“Yes, I speak English, Wall Street English!”

It is at times difficult for me to believe that my last trip to France was in 1992. Like now, I was in Paris doing research during the unrelenting gloom of winter. I fully expected to be back in the next few years as I had already been to France in 1989 for a month with my friend Tony visiting his family. It seemed reasonable to expect another trip in the next year or two. But life, school, work, and a hundred other interruptions intruded and a long fourteen years went by.

The reason for this introduction is that those fourteen (or seventeen) years at least have given me perspective on how France has changed during that span. One cannot underestimate the influence of the oft-used word “globalization.” Just casual observation on the street sees Ipods everywhere, Google as the homepage of many computers, three or four “McDo” on the Champs-Elysées, the occasional Starbucks, “Seinfeld” on television, and so on. And, since I strongly believe that consumption helps to produce identity—“I consume, therefore I am”—people across the world are now consuming many of the same things. Certainly, they may not be consuming them in the same fashion, i.e., differing habits of using cell phones, et cetera, but in general we have witnessed an extraordinary homogenizing of world society in the last forty years.

Certainly, none of this is new as globalization began a couple of million years ago as the first humans left Africa. Of course, what is different now is the pace of this change and the corporatisation of the world. A brief history lesson…

How long has France been French? Certainly, one can debate the idea of nationalism and national identity, but in the most basic sense one could say France has only been French for a hundred years--see Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Before this period one could claim with some justification that France was a collection of regional dialects: French, Provençal, Italian, Breton, German, Flemish, Basque, and Spanish. Identity was local: you were from a particular village or maybe a larger region but one did not really think of oneself as French. How did this change? Weber argues three main causes (of course, there are more…): the railway, the army, and a system of national education. Railways unified the country in a physical sense but also allowed relatively cheap travel and gradually broke down the barriers of rural isolation. Mandatory service in the army brought together large numbers of disparate Frenchmen together and stamped upon them a sense of universality. Schools taught from a State-mandated curriculum that preached uniformity and tried to break the regions of their dialects. As a result, even if incomplete, by 1914, France had become much more French as regionalisms eroded and France as a nation, even if then, incomplete, was forged.

Now, one could argue that France is becoming less French. The forces of corporatisation, the world-wide web, and “American media culture” (of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the recording industry) have launched a withering assault on fortress France and all other countries in the world. Certainly, this is no conspiracy but it is the logical victory in some sense of large bureaucratic organizations. Multinational corporations, for example, that operate in many countries demand a level of homogeneity among their branches and employees in terms of sheer efficiencies of scale. UPS trucks in France are brown and one sees brown-clad drivers rushing from building to building delivering their packages. I started service on a French cell phone (a mistake and perhaps more on that in another entry) and the red-clad employees and institutional set up may as well been Verizon. France has seen a real revolution in terms of “customer relations” in the last half century much because of the teachings of American business schools. Typically, when one went to the Galeries Lafayette department store twenty, or more likely forty years ago, trying to get service from a sales clerk was nearly impossible. They may or may not have deigned to serve customers…it depended on whether they felt like it or not. Today, while perhaps not fawning over you, service in general in France has improved tremendously. Anecdotally, I have felt more at ease here than in my last two visits and have not yet have had a person be rude or unkind to me. Even Grizzly Adams’s refusal to do my photocopying came with a grin of general bonhomie.

Furthermore, American media culture is ever-more prevalent in France. What strikes me most now compared to my earlier trips is the simultaneity of the media, and I do not mean the word-wide web. American movies, especially those of the “blockbuster” variety, come out nearly the same day in France as they do in the States. In years past one saw a delay of up to six months. One can make the same statement for popular music as well. Britney, Christina, Madonna, Shania, or whatever flavor of the month is out there, sees their newest massaged and overproduced singles promoted and released at the same moment. I wandered into a French media store, a “megastore” of sorts, and went to browse the compact discs. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the store dedicated 75% of the floor space to Anglo-American pop music. French music, “les variétés Françaises” appeared in a neglected, dimly-lit corner and I found myself browsing for French songs amongst some septuagenarians.

Again, this long-winded introduction brings me to the title of this blog. The Métro is full of advertising posters for the English-language school “Wall Street Institute of English.” Paris itself has more than a dozen of these schools (probably franchised out) and in January I even saw one in Tours near the Institut de Touraine. The advertising posters display handsome, young twenty-somethings smiling at the viewer responding to the question “Do you speak English?” with the reply, “Yes, I speak English, Wall Street English!” The sign also provides helpful translations of these phrases for the slower French—“Parlez-vous anglais? Oui, je parle l’anglais de Wall Street!” The icon for the company is a stylized half-face of the Statue of Liberty (never mind that it is not on Wall Street) peering out at you. It undoubtedly is a great name for a school with the connotations of fortune and success that one might equate with Wall Street (I do not see a company called “Bronx English” doing quite so well. Parlez-vous anglais? Oui, je parle l’anglais du Bronx!) One also sees the claim of a 97% rate of success for their clients. Some fine print explains what that success rate means. I certainly hope that the French equivalent of the “Heathers” are not in those classes.

Obviously, the French have been learning English for years but now increasingly more and more French (those with aspirations of getting an “edge”) are learning English. When I was fumbling to get the dreaded cell phone the clerk broke into childlike English that was the equivalent of my childlike French and this allowed us to finish the transaction much more swiftly. While I do not project the French language disappearing anytime soon one has seen a new class of French willing to embrace English to an extent never before seen--though I wish they would embrace our keyboard layout. The French have long worried about the erosion of their language. Louis XIII established in 1635 a royal defender of the French language, l’Adadémie Française, an institution of forty venerable French men and women (like justices on the Supreme Court, these “immortals” serve for life) of erudition and learning. Even one of the French advertising trade journal columns featured a “debate” in the 1950s about the importation of “Americanisms” into France and its challenge to the language. One of the debaters wisely noted that the French language was a living thing and could well survive the importation of terms such as “le marketing” and still survive.

What has all of this produced? Well, a France that is less “French,” whatever that means, than before. National identity is never in a period of stasis and is always changing: the difference now is that the velocity of change is simply greater. One can certainly criticize the international corporatisation of the world in a lot of ways, though one can also say that no two countries with a “McDonald’s” have gone to war with each other. On the other hand one can lament that a type of Frenchness is evaporating, never to return. I had better get in that two-hour lunch before it is too late. Vive la différence…