers overtly deny the value or validity of non-standard forms, they retain and use them for certain purposes, because at some level, they have meaning or value for them. (Labov 1972) We can perhaps see the contradiction here as parallel to the paradox of drug interdiction in western countries—people want the drugs banned, and their importation interdicted, but covertly, some consumers want them, and are willing to pay for them, so the supply continues to flow.

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