BRUSSELS LETTER
France is not disarming. While English has imposed itself on all levels of European institutions, both orally and in writing, Emmanuel Macron, like many of his predecessors at the Elysee Palace, continues to fight for the language of Molière do not disappear from community forums.
A few weeks before the French presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), in the first half of 2022, the government is preparing a new offensive. In a press release dated October 22, published after the submission of a report on “Linguistic diversity and the French language in Europe”, the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, and his French-speaking counterpart, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, have announced “A multi-year action plan” to promote multilingualism in Brussels.
There is something quixotic in this fight, it seems so lost. “The place of the English language within European institutions has become preponderant, even hegemonic”, write the authors of the report, who worked under the direction of Christian Lequesne, professor of political science at Sciences Po Paris. A few figures allow us to measure to what extent the 23 other official languages of the EU have in fact almost disappeared from the community landscape. And French, even if it resists better than the others, is no exception.
Thus, at the Commission, where the draft directives are prepared, in 2019, “3.7% of documents sent for translation had French as the source language, against 85.5% for English”, notes the report. Twenty years earlier, 34% of them were written in French before being translated. In the Council (which represents the Member States), it is even worse: in 2018, 95% of the writings were first in English, 2% in French … The European Parliament has resisted better but the decline does not seem no less inexorable. In 2019, only 11.7% of documents were written in French.
“Victor Hugo would be very disappointed”
In this landscape so little Francophile, the Court of Justice of the EU is an exception: there is only one language of deliberation, and that is French. Debates are held regularly to know if it would be advisable to introduce another which would be English, but until now Paris has kept the exclusivity. This does not go without posing very concrete problems for the Luxembourg Court: as the report by Christian Lequesne points out, this situation gives rise to “A difficulty in recruiting. The pool of judges and collaborators (in particular referendaries) is mechanically reduced due to the need to recruit people who already have a very good level of French ”.
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