French, English and the ‘Allgood’ law

French has borrowed extensively in recent years from English, and examples are not hard to find: le fast food, le self-service, le showbusiness, people, la musique funky. But these loan words have not been universally welcomed. For many French politicians, these Anglo-Saxon incursions represent a threat to the French language, and indeed to the French way of life, and have prompted legislation.

The Bas-Lauriol law of 1975 proscribed the use of non-approved loans in certain contexts, notably in tendering for public contracts and in broadcast media, but foundered (ironically enough in Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ year, 1984) over the prosecution of a Paris furniture salesman, Hugues Steiner, for selling his merchandise from a place he called Le Showroom and not La Salle d’Exposition as required. The prosecution failed, and Steiner, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly compared what he saw as attempts to shackle his free expression to the language purification policies followed by Nazi Germany.

A more ambitious law, passed in 1994 by the then Culture minister Jacques Toubon (inevitably dubbed ‘Monsieur Allgood’ in the French popular press), proved equally controversial. Parties of the right and far left, for different reasons, approved the measure, but objections from centrists and the Socialist party were upheld by France’s Constitutional court, on the grounds that the constitutional right to free speech could not be maintained if the state dictated the words in which it could be expressed. This left an awkward legal limbo in which public sector employees were obliged to use the prescribed terms, but restrictions were not extended to the private sphere. As Rodney Ball (1997: 214) points out, this means that a car salesman may vaunt the advantages of un airbag, but the official from the ministry of transport checking the specification of the same vehicle must refer to un coussin gonflable.