The French language is eminently political. It is the language of the Oaths of Strasbourg through its ancestor, Old French, imposed against the Latin of the clerics. It has been the official language of administration since the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterรชts in 1539. An instrument of an Academy that “allowed itself to be constituted rather than requested it” by Richelieu and in whose hands it serves to magnify royal power and ensure the prestige of France abroad. Voltaire himself, in one of his philosophical letters, would demand efforts from the Academy to publish “the good works of Louis XIV.” Affirmed by the revolution with the report from Abbรฉ Grรฉgoire on the “necessity and means to destroy dialects and universalize it,” it would then win, willingly or not, the esteem of Europe to become “the companion of the Empire.” “Unity of culture and its language,” an expression of its existence, is finally read in the speech of a famous recipient at the Academy.
Political, the Francophonie summits are equally so. The one that just concluded in Bucharest with fierce discussions for the adoption of the final communiquรฉ gave a striking confirmation of this. Institutionalized in 1986 with the 1st Conference of Heads of State and Government “sharing the use of the French language,” the Francophonie felt the need to acquire a political dimension. The Charter developed at the Hanoi summit in 1997 integrates as objectives, the deepening of democracy, the consolidation of the rule of law, and the effective respect for human rights. These are privileged means, according to it, to consolidate world peace. This structure was completed at the Moncton summit two years later by measures aimed at making the Organization a “political and diplomatic actor on the international stage.”
But there is a significant gap between the idea and its realization. By enabling the membership of a large number of states that are supposed not to accommodate crises, conflicts, and violations of human rights, the Francophonie runs two main risks. By politicizing, the Organization could, like Europe, dilute itself in endless expansion and veer away from its core mission. What becomes of the “defense of French” openly questioned the representative of Quebec during the Beirut summit in 2002 if, around a negotiation table, the majority of participants use interpreters to communicate? This political orientation of the Francophonie also contains within itself the seeds of great disillusionment. The authentic nobility of its ideals will inevitably collide with the practical obstacles to their implementation. Consequently, this question arises: Is the French language, bearer of democratic principles aligned with a state always ready to defend them and with which it identifies to form what Marc Fumaroli calls “a literary nation,” not at risk, due to this gap between words and reality, of undergoing a change in status? The worst scenario would be for French, which was once feared for the content of its words, whose spread of thought abroad was once watched with apprehension, to become no longer bothersome. On the contrary, having become harmless, an ethereal and ineffectual metalanguage, a rhetoric whose intrinsic power of signifiers appears deactivated, it would draw near to that 18th-century language, “fictitious” from being exclusively reserved for the use of a social salon. It would reassure. It might even entertain.
