Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on March 18, 2022. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
The French language is continually evolving and adapting; that’s a fact. But how will students be able to realize this if they are deprived of the intelligence of the language, which is based on knowledge of its history? The CAPES reform eliminated the Old French test, which allowed future teachers to learn the grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary of medieval French.
As a result, French language history courses are threatened or disappearing in all French university literature degrees. So, what will the French teacher answer when a middle school student asks him why the plural of cheval is chevaux and not chevaux? Will we oppose the automatic logic of a spell checker (“that’s how it is”) to children and adolescents who rightly expect their teachers to answer questions appropriate to their age: Who? How? Why? These students’ questions, despite their naivety, demonstrate more intelligence than the experts in pedagogy who take away from teachers any means of responding to curiosity and justifying the many oddities that only find meaning in history.
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Removing the majority of the history of the language test from the recruitment competition for French teachers is to deny the importance of history and to confine teachers and their students to the absurdity of rules whose meaning they can no longer grasp. It is also to prevent students from understanding the changes underway in our relationship to the language and its written materials. It is the differences that measure time and allow us to perceive change. Without being able to rely on a knowledge of the past of the language, of the previous states of French, of the old relationships between the spoken and written language, students are prisoners of the instantaneous and of a contemporary state of French, without being able to appreciate the important changes underway not only in the French language itself, but in our relationship to the language.
How old is French literature? More than a thousand years. It is a long and beautiful story that begins at the same time as the country becomes aware of its unity. But it is also a European story: the prestige of French culture and literature had a profound impact on England and Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in the Middle Ages, making Old French a common heritage whose masterpieces are preserved in Oxford as well as Turin. The English and German vocabulary have inherited a large number of French words from the Middle Ages. The history of French and European literature becomes incomprehensible if we deny access to the medieval source.
But some pedagogues explain that these are a lot of books to read: they mean by that that it is too much. They think like inquisitors that it is necessary to empty the libraries of all this paperwork which encumbers them; and at the same time as they empty the shelves, they exhaust the skills of the students and at the same time make sure that they burn the books that no one will be able to understand them any more.
What better way, so much more effective than the auto-da-fé, than to make books incomprehensible and to make literature inaudible because it is unreadable? These iconoclasts of a new kind, who have only the words of inclusivism and sociability on their lips, are, in reality, the collaborators of a crime. The one that consists of consigning to oblivion the dead who had only books to reach us. Old French is, therefore, an old thing to be eliminated by the bureaucrats of our administrations. They make it disappear from the competitions as they had already done for the ancient languages, Latin and Greek.
What does this mean in concrete terms?
Today, it is still considered that a young literature teacher must be able to read all the books written in French since the existence of French, and we do not resign ourselves to the fact that he only understands what modernity has produced since, say, the Industrial Revolution. In competitive examinations, a significant place was reserved for this skill of reading and interpreting ancient texts; we dared to think that a Professor could read the Roman de Renart or The Song of Roland alone. This made it essential for any student of Literature to study the Language and Literature of the Middle Ages—that is, a little over a thousand years of literary production.
Now, we see teacher training programs – which had long since made Latin completely optional – do without the study of the medieval language. The reform of the Capes and its regionalization envisaged by Emmanuel Macron accelerated this movement: the test is now nothing more than a small test on historical semantics that a student can answer without ever having studied Latin; without knowing anything about Romance languages and, to be honest: without having ever read a book before Zola. Thus, in Parisian universities such as the University of Paris 3, a student can perfectly well complete a full course in Literature with the option “teaching professions” with only one annual course devoted to the language “from the Middle Ages to the Classical Age” as his only historical background. At Paris 8, the compulsory courses include methodology courses, or courses that focus on “cultural transfers” or that “connect literature with other artistic practices, in particular by questioning the verbal and the visual”. But medieval literature and language? We can do without it. In another Parisian university, the complete Bachelor’s degree course only includes 18 hours of old French over three years of classes.
But let’s not worry: they are, on the other hand, perfectly trained in “Digital Humanities” or in “Didactics” or in “Francophone French Literature”—with an “s” because the plurality of the language is no longer thought of except in space.
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Today’s teachers are tomorrow’s students. Can we imagine a world where the only skill of French teachers would be to be able to read contemporary editorial production? It is undoubtedly a fantasy of the Market to train only good clients. But is our democracy intended to play the game of this acculturation? The candidates for the presidential election are arguing, in inclusive writing, about the origins and the future of our common destiny.
Cancel Culture, the auto-da-fé of the modern world, no longer stands in public: it has become a bureaucratic process of leveling culture that ensures the invasion of common law against continental law and that rewrites the schools of tomorrow in the light of a subversive model that eliminates Chaucer from English universities; and that makes Chrétien de Troyes and Renart disappear from the French cultural landscape.
When these thousand years of history have fallen, what will remain to defend?
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Image: “Vintage french dictionary pages” by Liz Eckman on Flickr