The end of the year is the season for prizes: Nobel, Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina and so many others. But a small, less publicized price went unnoticed. It does not reward literary, scientific or intellectual excellence, but what its jury calls “linguistic indignity”. Since 1999, a jury chaired by an old friend from Quebec, the writer Philippe de Saint Robert, has been meeting at Lipp’s to appoint a personality who has stood out for “his relentlessness in promoting the domination of English in France to the detriment of the French language. Each year, the English Carpet Academy also designates a foreign personality who has contributed to the “servile” propagation of English.
It is no surprise that the 2022 awards were given to President Emmanuel Macron and his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, respectively.
We know the propensity of the French president, promoter of ” start-up nation to speak in English. If the jury appointed him this year, it was particularly to emphasize his resignation to “the dominant use of English in the functioning of the European Union”, where the use of French is often reduced to its simplest expression. The jury recalls that, since Brexit, English “is not the national language of any member country”. The mother tongue of barely 1% of Europeans, it only has official status in Ireland and Malta.
As for Justin Trudeau, he won the foreign prize for designating a governor general, Mary Simon, who does not speak French. Strongly criticized in Quebec, this appointment of a first Governor General of Inuit origins had been the subject of a request to the Superior Court by a group of citizens who considered that it violated the Canadian Constitution. The new Governor General has since made a commitment to learn French.
Regarding Emmanuel Macron, the academicians also deplored that, at the instigation of France and its president, the International Organization of La Francophonie has entrusted a second term to Louise Mushikiwabo, a former minister of Rwanda. Indeed, this country replaced French by English as the compulsory language of instruction in its schools in 2008. The Academy also points out that, during the last Francophonie summit, held in Djerba last November, Emmanuel Macron appointed the singer Yseult as godmother of the next edition of the summit to be held in France in 2024. However, Yseult sings mainly in English.
Since its founding, the Academy had always made it a rule not to award its prize to a sitting president. But “Emmanuel Macron flaunted his Anglophilia so much that we had no choice,” says Philippe de Saint Robert. The writer criticizes the French president for “making the French language a museum” by creating an International City of the French language in Villers-Cotterêts, but for “doing nothing to defend it internationally”.
This year, the Head of State was in competition with the French National Railway Company (SNCF) for the name of its new application “SNCF Connect” and the City of Nice for its slogan ” I Love Nice “.
In 2021, the Academy called the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Darmanin, to order for having bilingualized (French-English) the new French identity card. In the past, this prize has scratched such prestigious personalities as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who had the slogan of the 2024 Olympic Games projected on the Eiffel Tower “ Made for Sharing », and the European commissioner Pierre Moscovici, for having sent a letter written entirely in English to a French government minister!
Among the foreign winners in 2018 was the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, singled out for announcing the abandonment of the French-language university project in Toronto.
Under the presidency of Philippe de Saint Robert, the jury brings together a dozen literary personalities or simply lovers of the French language. We find there in particular the journalist of the Figaro Eugénie Bastié, the writer Benoît Duteurtre, the former ambassador Albert Salon and several representatives of associations for the defense of the French language.