Pave: As He Was Saying...

Le jour 213 de Sarko

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898),
novelist
Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1872), Ch. VI

Political language is a sort of agreeable froth thrown off by the hard politics roiling below. Whether the politics are for good or for bad, the froth is usually pleasant and indeterminate, inspiriting and empty, florid and banal, grand and petty. [Pause.] Sometimes it is astonishing, sometimes inenarrable. [Pause.] It fills a half hour with talk without the danger of saying anything.

What political speech most often is NOT is plainspoken -- a string of plain words strung into an unequivocal and intelligible report.

With all this in mind, we thought the title below promising.

French Political Language
THE DECLINE OF THE ABSTRACT NOUN
What A Reduction In Abstraction Says About The New France

PARIS December 13, 2007 (The Economist) - Of all the novelties of France under President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the more arresting is the decline of the abstract noun. In the past, no French leader would make a speech without liberal doses of destiny and history. In one speech Mr Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, squeezed 13 abstract nouns—unity, liberty, humanity and more—into a single sentence. He was almost outdone by his prime minister (and part-time poet), Dominique de Villepin, who came up with the declaration: “Globalisation is not an ideal, it cannot be our destiny.”*

The contrast with the wordcraft of Mr Sarkozy is instructive. In his first big foreign-policy speech, he managed in 18 pages to utter neither the word glory nor the word grandeur. Unlike his British counterparts, who favour verbless sentences, Mr Sarkozy is a verbaholic. According to a linguistic analysis of his campaign speeches by Damon Mayaffre, of the University of Nice, one of Mr Sarkozy's most frequent words is I, usually followed by the verb want.

What does this say about France? One answer is that the country has a hyperactive president, constantly on the go, who expects the French to be so too. “Work more to earn more” was his slogan, and his use of verbs matches the message.

... Another explanation is that Mr Sarkozy is challenging the French tradition of conceptualism. Intellectuals, long cherished by the establishment, get short shrift now. ... This week, Mr Sarkozy sneered at French philosophers during the visit of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi to Paris, accusing them of sipping coffee in Left Bank cafés while others got things done.** As for France's famously rigid school curriculum, he has little fondness for it. Too much time is spent, he has declared, “on doctrine, theory and abstraction”, and not enough on practical applications.

Alas. [Plaintive pause.] This fluff simply fails to deliver the advertised goods. Once past its opening paragraphs, the theme changes to Sarko's metabolism then it's Sarko's disdain for café intellectuals. There are no convincing quotes to illustrate the article's claims. For example, the article claims Sarko is a "verbaholic" yet none of the quotes on offer is particularly verby.

Our own observation about Sarko's speeches is that they tend to be narrative. He likes to tell a story in which he can present France as a character. We believe he likes stories because things happen in stories, that there are characters in stories, the characters have relationships, and things come to a point by the last page.

Jack and Dom on the other hand spent the first twenty minutes of their speeches just acknowledging those in attendance. Then, each in his own special style, they would dissertate about grand old France, a nation dizzy with glories, and the fabulous French, a people burden by superlatives.

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* PARIS June 8, 2005 (BBC) - Speech before the Assemblée nationale upon assuming the premiereship. The quote in full:

They [scil., the French] defend a particular vision of humanity, with its rights and duties, and reject the sole validity of the logic of the market and globalisation. The French know it and say so forcefully: globalisation is not an ideal; it cannot be our destiny. They expect us to affirm our values. ... Europe has been built on the economy and pragmatism. Now its peoples are demanding more humanity, more protection, greater job security, greater attention paid to environmental issues, a better defence of the values of respect and equal opportunities. The meaning of Europe can be found in these values. It cannot be constructed through market forces alone.

Yes, well, this horse hockey sounds very grand. Globalization is an economic model, not a moral model. Anti-capitalists, anti-mondialistes, and the caviar gauche love this argument because free-marketeers, not having advanced it, do not defend it.

PFFT (What is this?): Ramble 4 | Rayonnement français 0