The judgment is not insignificant and will perhaps go down in history. On May 11, a court decided to prohibit the use of so-called “inclusive” writing in documents from the University of Grenoble. On July 16, 2020, the board of directors had indeed decided to write the statutes of the institution in this new ideological sabir which ignores some of the elementary rules of the French language by multiplying the midpoints and other unknown signs of grammars .
In particular, we could read that “the Director of the Languages Service is elected for 5 years by secret ballot. He/she is elected in the first round by an absolute majority of the elected members, in the following rounds, he/she is elected by a relative majority. I’ll spare you the rest.
The court thus reacted to the complaint lodged by an associate professor of English. He considered that this text violated the Constitution since it stipulates that “the language of the Republic is French”. To everyone’s surprise, the judges ruled in his favor in the name of case law according to which administrative acts must comply with a principle of “clarity and intelligibility”. Any document would therefore be required to have “a level of clarity sufficient to guarantee its immediate accessibility”. Democracy would be at this price.
In its judgment, the court relies on a statement by the French Academy dated October 26, 2017 which affirms that “the multiplication of orthographic and syntactic marks” of this writing “leads to a disunited language, disparate in its expression, creating a confusion bordering on illegibility”.
The Immortals didn’t believe so well. Because beyond the legal and linguistic debate, this judgment highlights what could be designated as an increasingly manifest form of secession by the new intellectual and university elites.
Indeed, the members of the board of directors of the University of Grenoble did not decide to propose a linguistic reform, to convince the majority of their ideas, to send a memorandum to the government or to the French Academy. They decided to write as they saw fit. Let’s take it for granted!
It doesn’t matter that practically no one writes like this, that this language is in fact “exclusive” since it is not taught anywhere and has neither grammar nor rules known to everyone. It does not matter that, according to an Ifop survey carried out in 2021, 63% of French people disapprove of its use and 42% have never even heard of it. In the name of their good feelings and a misguided feminism, these elites got up one fine morning and decided that the common language spoken by more than 300 million French-speakers in the world was no longer suitable for them and that they had to to change. As if it were their private property.
This is what is called secession. If the neofeminists act like this, why wouldn’t everyone tomorrow use their own linguistic rules, which in the name of ecology, which in the name of anti-racism, which in the name of the simplification of grammar? As for the partisans of universal peace, they could write in Esperanto—some are not very far from it. What then of the common language?
Beyond the delirium inherent in this abstruse and totally ideological mode of writing, the example of the University of Grenoble illustrates how our new “enlightened” elites increasingly live in their own universe with their own cultural references. And so, why not their own language? This was described before anyone else by the American historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994. It is no longer the masses, the proletariat or the people who are revolting, he said, but the educated elites, those who have access to the university and flood the media, who, in the name of Good, have decided to secede and put an end to this people who would be racist, sexist, polluter and misogynist anyway.
Unlike the old national bourgeoisie which had resolved to “make a nation”, our new globalized elites have “withdrawn from life in common”, wrote Lasch. They have more in common with the privileged classes who live thousands of miles away than with the people who do their housework and pick up their garbage cans. This elite separatism explains a whole series of strange phenomena which otherwise would remain incomprehensible. Think of the exalted, irrational and sometimes even anti-scientific discourse on sexual, racial or ethnic minorities. Speeches so extremist that they go beyond the understanding of the majority. And therefore prevent society.
When we no longer want to share the language of the greatest number, that says a lot about the degree of dissolution of society. Recently, two professors from Lyon 2 University, convinced of their moral superiority, did not hesitate to impose a law exam written in “inclusive” sabir. There were spellings like “touz”, “als”, “appelae” and “recognized”. To those who felt aggrieved by an “illegible” statement, the university replied that “academic freedom” was sacred. The rest of humanity just had to get dressed.