French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a monument to the French language deep in far-right heartland.
Macron used the occasion to wade into a culture war debate, backing a right-wing bill to ban the use of “inclusive language” – a popular trend for using both masculine and feminine versions of words when writing.
France must “not give in to fashionable trends,” he said as he inaugurated the Cite Internationale de la Langue Francaise just hours before the Senate was due to debate the proposed law.
Modern French presidents love a cultural “grand projet” – an imposing monument to “scratch” their name on history, as ex-leader Francois Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Georges Pompidou built a famous modern art museum in Paris, and Jacques Chirac created the Quai Branly global culture museum on the banks of the Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterets while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into an international centre for the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits and cultural events.
Perhaps fittingly, the website seems determinedly uninterested in the quality of its English translations, describing the castle as a “high place of the French history and architecture”.
Is this like Americans using Latinx? Cause that shit’s dumb af and infuriates Spanish-speaking Americans on the daily.
I’m very left-leaning but I’m absolutely conservative when it comes to changing your language just to appease people that don’t even speak it
Very different. In French, you often simply need to add a letter or two at the end of a male-gendered word to make it female-gendered. A lot of our media simply does something like “word(e)”, with the contents of the parenthesis being the additional letters to make a word female-gendered. That way, you can avoid typing mostly the same word twice.
We’ve been doing this for decades, and is absolutely not a new “woke trend” or whatever bullshit Macron seems to believe it is.
“Latinx” was a stupid trend by white Americans to try and bastardized how a language works.