After a period or at the beginning of a proper name, the use of capital letters is obvious.
However, other uses raise some questions.
Indeed, have you ever wondered whether to write the “Municipal council” or the “municipal council”?
Or "People from the East" or "People from the East"?
In certain situations, the choice between a capital letter and a lower case becomes difficult.
Rest assured, there are rules for successfully deciding.
The editorial staff invites you to (re)discover them, thanks to the
Petit bon usage de la langue française
, by Cédric Fairon and Anne-Catherine Simon, based on the work of Maurice Grevisse.
Nouns and adjectives
The capital letter is used for the names of countries and peoples when they do not have an adjectival value and when they do not designate a language: we note "Brittany and the Bretons" but "the Breton people speak Breton".
As a general rule, only the noun is capitalized unless the adjective that accompanies it is before the noun: one writes "the French Army" or "the Armorican Massif" but "the Second World War" and "the Middle Ages ".
Literary and artistic works
The titles of literary and artistic works must also be written with a capital letter on the first word:
Rimbaud's
Drunk Boat , Botticelli's
Spring
... The same applies to the names of newspapers (
Liberation
), film titles (
Que la fête begins
) and the songs (
Milord
).
If the title of the work begins with an indefinite article (un, une, des), only the article is capitalized:
Un long dimanche de fiançailles
;
on the other hand, if the article is definite (the, the, the) it is customary to capitalize the following word when the title is short: we write
La Marseillaise
mais
L'insupportable Légère de l'Etre
.
Titles, concepts and institutions
We use the capital letter to mark a word in a function or a title when addressing someone: Madam, dear Sir (in a letter or an email), the Prime Minister, the Judge.
Thus the word “president” is written in lowercase except when one addresses “Mr. President”.
Abstract concepts (Good and Evil), literary trends (Romanticism) and historical events (the French Revolution, June 18, etc.) are capitalized.
The names of institutions finally take a capital letter if they are unique in the country: one writes “the École Normale Supérieure” and the “Constitutional Council” but the “regional council” and the “mairie de Paris”.
Geography
The cardinal points (north, south, east, west) are capitalized only when they designate a group of regions (the people of the North) or a group of countries (the countries of the South).
When, on the other hand, one writes: “the north of France”, the cardinal point does not take a capital letter.
The words “Atlantic”, “Pacific”… always take a capital letter.
Also the names of towns, even when they are connected by hyphens: "La Roche-sur-Yon".
Calendar and religions
For religious or civil holidays, the norm is to capitalize if the name contains a single word (Christmas, Easter) and to capitalize only the most specific word (New Year's Day, the music).
Day names are written in lowercase except for specific days.
Example: International Women's Day.
Finally, the words relating to the sacred all take a capital letter: the Bible, God, the Word, the Creator, the New Testament, Allah, Buddha...