There is nothing new about the defence of the French language by the French; indeed, their quixotic efforts to legislate against English lighten one's day. At the moment deputés are proposing a bill to force French affiliates of multinationals to call themselves by French names. Thus Vivendi Universal would become Vivendi Universel. Traitors who stoop to using la langue de Dobeliou get short shrift. When Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the European Central Bank, addressed the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in English, the French delegation walked out. Philippe Baudillon, director general of the Parisian 2012 Olympic campaign, gave a press conference in English, provoking a parliamentary demand for punishment. But nothing has provoked as much ire as a recent report on education, which suggested that English should become compulsory in primary schools.
Many primary teachers place greater emphasis on learning a local language such as Breton, Corsican or, like my young nephews, Basque, considered in some households more useful in adult life. Making English compulsory would inflate it to (almost) the importance of the two current pillars of learning at that age: French and mathematics. Passionate resistance to the report's proposal comes from teachers, unions, intellectuals and the increasingly powerful pro-sovereignty lobby in parliament. "It's a good idea to include a language as a core subject," said a senator responsible for a 2003 government report on teaching foreign languages. "But that language should not be English." Commenting on the report, Bruno Bourg-Broc, president of the all-party parliamentary group defending francophonie, added: "The report is going against current trends when it claims that being unable to speak English is a handicap in the construction of Europe." Le Monde reports that Claude Hagège, a linguist at the prestigious Collège de France, wants a law forbidding the teaching of English at primary school - because children can pick it up elsewhere. "English may be the language most spoken today," remarked a deputé, "but not for long. Spanish will soon overtake it. If there has to be a compulsory language it should be Arabic." Any language but English, it seems, as though the language carries within itself the seeds of the contaminating Anglo-Saxon culture. "In 1914," he went on, "officers had to learn German - how right they were." Jacques Chirac has been advocating that more French children learn the language of their principal political and commercial partner for some time, recently promising extra marks in their baccalaureate for studying German. "Nothing could be worse for humanity," the president warned melodramatically, "than to move towards a situation where only one language is spoken... it would be an ecological disaster." He himself speaks no German and Schröder speaks no French. During their monthly meetings they communicate in English.
But sensing that making English compulsory would not be politically acceptable and noting that the "frankly mediocre" level of English acquired by French students has been falling against that of other European countries, the report softens the blow. It proposes that eight year olds should learn a simplified form - l'anglais de communication internationale. This in turn has raised the fury of teachers of conventional English who, trained to drill their students in our perfidious grammar, feel redundant. Their fury is shared by French teachers, who fear compulsory "international" English will eat into their timetables.
For learning French grammar is difficult too - eight year olds can spend more than a quarter of every school day trying to write correctly a language they speak fluently. My son's class, which goes from seven to 11 years, has an English lesson only when the teacher can find time - about once a term last year. The English they learn is simple: blindfolded, they turn left or right according to the command. Could I help? I agreed to do it, unpaid, and by the time an inspector had cleared half a day to come and assess me, my pupils had already mastered how we pronounce our vowels and were fluent in simple phrases. But the teacher would face sanctions if the inspector suspected I had started without authorisation so, smothering conspiratorial giggles, the children outdid each other in ever more outrageous attempts to mangle "How old are you?" before, apparently through great effort, arriving at a pronunciation better than the inspector's. She was most impressed, and just before setting off on the long road back to her academy, gave her one recommendation: "Teach them songs." Since many of the children live in isolated farms, "Old MacDonald" seemed perfect: the children learned that even cows and pigs speak differently across the channel. But the following week the teacher warned me that there was muttering among the parents. These children learn at the milking stool that McDonald's is the evil empire's Trojan horse - our neighbour José Bové had bulldozed to the ground the only example to infiltrate our region. "Teach them your language, Monsieur Tim, not your (lack of) culture."
