have seen—it was far less common for Walloons or Flemings to be comfortably conversant with the other’s language, both sides would resort readily to English as a common communications medium.
In countries where regional languages—Catalan, for example, or Basque—were now officially taught, it was not uncommon for young people (‘Generation E’—for Europe—as it was popularly known) dutifully to learn the local language but to spend their spare time—as a gesture of adolescent revolt, social snobbery and enlightened self- interest—
German, too, was fast losing its place in the European language league. A reading knowledge of German had once been mandatory for anyone participating in the international scientific or scholarly community. Together with French, German had also been a universal language of cultivated Europeans—and until the war it had been the more widespread of the two, a language in active daily use from Strasbourg to Riga.[392] But with the destruction of the Jews, the expulsion of the Germans and the arrival of the Soviets, central and eastern Europe was turned abruptly away from the German language. An older generation in the cities continued to read and—infrequently—speak German; and in the isolated German communities of Transylvania and elsewhere it limped on as a marginal language of limited practical use. But everyone else learned—or at any rate was taught—Russian.
The association of the Russian language with Soviet occupation considerably restricted its appeal, even in countries like Czechoslovakia or Poland where linguistic contiguity made it accessible. Although citizens of the satellite states were obliged to study Russian, most people made little effort to master the language, much less speak it except when forced to do so.[393] Within a few years of the fall of Communism it was already clear that one paradoxical effect of occupation by Germany and the Soviet Union had been to eradicate any sustained familiarity with their languages. In the lands that had for so long been trapped between Russia and Germany there was now only one foreign language that mattered. To be ‘European’ in eastern Europe after 1989, especially for the young, was to speak
For native German speakers in Austria, Switzerland or Germany itself, the steady provincializing of their language—to the point where even those whose own language derived closely from German, like the Dutch, no longer widely studied or understood it—was an accomplished fact and there was no point mourning the loss. In the course of the Nineties, major German firms like Siemens made a virtue of necessity and established English as their corporate working language. German politicians and business executives became notable for the ease with which they moved in anglophone circles.
The decline of French was another matter. As a language of commonplace daily use French had not played a significant role in Europe since the decline of the imperial aristocracies of the old regimes. Outside of France, only a few million Belgians, Luxemburgers and Swiss, together with pocket communities in the Italian Alps and the Spanish Pyrenees, used French as their native tongue—and many of them spoke it in dialect forms disparaged by the official guardians of the
But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been
Within thirty years all that had changed. By the year 2000, French had ceased to be a reliable medium of international communication even among elites. Only in the UK, Ireland and Romania was it the recommended choice for schoolchildren embarking on a first foreign language—everyone else learnt English. In some parts of former Habsburg Europe, French was no longer even the
Even at the European Commission in Brussels, where French had been the dominant official language in the Community’s early years and where native French speakers in the bureaucracy thus exercised a significant psychological and practical advantage, things had changed. It was not so much the accession of Britain itself that brought about the shift—the seconded civil servants from London were all fluent in French—as the arrival of Scandinavians, who were fluent in
Unlike the Germans, however, the French authorities did not respond by switching to English in order to ensure their commercial and political effectiveness. Although more and more young French people studied English and traveled abroad in order to use it, the official position became decidedly defensive: no doubt in part because of the uncomfortable coincidence of the decline of French language usage with the diminution of the country’s international role—something the UK had been spared because Americans too spoke English.
The initial French response to intimations of linguistic diminution was to insist that others continue to speak their language: as President Georges Pompidou had put it early in the 1970s, ‘Should French ever cease to be the primary working language of Europe, then Europe itself would never be fully European’. However, it soon became clear that this was a lost cause and intellectuals and politicians opted instead for a siege mentality: if French were no longer spoken beyond the country’s borders, then at least it must have an exclusive monopoly within them. A petition signed in July 1992 by 250 prominent personalities—including the writers Regis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean Dutourd, Max Gallo and Philippe Sollers—demanded that the government require by law the exclusive use of French in conferences and meetings held on French soil, films made with French funding, etc. Otherwise, they warned, ‘les angloglottes’ will have us all speaking English ‘or rather, American’.
French governments of every political persuasion were all too happy to oblige, if only
Toubon’s target—what he contemptuously dubbed the ‘mercantile English’ that was displacing French (‘the primary capital, the symbol of the dignity of the French people’)—was already moving out of reach even as he took aim. Intellectuals like Michel Serres might complain portentously that the streets of Paris during the Occupation had fewer names in German than they had today in English, but a younger generation reared on films, television shows, video games, internet sites and international pop music—and speaking a mobile French slang full of borrowed and adapted words and phrases—could not have cared less.
Legislation intended to oblige the French to speak French to one another was one thing—albeit honored largely in the breach. But the attempt to require foreign scholars, businessmen, think-tankers, lawyers, architects and everyone else to express themselves in French—or to understand it when spoken by others—anytime they gathered on French soil could only have one outcome: they would take their business and their ideas somewhere