Pardon My French

A few weeks ago, France’s Minister of Culture, Édouard Geffray, tightened the standards for the baccalaureate exam, which French high school students must take to advance to higher education. Now, no matter how impressive a student’s conceptual mastery of a given subject may be, if their written treatment of it contains too many language errors, they’re flunking.

“Any paper that does not reach a sufficient level in terms of spelling, syntax, and grammar cannot receive a passing grade on the baccalaureate,” said the minister, quoted in Le Monde. This goes for math and science too, even if one big appeal of both of those fields is how they are said to transcend language and culture. (My former professor Donna Haraway would thoroughly disagree with that notion, but I digress.)

Geffray’s turning of the screws comes as pass rates for le bac have been steadily rising, even as French students’ spelling errors have been too. (A 2023 IFOP study noted that 5th grade students now are making twice as many dictation mistakes as they did compared to 1987.) The causes for this could be legion, argues linguist Patrick Charaudeau: texting has changed young people’s approach to language; performance is predictable along socio-economic lines; classroom size is increasingly unmanageable. Whatever the reason, it has caused (mostly) right wing critics to cry grade inflation and wring their hands over slipping standards.

It was ever thus. France has a whole institution, the Académie française, dedicated to policing the language because French is, on its own, an absolute shit show. The extreme variety of silent consonant endings, the lack of logical rules for how word endings evolved over time, the preponderance of irregular verbs, the haphazard assignment of gender for nouns with only a few predictable identifiers like the -tion ending, make the language extremely difficult to hack for natives, let alone anyone not born to it.

It is little wonder so much English creeps in, especially in business, where you will hear words like “meeting,” “briefing,” and “call” used constantly, albeit pronounced in French. English is short, to the point, generally easy to spell, syncretic and proud to be flexible. Just look at the size of the Oxford English Dictionary, which throws a party every time it adds a word. The Académie française’s role is to exclude, not to add. It’s as if simply maintaining the language requires constant vigilance against entropy.

I don’t remember English class ever being as rote and punishing as what my stepkids endured throughout their primary and secondary education. Granted, I was in artsy gifted magnet programs and private schools, but we did very little memorizing other than a couple poems. Literature was used more as the basis of discussion than rote repetition. There was precious little copying and recopying of homework, like my stepkids had to do many times a week for years. Our math homework wasn’t downgraded because we didn’t punctuate our word problems correctly. Teachers didn’t have access to our notebooks like they did my stepkids’, who had to put even their in media res scrawl up for surveillance.

Maybe I’m just mad at French right now for personal reasons. Remember that language test I had to take for my citizenship application? The results are in and they are not stellar: of the three separate criteria, my spoken French is great. My writing is average. My comprehension, which included the same dreaded dictation exercises that fuck up so many French schoolkids, barely passed. Thankfully I submitted my dossier before outgoing Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau’s reform raising language standards went into effect, or my mere B1 level would no longer cut the moutarde. I remind you that I am a professional writer.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but then if you want to put your ego in check, immigrate somewhere as an adult. Bonus points if your new country’s language is tricky, and you only started learning it upon arrival. Double bonus points if you earn your living in the communication arts and have a quite literal investment in expressing yourself clearly, correctly, and with authority. Show up in France in your 30s like I did, or older, and any smugness you may have accumulated over time will evaporate like the steam on your shockingly astringent Café Richard espresso.

Some years ago, when I was still living in Paris as a carefree singleton making the most of the apps, there came a point when I could finally conduct a romantic relationship in French. I met a dude, let’s call him Bertrand. He looked like Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a colorful scarf, made a decent living in IT and lived near me. I was happy when we hit it off because I had been on an extended dry spell. Bertrand invited me over to his grimy one-bedroom on the other side of the Butte Montmartre from me, made me a fairly convincing Thai dinner, and we talked about politics as well as I could manage. He was a good kisser.

