Activists have always viewed words as a weapon. It is therefore not yesterday that they attack the language. During the French Revolution, it was well seen to call oneself “citizen”. In the name of the god Reason, the months, days and even years were renamed. Two centuries later, the communists deemed it bourgeois to refer to themselves as “Monsieur” or “Madame”; they preferred “Comrade”. Everywhere reigned this “gloomy Marxist sabir”, to use the words of a journalist at the time. Closer to home, since the 1970s, it was not uncommon to hear the mere use of the conditional and the past simple described as “bourgeois”.
Rarely, however, have these attempts to subject language to ideology been so brutal as with what is now called “inclusive” language. Strange formula for a well-meaning and impractical grammar that risks alienating many readers.
For several years, these new rules, which claim to fight against discrimination with great blows of “plumbers and plumbers”, of “all and all”, of “iel”, of “.es”, insinuate themselves into the administrations. An article from Duty recently taught us that certain media, such as Quebec Sciencewere infatuated with it and that others were thinking about it.
This vast enterprise of moralizing the language—because that is what it is all about—yet rests on a myth according to which there was a masculine plot to drive out the feminine from the language. It has been a long time since sociolinguists of the quality of Yana Grinshpun (see her article in Illness in the French language, Éditions du Cerf) have shown that the appearance of the generic masculine, making it possible to designate both men and women indiscriminately, was in no way a conspiracy. On the contrary, it is thought that because of its formal affinities with the Latin neuter, it ended up replacing it.
As for grammatical gender, linguists also know that it has little to do with sex, and even less with this curious notion of “gender” recently imported from the United States (gender) and to which everything should henceforth be reduced. Exactly as Marxism saw the class struggle everywhere.
We need someone to explain to us what is sexist in writing the words “estafette” and “highness” in the feminine and “mannequin” and “clitoris” in the masculine. Or to say “it’s raining” and not “it’s raining”. Our English-speaking compatriots who are constantly stuck in “the table” know well that in French, grammatical gender meets much more complex criteria than just “gender”. There is also a form of magical thinking in this way of bringing everything back to it. Unless we are shown that women are more equal in Turkey and Cambodia, whose languages know neither masculine nor feminine.
We are surprised that such brilliant minds as George Sand, Colette, Gabrielle Roy and Simone de Beauvoir allowed themselves to be so misled, slavishly applying rules of grammar which sanctioned nothing less than the “monopoly of men on the public speaking”. The formula is from Éliane Viennot, a “teacher” (that’s how she describes herself) who sees in the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes in classical poetry a terrible sign of heterosexuality. Hold on tight: she even thought she detected in the acute accent the vague trace of a… penis!
The best historians know, however, that at the time when the rules of our language were codified, around the 17e century, women played a significant role in literary salons. Wasn’t it La Bruyère who saw in the language of women a softer language, less bombastic and more distant from that Latin from which it was then important to distance oneself?
No, language cannot be reduced to the war of the sexes. It belongs neither to men nor to women, and even less to these new red guards who push the detestation of masculinity to the point of seeing its trace in each sentence.
For a language as lively and agile as French, this gibberish that constantly stutters can only be a pensum. With its impractical rules, we will soon get bored of the agreement of the past participle. As if, in French, Quebec students had nothing else to worry about than humming the suras of neo-feminism.
It is true that in a world where everyone claims to choose their sex, we could well choose our language. Moreover, this newspeak has already become a sign of recognition in a certain left. Everyone is free to express themselves as they see fit, even at the cost of the erosion of the social body. But this militant language, which pursues above all political goals, should not contaminate the institutions and the media, which should have no rules other than usage.
By what right, in fact, would the latter impose new rules of grammar on their readers? The slow progress of this new Esperanto in the news is a sign that militancy is more and more significant there. If there is one thing we should know, however, it is that journalism and activism are irreconcilable. By dint of mixing them, it is the information that is sacrificed.