Back in Paris after two years of absence, Patrice Dallaire is in shock at the omnipresence of English. His book Awake… brothel! is a cry from the heart and calls for a public debate on the status of French as the cement of republican cohesion, while the English language occupies a growing place in posters and communications, in all sectors of activity in France.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Paris. September 2021.” Fly-Car, City-Life, Lime, Pony, Click & Collect, City Market, happy hours, cash back, TVBox, Made in France “, etc. The shock is brutal! I walk in this city that I no longer recognize. However, my absence, due to COVID-19, will have been barely two years…. Social reasons, advertising, menus, websites, background music in restaurants, etc. English is everywhere.
I wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me. I interview relatives. I am told that I am not mistaken. There is, I am told, a “fashion effect”. A fad ? What next ! My Quebec sensibility is tickled.
…
In the year 2050, what will the French see in their public mirror? And the French speakers from elsewhere will see what exactly in the large Parisian window? If English continues to gain ground in advertising, the cultural reflection embodied by France will give the impression of a distorting mirror, shifted between the imaginary and the sad reality on the ground. Because a France that dresses in English disguises itself in a way.
As I observed, wondered, and probed others, I saw that the problem is much broader than the English display. We are facing a social problem.
It is on the psychological plane that the danger is most insidious. The long and progressive submission observed shows us how defense mechanisms can fail. Because that’s what it’s all about: submission. Quiet submission, slowly distilled from one culture to another. Submission becomes acceptance, resignation, enslavement, subjugation. As in Michel Houellebecq’s novel, the French will wake up in a world where English, after subtly insinuating itself into all facets of their lives, will be present everywhere, entrenched, master. They will have imperceptibly assimilated Anglo-Saxon thought patterns. Having integrated their values, they will think like Anglo-Americans. They will find normal what has slowly imposed itself on them and which they would have rejected altogether if the changes had been brutal, sudden. And, faced with an environment that will surpass them, they will submit, will implicitly accept to disappear as culture and civilization.
Americans use the phrase ” melting pot to describe the process of integration and acculturation of immigrants and populations that inhabit the United States and who, stimulated by the American dream, the mythical ” American Dream become Americanized, often within the space of a generation. But do we, people of French culture, want to look like Americans in everything?
People will also say that I am doing political fiction but… But other civilizations disappeared before ours, in Europe and elsewhere in the world, not only those crushed militarily, but also those fallen under the battering of technologies, trade, cultural borrowings and values and fashions from other civilizations.
Some will say, “What the hell is he getting into? “. Legit question. To which we can answer that sometimes you need external eyes to see inside yourself. And, to quote Albert Camus, I too can say: “my homeland is the French language!” Above all, I would remind you that the expression “non-interference but non-indifference” has long been used when it was a question of France expressing its feelings regarding the political future of Quebec. In this caseas far as I am concerned, non-interference would be indifference and, as Alain Juppé writes so well in the preface to this book, the French language belongs to all its speakers throughout the world, so it is impossible for me to be indifferent to its future and the fate France.
One may have the impression, reading the preceding pages, that the great wheel of the anglicization of France is turning slowly. It was true until now. Now that the gear is run in, there is a real danger of acceleration of the dynamics. In this regard, the 2024 Olympics could serve as an accelerator and lead Paris, if not France, to a point of no return on the road to the anglicization of its linguistic landscape.
My remarks come from an intimate conviction, supported by studies carried out in other countries, that this linguistic sloppiness and this snobbish fashion will lead us to significant setbacks in the status of French, not only in France but everywhere in the world. where the French language is spoken.
If the French do not wake up, they will soon see their country carpeted in English and the population floundering in a kind of formless, bastardized culture. Will France “which made foreign peoples dizzy” now make them dizzy? So, before it’s too late, wake up, damn it!
*Patrice Dallaire is a career diplomat with degrees in international relations and political science. He was special advisor to the Premier of Quebec, representative of Quebec in Canada, diplomat in China and assistant secretary to the Minister of the Executive Council of Quebec.
Wake up…damn!
Patrice Dallaire
Verona Editions
86 pages