Carl Bergeron is a Quebec writer. Latest book published:
La grande Marie or the luxury of holiness
(Médiaspaul, 2021).
In my country, an “Association of French teachers” denounced the
“dusty language”
that its members would have the burden of teaching and transmitting.
According to his spokesperson, they would dream at night of
“modernizing”
the use of the past participle with the auxiliary avoir to make it invariable.
Teaching rules
"decided 400 years ago"
would take too long, and would not be in tune with the
"reality of young people"
.
The “teachers” no longer know how to do what the “teachers” knew how to do (oh well, what happened?).
It would therefore be urgent, not to correct their pedagogy, but to change the rules of grammar, affecting to soften a language that we have taken care to decree stiffened by the centuries.
O rigid past, what crimes are committed in your name!
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Supposedly elitist, the French language would suffer from comparison with a certain globalized English, which would win the support of trendy youth.
To "adapt" to the Gafam, we would need a "liquid" French, rid of its dross and open to manipulation by linguists, who would take the fold of the world as it is decided in California.
Language is no longer a legacy: it becomes an endless iPhone update.
Such would be the manifestation of the "sense of History", which would place us before the choice of enthusiastic support or embittered exclusion.
The dissenters who would find anything wrong with it would either be delirious circus beasts, whom it would be important to calm down with pedantic appeals to measure, or grumpy people under the yoke of sad passions (it is well known that those who want to subject the language to their political fantasies and call for the social death of their adversaries are merry men).
The lie is adorned with the appearance of evidence, through fake formulas, supposed to introduce new democratic principles, which few citizens will have the idea to question, under penalty of being expelled from the "circle of reason », this new nave of fools.
Carl Bergeron
This is the basis of the revolutionary lie: to declare "dead" as much from the point of view of the sense of History ("dusty"), of democracy ("discriminatory"), of aesthetics ("cheesy") as of efficiency ("useless") what one seeks to liquidate.
The lie is adorned with the appearance of the obvious, by fake formulas, supposed to introduce new democratic principles, which few citizens will have the idea to question, under penalty of being expelled from the "circle of reason », this new nave of fools.
Thus the so-called “inclusive writing”, which lies about what it is, by expropriating the language it sets out to moralize.
Firstly because it is not about writing, but about rewriting, or falsification: the so-called “inclusive writing” is a parasite that grafts itself onto the language to empty it of its meaning – or of its blood. .
The complications it introduces through the back door do not increase the power or the beauty of French, like the "old rules decided 400 years ago", presumed worm-eaten by the uneducated, but multiply in the mesh of the phrase locks them against thought, in the name of virtue.
What does the "Association of French Teachers" tell us when it presents itself under this degraded name, if not that the language it claims is precisely no longer French, as it has been transmitted to us by our ancestors, but an ersatz that promotes the false and prohibits the true?
A non-language, which is not, cannot think and express what is.
It can only ratify the false by making the true impracticable.
And seduce three categories of people: intellectual terrorists, notables who “collaborate” and conformists.
Is the students' apathy really due to the Gafam, to the lack of teaching hours, or to the thinly veiled contempt that adults in authority have for them, who give them cheap and plasticized French, while having the nerve to claim in passing that 1) this is what they are asking for;
2) is this what "today's reality" requires?
What destroys first the springs of the culture, is not such reform or method, but the consent to the lie.
Carl Bergeron
Let's say I offer a teenager the choice between a video game or a Flaubert novel, and he opts for the video game, am I telling the whole truth if I claim that's what he's asking for?
Nothing arouses the apathy of young people more than being placed before inconsistent adults who do not believe in what they must teach and pass on.
What destroys first the springs of the culture, is not such reform or method, but the consent to the lie.
The principle of the revolutionary clean slate rests on the destitution of reality, the depreciation of culture and the calumny of history, as well as on the enlistment of consciences in the construction of the new world.
However, utopia – an abstraction whose contours vary from month to month – demands an ever greater violation of justice, in order to force the impossible coincidence between reality and ideology.
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Two linguists debate
When an association of French teachers assumes the falsification of language even in its name, it does more than give in to it: it consents to it in order to make it a point of doctrine.
