“But in which country am I here? Gaston Miron wondered one day as he walked up Boulevard Saint-Michel, where shop windows were competing with posters in English. There is no doubt that a quarter of a century after leaving us, our national poet would ask himself the same question on landing at Roissy.
He who knew France well, this carnal France of which he had surveyed the streets and the landscapes, where he had knocked on all the doors without false humility or condescension, would not believe the last episode of this mediocre TV series that we could title The Anglomania of the French Elitess.
In the country of the “start-up nation”, to use the expression immortalized by President Emmanuel Macron, bilingualism is now creeping into the pockets of citizens. The case dates back to August 2 when the government launched its new identity card. Reduced to credit card format, it now contains an electronic chip. We would be delighted if she had not become bilingual.
Since June 20, 2019, Brussels has obliged member countries of the European Union (EU) to translate the words “identity card” into at least one of the 24 EU languages on their respective documents. In a very Brussels logic, we formally let everyone choose this language. In practice, no one will be surprised that all without exception have chosen English ” Identity Card ».
Fortunately, countries like Spain have only translated the title of the document. Others like Germany, Austria and Romania have translated it into English and French. While nothing forced it to do so, France is one of the most zealous Anglophiles. With Poland and Italy, she translated the entire document into Shakespeare’s only language.
“It is a question of allowing the French citizen to circulate easily by proving his identity […] in all the countries of the Union”, explained blissfully the director of the National Agency for Secure Documents, Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin-Clerc. As if the average European were too stupid to recognize an identity card and distinguish the family name from the first name or the address, whether they were written in Gaelic, Finnish or Bulgarian.
In December, the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Darmanin, received for this initiative the famous prize of the English Carpet, a lemon prize awarded each year to the most Anglophile initiatives. For a few months, the French Academy has been upwind and even threatens to seize the Council of State. Doesn’t article 2 of the French Constitution stipulate that “the language of the Republic is French”? Such an appeal would be a first in the history of an institution founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu and whose independence from the state has always been the subject of heated struggles.
In a presidential campaign where the question of the decline of France is at the heart of the debates, the subject should be eminently symbolic. It illustrates the propensity – which is far from new – of part of the French elites to practice what La Boétie called from the 16e century “voluntary servitude”. A text that our late Pierre Falardeau liked to quote.
Quebeckers know this more than anyone else, this institutional bilingualism is all the more perverse since neither in France nor in Quebec is the French language threatened with disappearing from the map as Gaulish died out in another era. As the poet and essayist Alain Borer writes, she is rather “exposed to the risk of collapsing into rotten French, into a kind of dialect of the Anglo-Saxon empire” (« Speak white ! », Gallimard Tracts).
This renunciation is all the more distressing as it comes a year after the United Kingdom slammed the door of the EU. The “perfidious Albion” may have deserted the European inner circle, the “Globish”, this dialect of the Anglo-American Empire, has never triumphed there so much.
The opportunity was however good to give more space to French. A report submitted to the Quai d’Orsay in October precisely recommended a rebalancing. He suggested that at least 50% of EU documents must be written in French or German. It will take more than putting French at the end of a long list of priorities, as Emmanuel Macron did, for things to change.
Over the years, the EU has steadily become an instrument of Anglicization and even Americanization of European peoples. We are far from the “Europe of translation” desired by Umberto Eco. This is true for language. But it is also clear that it is through Brussels that the political correctness and the most radical ideological fashions that submerge the United States today are too often imposed in Europe.
“We have given up the happiness of being French,” lamented Jean d’Ormesson. Amazing paradox. The more our elites become infatuated with the cult of minorities and the diversity ideology, the more they do so in the sole language of the Empire. A demonstration by the absurd that a language is also a way of seeing and thinking the world. We could have found better for the 400th anniversary of Molière.