The Economist Asia - February 10, 2018

74 The EconomistFebruary 10th 2018

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A

PHILOSOPHYgraduate and unpub-

lished novelist, Emmanuel Macron

treats French culture like a national trea-

sure, and the French language as a jewel.

“French is the language of reason, it’s the

language of light,” the president declared

when inauguratingthe Louvre in Abu

Dhabi, a silver-domed gallery on a sandy

shore that he called a museum “of the des-

ert and light”. Mr Macron hasvowed to

make French the first language in Africa,

and “perhaps” the world; he named a

young bestselling Franco-Moroccan novel-

ist, Leïla Slimani, to lead this mission. Yet

his campaign to rejuvenate French, and to

open the country up to writers who share

the language around the world, has inad-

vertently revived a French culture war.

Today more people speak French in Kin-

shasa, capital of the Democratic Republic

of Congo, than in Paris. By 2050, thanks to

population growth in Africa, some 85% of

the world’s French-speakers will live on

the continent. Mr Macron has been pro-

moting French on his recent travels to the

Gulf, China and, pointedly, Ghana, an Eng-

lish-speaking west African country sur-

rounded by French-speaking ones. Visiting

Tunisia, he said he wanted to double the

number learning French there by 2020.

Mr Macron, who is 40, does this in a de-

cidedly less defensive way than his prede-

cessors (Jacques Chirac once walked out of

a summit when a Frenchman spoke in Eng-

French-speaking countries. The institution,

he said, was merely “a continuation of

French foreign policy towards its former

colonies”, which props up African despots

and treats Francophone writers as the exot-

ic “other”. Writing inLe Monde, Abdourah-

man Waberi, a Djiboutian professor at

Georgetown University, urged France to

turn the page on an “outdated vision”

based on an “artificial hierarchy” between

French and Francophone artists.

La Francophonie “cannot just be an in-

stitution for saving the French language;

that is not what Francophone countries are

worried about,” explains Mr Mabanckou.

“Africans don’t need the French language

to exist.” He asks how many universities in

France teach Francophone African litera-

ture, and complains that American stu-

dents are more likely to study such writers

than are French ones. The French literary

world clings to a Paris-centric vision, Mr

Mabanckou says, too often failing to con-

sider writers from former colonies as part

of mainstream literature, as British pub-

lishers and universities now do.

The underlying grievance is that Paris-

based publishers and academics, by treat-

ing non-French writers as “Francophone”,

are perpetuating a form of neo-colonial ar-

rogance towards them, and clinging to

ownership of the French language. Some

such writers cannot believe they are still

fighting the battle waged by Salman Rush-

die 30 years ago against the concept of

“Commonwealth literature” in writing in

English. Mr Mabanckou, who prefers to

consider his work part of “world litera-

ture”, looks back at a figure such as Léopold

Senghor, the Senegalese poet who was

elected to the Académie Française, as ulti-

mately a defender of French interests.

For some African writers whose mater-

nal language is a local tongue, the very pro-

lish). He is unapologetic about breaking

into English, even on home soil. Nor does

he side with purists in seeking to protect

the language from mutation. Cardinal

Richelieu founded the Académie Fran-

çaise in 1635 to render French “pure”; to this

day it devises French neologisms for inva-

sive English terms, such asmot-dièsefo r

hashtag ormégadonnéesfor big data. Mr

Macron argues that “French is not a closed

language” and should be fluid. Read Rabe-

lais, he says, to see that French itself was

built on patois and vernacular tongues.

He has no hang-ups about redefining

French culture, either. While campaigning

for the presidency, he appalled traditional-

ists by declaring that a single “French cul-

ture does not exist”. Itis not a rigid object,

in his view, to be left to gatherdust and dis-

play in a glass cabinet. Rather, French cul-

ture is “a river nourished by numerous

confluences”, as much by Marie NDiaye, a

part-Senegalese author, as by Victor Hugo.

Merci, mais non merci

It came as something of a surprise to fans

of his capacious approach to find it reject-

ed by some of the very writers he seeks to

embrace. In January Alain Mabanckou

(pictured), a Congolese writer who in 2006

won the PrixRenaudot, a literary prize, for

“Memoirs of a Porcupine”, said he would

not take part in the president’s project to

renovate La Francophonie, a grouping of

French culture wars

The river and the sea

PARIS

Emmanuel Macron’s bid to enlarge French culture has caused controversy—and not

as he might have expected

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