It invites its members to hide behind the abstract sign of the collective.
Take the test to see.
Sign up for an association with an “inclusive” name and another with a regular name, and dare to say that you have the same freedom of speech there?
The more ideology progresses in its usurpation of reality and being, the more it claims that reality and being are only a fiction.
The criterion of truth is no longer invoked in the examination of the legitimacy of a statement: "true" is what is worthy of existing, that is, what is deemed ideologically consistent.
Humility in the face of the
given
, whether it comes from nature (sexual difference) or from culture (French language), gives way to a deviant Promethean pride, which claims to be able to do anything: arbitrarily change the rules of grammar;
decreeing the good and the bad, the modern and the old-fashioned;
but also to designate in the city who is the citizen, the resident or the pariah – the intellectual, the polemicist or the fascist.
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Since it has not been given to them to convert hearts, to renew the language
from within
in beautiful works that survive them, they take revenge by “moralizing” and “changing” the heritage from without.
“The-language-that-evolves” is only an alibi.
The French language, this submerged continent and this marvelous garden, which a lifetime would not be enough to explore, even in part (one need only delve into a large Littré tome from the 19th century to be seized with vertigo before what it
can
), is no longer received as an organic reality, co-creation of men and centuries, but as a dusty trinket that can be fiddled with according to one's whims.
It is a whole vision of the world that is revealed.
To open up to the genius of a language or enter into a work, one begins by stepping back and taking off one's sandals.
I am inspired by the allegory of a priest, present at the round table of the "Nuit Pascal"
,
recently organized by
the Figaro Histoire
at the Collège des Bernardins, which evoked for the time not the genius of a language nor the spirit of a work, but the gesture of Moses before the Burning Bush.
“I often wondered, he said according to my memory, what would have happened if Moses had not removed his scandals, if he had not done what the Lord asked of him.”
The priest's answer is extraordinary: “I believe that the Buisson would have simply died out”.
Artificial grafts are included in language that disarticulate and disfigure it, while the integrity of works is violated by excluding everything that expresses the otherness, the “negativity” of existence.
Carl Bergeron
If art and literature are not the sacred, they are its reflections: the Light to which they bear witness wants man to diminish so that It may grow.
It is only on this condition that their flowering can bear fruit and elevate the poor creatures that we are.
However, the usurpers of “inclusive rewriting” refuse to take off their sandals.
They even take pride in it and see it as the mark of their “independence”.
“Inclusive writing” and censorship, “inclusive rewriting” and exclusive rewriting” go hand in hand.
Artificial grafts are included in language that disarticulate and disfigure it, while the integrity of works is violated by excluding everything that expresses the otherness, the “negativity” of existence.
The project: remove the language from its symbolic base to make it a binary code, a series of 0s and 1s responsible for transmitting “information”;
reduce the national languages to the state of mercantile flow (the interchangeable English of the Gafam).
Every day, social media slaves will update their feed to find out who to insult or who to clap, who to lynch or who to worship.
Don't ask yourself if “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” and “person who identifies as a man” or “as a woman” is French and human;
if it sounds right in the mouth and ear of a being with understanding;
but if the same terms in ChatGPT's microphone are plausible.
Tomorrow, the history of peoples will no longer be told with the words of writers and artists, which alone can tell the concrete unity of a destiny, but will be rewritten by a machine with words that do not exist, for the charge with crimes that have been fabricated in the laboratory.
The idol of progress wants it.
Isolated facts, unrelated to each other, will be fused into an abstract unity, to always tell the same “story” (we know which one).
The rest will be dismissed as "mythical fabrication."
Nothing will escape the revisionism of this era which only loves itself and only wants to see in history the confirmation of its superiority.
Quebec and Acadia are the orphans, or the unloved bastards, of an America that could have been Franco-Amerindian, and that the Godon (nickname of the Englishman) parked in enclaves.
Carl Bergeron
I am from Quebec.
It was in the 17th century that our ancestors left France.
A part goes through Acadia, before migrating to Quebec and then elsewhere in America, notably in Louisiana, in the wake of what has been called "the Great Upheaval".
