Ah, dictation! This exercise has become the symbol, for many, of our childhood on the benches of school. Mandatory passage to obtain the certificate of studies (abolished in 1989 by Lionel Jospin), the use of dictation became widespread in France in the 1850s. To the point that it was part of the pastimes of the court of Emperor Napoleon III, who had submitted to the famous dictation attributed to Prosper Mérimée. Result: the emperor made 75 mistakes, the Empress Eugenie, 62, Alexandre Dumas son, 24! Only one foreigner, the Prince of Metternich, the Austrian ambassador, had made only 3, according to sources in the National Library of France.
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The French language is full of subtleties. For example, do you know how to conjugate the verb "resolve" to all the people in the present tense? How is the adverb derived from the adjective "ardent" written? What about the adjective "common"? This is a small overview of the exercises that our grandparents or great-grandparents faced at school.
Would we have been able to get a 10/10 at this dictation from the 1930 school certificate? Le Figaro offers you to carry out this test to verify it.
