(Paris) A 102 square meter board, a classroom that makes 6,600 and no less than 1,779 desks: thousands of people took part in a giant dictation on Sunday on the avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, transformed into a huge classroom.
This event, which received more than 50,000 applications, is a world first. Among the registrants, 5,100 people aged 10 to 92 were drawn at random to be able to participate in one of the three major dictations, i.e. 1,779 participants per exercise, with the novelist Rachid Santaki as master of ceremonies.
The first dictation was a passage from The Pope’s Mulea short story from Letters of my mill by Alphonse Daudet, dictated by the journalist and president of the Library without borders association, Augustin Trapenard.
The other two were a contemporary text read by writer and journalist Katherine Pancol, and a text on a sports theme, dictated by rugby player Pierre Rabadan.
At 2:15 p.m., total silence fell on the famous avenue. Young and old leaned over their copy, ballpoint pen in hand. But after a few minutes, 10-year-old Samson gave up. He found it complicated because it goes too fast.
When twenty minutes later, the dictation ended, it was a relief for Adrien Blind, 42: “Through this exercise, I remember the stress, the worries, this feeling of losing the thread”.
To his left, his son is upset. In cm2, Antoine is one of the best in his class. However, his copy is almost empty: “It was almost impossible! It was a dictation for adults”.
Touria Zerhouni, a 65-year-old retiree, gave a cry of joy during the self-correction. “I only made two mistakes! I expected much harder”.
La grande dictée des Champs is an opportunity to test your spelling but also to celebrate the French language, according to Marc-Antoine Jamet: “Dictation is an instrument for living together. It is unifying”.