After a couple weeks I decided to introduce him to my friend Juliette. She grew up in Brittany and lived in Paris but somehow spoke impeccable English, which is how we were able to form such a close friendship when I first showed up speaking no French. The night Bertrand and I had dinner at her place was one of the first times she and I would spend an evening in her mother tongue. At some point before we had finished our main course, I had mostly zoned out in the way that neophytes in another language only can. I took a break from the conversation and let their discussion mostly wash over me, so I barely noticed that Juliette was becoming exasperated with my new swain after a while. I figured we had all had too much to drink and called it a night.

The following day, I called Juliette to thank her, and she laid it out for me point blank: “Alex, if your French was just a little bit better, you’d see what an idiot this guy is.” It didn’t take me too much longer to figure it out on my own, thankfully.

Being thrust back to childlike beginner status when everyone else with as many grey hairs as you is grownup and advanced causes emotional dissonance. When you get to a certain age, you have achieved some bossing-people-around privilege. That, too, goes out the window when you cannot demand things with your full chest because your interlocutor is snickering at your faulty grammar/pronunciation/ability to discern between, say, a fruit spread and a condom.

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Correcting is epidemic here. Perhaps because they endured so much of it themselves as younger people, French people will cut you off in mid-sentence to right your linguistic wrongs, often with no apology. This is usually done with a mind to help, not flex, but the humbling comes nevertheless. I have been enduring it consistently for 20 years now, because I still make a lot of mistakes.

Correcting doesn’t just happen from French person to foreigner. I have witnessed countless political arguments on social media—exchanges that usually escalate from zero to 60 in a single back and forth—devolve when one poaster goes on a tangent criticizing their opponent’s wording. It sort of kills the thrill of the clapback when everyone takes a time out to get out their red pens, clear their throats and call the grammar police.

A lack of mastery upsets some power dynamics that exist for good reason. I stepmothered my aforementioned two stepkids for seven years. I got lucky, because while they were sassy and iconoclastic and scrappy, they rarely defied me. (They were also really good in restaurants.) I chalk this up to their parents’ excellent training, which included deference to adults on principle.

While I was never technically their parent, as part of the village that raised them for a time, I brought my own Californian, 1970s transactional analysis-spiked flavor, which was respected by my fellow adults. (If you have never seen the book TA for Tots and Other Prinzes, the ultimate transactional analysis teaching tool for kids, you probably don’t know why you have been saying “warm fuzzies” all these years. Rectify that!)

For me, the ideal mode of defusing conflict was to sit down and talk about it. To urge the use of “I” messages, not “you” messages, and dampen insult in favor of calm sharing. To be the adult referee that pulls off such a delicate balancing act requires holding the room, which is hard to do when you’re stuttering and grasping for words. It just takes too long to spit anything out and by then you’ve already lost the kids.

It’s even harder when faced with a truly chaotic situation—like having to break up a pre-teen fistfight in the backseat of a car while driving too fast towards the Malaga airport late for a plane. On that occasion, all Madame Use Your Words could do was quickly turn around and throw a flip-flop at them to try to break it up. What I really needed was a hose.

When fighting with my ex, which happened far too often towards the end of our couplehood, my ability to speak French abandoned me entirely, right when I needed smooth retorts the most. He would yell in French, and I would return fire in English. He understood English well enough to know the gist of what I was saying, but there was no chance he would have understood how exactly right my choice of words was on every occasion, nor how exactly right my point always was. His loss!

Since I stopped living in a predominantly French household, my abilities have badly faltered. Now I can go all day without speaking to anyone, and I do not sit around listening to French podcasts, even though some of them are excellent. My vocabulary has slipped, and my spoken spontaneity as well. I am more obtuse to subtleties, and so I am blunter in my self-expression. Luckily the maximiens I am closest to are tolerant, even though Cassandre takes issue with the pseudonyms I have chosen in this newsletter because they are not quite nailing the spirit of things. “Saint-Maxime sounds too posh,” she said to me the other night. “You need a jollier name for us.”

I will happily take suggestions.