Between 1755 and 1763, Acadia experienced
"large-scale ethnic cleansing"
(John Mack Faragher).
The regime that was put in place after the British Conquest (1760) and, more so, after the crushed Rebellions of 1837-38, was based on English primacy and French servitude.
Survival” which was inaugurated in Quebec in the 19th century, under the aegis of the Church, is not dishonoring but leaves an ambiguous memory.
The drain on this people reduced to poverty was enormous.
While relations with France certainly never ceased during the period, it was not until the 1960s that they took on a more sovereign turn.
I am what the poet Gaston Miron called a "Quebecanthrope", a man who carries in his body, in his mind and in his soul the memory of the humiliated fatherland.
I remember the shame;
I remember hope;
I remember the tongue twisted, locked, knotted by the humiliation of not resembling the master, but also the tongue restored, liberated, untied.
I remember
“the incredible, unimaginable effort it took us to bring ourselves into the world, which sucked us down to our shadows”
(Miron).
But even more, I remember the dream of our fathers and the hearts of our mothers.
I remember the great departures from La Rochelle, Honfleur and Dieppe;
de Champlain and the Grande Tabagie de Tadoussac;
of Marie de l'Incarnation, who came to crown “her little princesses” at the end of the world;
of the Great Peace of 1701, and of Kondiaronk's speech and death;
from Brébeuf and the Great Lakes, from La Vérendrye and the West, from Cavelier de La Salle and the Mississippi;
of Guillaume Couture and the Baron de Saint-Castin, whom the American forest converted and baptized, before making them legendary heroes.
Long before the Hudson River was the Hudson River, the Frenchman, who was already no longer French, sang there on his bark canoe
À la claire fontaine
, like the Canadian he was becoming.
Quebec and Acadia are the orphans, or the unloved bastards, of an America that could have been Franco-Amerindian, and that the Godon (nickname of the Englishman) parked in enclaves.
Result: two centuries after the Conquest and the Deportation of the Acadians, we were "one of the rare places in the world where French is a sign of inferiority", according to Miron in 1981 in
Apostrophes
.
It was four years after the adoption, by Camille Laurin and the government of René Lévesque, of Bill 101, which had put the French language back in its rightful place - the first;
which had not been seen since New France.
The lie of "inclusive rewriting", which seals the alliance of intellectual perversity and worldly cowardice, does not want justice but the parody of justice, to the point of making us forget both justice and the possibility of evil. .
Carl Bergeron
Language, which is symbolic, brings together what has been separated.
Non-tongue separates what had been united, and introduces division by prohibiting all communion.
More than a “cultural war”, we find ourselves in the middle of a metaphysical fight within language itself, between what seeks to unite from above (
symbolus
) and to disunite from below (
diabolus
).
The nihilistic aggressiveness against the language, against the nations and their history is a slap in the face to all the dispossessed, who await the end of the delirium on the periphery of the empire.
In
L'homme rapaillé
("gathered" and, by metaphor: "reconciled"), Miron sees language as the instrument of rediscovered unity.
The poet makes the wounded country appear there, through the “rutted paths of its history / to the men standing on the horizon of justice”: he announces a story of regained dignity which remains to be written, not rewritten.
Revolution occurs when truth and lies become a matter of life and death, according to Solzhenitsyn;
the illusion of the social staging, of the left and the right bursts.
Everyone is sent back to their conscience: should I continue to consent to the lie?
Or should I tell the truth, risking being banished from the city?
In a way, beyond its horrors which are not desirable, one can think like a Berdiaeff that the revolution conceals a hidden meaning, for nations which thought they could live indefinitely on the rent of the past , safe from the trial of freedom and the spiritual struggle for truth.
The lie of "inclusive rewriting", which seals the alliance of intellectual perversity and worldly cowardice, does not want justice but the parody of justice, to the point of making us forget both justice and the possibility of evil .
It's the ruse of the devil, this absolute nerd, to pass himself off as new, he who doesn't know how to create;
who only knows how to parody the Spirit by altering everything he touches and rewrites.
