You threw yourself, like me, on the final communiqué of 19e Summit of the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF). You were dazzled, like me, to see that our beautiful language was represented there by 88 heads of state and government representing 320 million French speakers. You are therefore convinced, like me, that the French-speaking family, knowing “Create, innovate and undertake” – the themes of the summit – is now sailing from success to success.
Having participated in four of these summits – Cotonou, Hanoi, Moncton, Kinshasa – and having observed, essentially, their uselessness, I thought of concocting a final, unofficial counter-communiqué for you, but, I promise you , more entertaining and more lucid. Here it is.
“Meeting in Paris, the representatives of 88 member states and governments of the OIF were once again forced to report the setbacks suffered by their not entirely common language during the two years since their last meeting. The OIF, still chaired by the representative of a state, Rwanda, which chose English as a second language at school (6% of its population speaks French), again noted that several of the representatives of Member states and governments were unable to speak in French because the language was so foreign to them. This was the case of Greece (where 7% of the population speaks French), Cambodia (3%), Bulgaria (2%), and Vietnam (0.7%), among several others.
The Summit also notes declines in French at the top of the main founding states of the organization. Thus, Canada has chosen as head of state (called in this country “governor general”) a person who does not speak our language, and we note with horror that the atrociously appointed government in our Canada–New Brunswick precinct is led both by a lieutenant-governor and by a prime minister who cannot converse in French. Since our last meeting, two years ago, the Canadian statistics agency has also confirmed the decline of French in this country, including in its French-speaking province.
In France, we note that the president, Emmanuel Macron, our host, has ensured that the national identity card is now also in English, that trade fairs are organized there Made in Francethat its international attraction initiative is called French Touchin defiance of its own Toubon law which should, it was thought, prohibit these abuses. While the OIF is massively invested in supporting university education in French in the countries of the South, nWe note that there are now no fewer than 1,460 training courses universities offered entirely in English in French establishments. The phenomenon is particularly acute in its most prestigious universities, such as Science Po or the School of Advanced Business Studies. More than 30% of courses in engineering schools and 80% in business schools are in English.
We are particularly dismayed to see that the European members of our organization, namely France, Belgium, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Greece, Luxembourg and Romania, have tolerated English remaining the main language spoken in the institutions. European Union, even after the United Kingdom left the organization four years ago. We are also dismayed to see that France has not used the power given to it by its presidency of the European Union in 2022 to even attempt to remedy this situation. Internet users can now see that European documents are now only offered in English, with an option to use an automatic translation tool.
We cannot do better, regarding the flagship of the Francophonie that is France, than to quote the author and philosopher Alain Borer: “In colonized France [par l’anglais]it’s Halloween every day! Advertising, finance, medicine, scientific research, literature, journalism, cooking, fashion, music, first names, all fields capitulate one after the other and submit to this colonization that was once still gentle and now unleashed, while no one finds fault with it.”
Pretend
To pretend that French is not in a downward spiral, our organization will continue to use inflated figures and concepts. Thus, we will affirm that Egypt is a French-speaking country, while only 3% of its population speaks French, but not Germany, which has 15%. We will continue to say that there are 320 million “French speakers” in the world, when that adds up all the French speakers, even mediocre ones, and that, by this criterion, Charles de Gaulle was an “Anglophone”, because he heard English. As Quebec diplomat Jean Tardif indicates, “if we applied such a criterion to people able to express themselves in Englishcouldn’t we also count the majority of these French speakers as… English speakers?” Jacques Attali, in a 2014 report, estimated the number of French speakers at 140 million.
In fact, to identify the basis of the Francophonie, it would be necessary to calculate the number of people who live in French and for whom it is their first language. Our organization chooses not to report this number. A site specializing in world languages, Ethnologue, puts forward the reasonable figure of 80 million.
No matter, we will continue to brandish crazy figures affirming that the future smiles on us, because within 40 years, more than 750 million Earthlings will be French-speaking, appearing especially in Africa. We know very well that this is a deception. In Algeria, English has been taught in the first year since 2022 (French only appears in the third year). Our members, Burundi and Benin have introduced compulsory English in their schools. Our members, Gabon and Togo, have also become members of the Commonwealth.
Above all, according to our own most recent research, African education systems are failing to teach our language. This is why 52% of primary school children do not have, at the point of exit, a sufficient level of French to succeed. The fact that 15% of their teachers do not know how to write our language correctly is undoubtedly a factor in this failure.
The OIF therefore undertakes, like its English-speaking counterpart the Commonwealth, to pretend, and sometimes to convince itself, that it has a useful role to play on the international political scene. It will continue to stir up wind, pretending not to have become, contrary to the wishes of its instigators, a pure foreign policy instrument of French presidents, an instrument whose effectiveness, like France’s global footprint, is decreasing.
As the French editorialist Vincent Hervouët rightly indicates, “the Francophonie is sick of France”. See you in two years for a new assessment of our setbacks. »