The Battle for Communist Linguistics
An often underrated aspect of the turmoil of our time is linguistic, and some astute minds have been keen to capitalize on this. One of those minds is known as Jacqueline Delbon. A French teacher from Belgium, Delbon spent most of her life wondering about the fate of language, and it was always her ambition to have a part in it. As it turns out, the conditions were favorable to her. The conservative elite from the Académie Française, being too conspicuously right-winged for an increasingly communist-leaning France, had been failing to gain traction in their mission to preserve the historical, literary language. This left the position of “French linguistic authority” partially vacant.
In the meantime, Delbon had cultivated a keen expertise in navigating the political ambiguities embodied by the French “colonial communism” of her time. Seeing an opportunity for herself, she founded her own publishing house in 1925, soberly calling it Delbon Éditions, but somewhat pompously advertising it as “the pathway to the future French language”. Delbon’s first publication “Le français d’aujourd’hui” (“Today’s French”), an equivocal textbook, enjoyed decent success. It was purchased by teachers throughout the Republic, by second-language learners in the colonies, and sometimes out of curiosity in the higher classes.
Delbon continued to make a modest living from teaching and publishing until 1930, when the public debate about the French language suddenly was thrown wide open. That year, the French Minister for Education Martin Cassaneaux declared in a controversial allocution that “the French-speaking world ought to be unified, and the colonies scoured of the deformed speeches that are thriving overseas under the laxist, communist-pleasing policies”. All of the sudden, “Today’s French” was brandished as an argument from both sides, becoming more central to the question of “what to do with French?” than the Académie itself. For a while, keeping the Republic under a single banner and a standardized language, as imperialists would have it, seemed the right option to preserve its unity and prestige. Indeed, if those values were not particularly sought after by the communists, they still served as a common benchmark for most of the world, and France simply could not appear as a regime that did not care to have a coherent, well-hierarchised society of its own. What would come off as a sign of vulnerability in peacetime would be too much of a risk in wartime.
Delbon lacked a political mind and a clear opinion of her own in the matter, but she was again eager to reap the perks of the dissent. She thrived as the fulcrum upon which communist policies had diverged in the recent years, forming three main factions:
- the Pioneers – the early day communists, or Radicals;
- the Compromisers – a moderate wing that think it more prudent to appear as conservatists, while retaining some or most of the original ideology;
- and the less popular NER (“la Nouvelle Étoile Rouge”, the New Red Star), a group of parties spanning from centrism to the far-right which proclaim an imperialistic approach of communism in the name of “spreading it and keeping it alive through adversity”.
In the wake of such political paradoxes, Delbon Éditions has known great success in publishing extraordinarily contradictory works. NER members came to prize their copy of “Le français universel”, endorsed by Cassaneaux himself, who proposed standardization methods for French worldwide; while their opponents praised “Le français colonisé”, a sensible piece of work exploring the risks and social issues associated with exporting and imposing French abroad. She would sometimes publish two politically opposed versions of the same book. Pretty soon, it seemed that there was a Delbon manual or essay for each and every political leaning.
Thanks to the social skills of its founder, who was able to lure all kinds of more or less great thinkers into having their ideas printed, Delbon Éditions became successful as a platform for anyone wanting to speak up on the subject of the French language and colonialism at large, regardless of their political tendencies. If Jacqueline Delbon herself is more likely to go down in history as an opportunist than as a skilled editor or a relevant linguist, her lack of clear political leaning has made her work wholly remarkable, and perhaps ironically objective. It embodies the language problem of our time, not so far off from accurately showing the pathway to future French, in all its chaos and contradictions. Come what may, the ongoing success of her company is telling us of the many social dilemmas that still lie ahead of us, and linguists are pretty happy about it.
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