On X, auto-translated from the original French, Guillaume Herblot laments the dynamic, innovative France of fifty years ago in contrast to the sclerotic bureaucratic swamp it is today:

In France, we invented the Concorde.

In 1969, it took off and reached Mach 2, a symbol of Gaullist grandeur, designed to challenge the Americans.

In 1972, the TGV 001 broke the world speed record on turbine power (318 km/h).

In 1981, the electric TGV connected Paris to Lyon at 260 km/h. In 2007, it shattered the world rail speed record: 574.8 km/h.

In the 1970s, the Messmer Plan launched the largest civilian nuclear program in history: 58 reactors, providing up to 70-80% of our electricity, an energy independence that the whole world envied.

Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, SNCF: our engineers were the best. We were ten to twenty years ahead of almost everyone else.

Then 1981, Mitterrand. Massive nationalizations (banks, steel, chemicals, electronics, aeronautics). The 39-hour workweek. Auroux Laws. Exploding social charges. All-powerful unions. Punitive taxation. Rigidified labor laws.

In less than fifty years, socialism transformed a country of conquering engineers into a country of strikes, offshoring, and relative stagnation.

Industry went from about 28% of GDP to 11%.

The Concorde was abandoned. Our nuclear program was nearly dismantled for decades due to deadly political choices.

This isn’t fate; it’s the price of an ideology that preferred to redistribute and regulate rather than build and innovate.

A word to the wise.

On the topic of France and the French, it is rather surprising to find that as recently as the French Revolution, “French” was almost exclusively the language of the court, the mercantile middle classes in urban areas, and the church. Most “Frenchmen” spoke local dialects that had little in common with formal French:

A double guillotine
Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.

Just a few decades earlier [than 1900] the country was still a maze of local languages, while rural areas of 18th Century France were in many ways a foreign country.

“Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect”

In the 1740s, the astronomer Jacques Cassini (son of the more famous astronomer Giovanni Cassini, for whom the saturnal probe is named), sent an expedition out to fully map the country for the first time. When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, “he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence”, author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. (My primary source for most of what follows).

To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible […] The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk-weavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass” (3-4).

The insularity was especially pronounced in this region, the mountainous Massif Central, where “roads and byways came and went with the seasons … rivers were unnavigable” and “links to the rest of France practically non-existent”. Accentuating it was the truculent nature of the locals, who soon hacked Cassini’s geometer to death, apparently believing that a strangely clothed man pointing odd metal instruments at rocks was a sorcerer who was behind recent crop failures. A century later, another geographer said this region was best-viewed by balloon, but “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle” (Robb, 5). But most other parts of France were only a little better. This was a country that was four-fifths rural at the time of the Revolution; “almost a third of the population (about ten million people) lived in isolated farms and cottages or in hamlets with fewer than thirty-five inhabitants and often no more than eight” (Robb, 13).

The French monarchy had tried to impose the French language from above, “requiring priests and those in liberal professions to speak French, and for church registers and public acts to be kept in French”. But “such controls only affected the surface of life in much of France”, Peter McPhee writes in A Social History of France: 1789-1914. “Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect and lived within distinctive cultures of perception, language and ritual.”

Grégoire’s survey

In the first few years of the Revolution, the Abbé Henri Grégoire conducted a survey of language use in the whole country, asking each town hall questions like: “Did the people of the region have their own patois?” and “Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths?”

Everybody knew that the border regions included non-French speakers — Bretons, Basques, Flemings and Alsatians. And much of southern France spoke not French but a different Romance language, Occitan or langue d’oc. But even the ostensibly “French” or “Occitan” areas “turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects”.

In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French’. In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky. (Robb, 50-51)

Though the patois (“‘language’ proper is spoken only in the capital”, the Encyclopédie wrote) were most prevalent in the countryside, peasants weren’t the only speakers.

The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: ‘The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own’. In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and ‘felt ill at ease when speaking French. If certain quartiers of Paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers. (Robb 52)

During the Revolution, in one Gascon département, “priests complained of peasants falling asleep during the reading of decrees from the Assembly, ‘because they [did] not understand a word, even though the decrees [were] read in a loud and clear voice and [were] explained’. In consequence, successive assemblies encouraged the translation of decrees into local languages …” (McPhee, 38).

After his survey — presented to the National Convention on the very same day Robespierre was elected as the convention’s president — Grégoire concluded that “while France was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French-speakers (11 per cent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly”. More than six million couldn’t speak French at all, another six million “could barely conduct a conversation in it” (Robb 53).

In fact, Grégoire’s figures “were almost certainly an underestimate”.

Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the communes in fifty-three out of eight-nine départements were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). Robb 53.

On page 54, he has an interesting map showing the spread of official French and dialects in 1863.