La Honte et le Châtiment - Shame & Punishment (2024)
Rozenn Milin
This tells the story of how & why France suppressed language minorities within its borders & in its colonies, and how people such as the Breton people decided not to pass on their own language to the next generation.
This book was written as the final thesis of Breton Linguist Rezenn Milin, that tries to answer a question that basically goes like this : how and why did the Breton people quasi-lost their language other the course of the last century ?
The book treats about language substitution, and even though the Breton language and context are central throughout the book, she also explores the way France treated her colonies’ native languages and how similar the methods were used, yet how the outcomes expected and obtained differ.
Even if it is an academic book, and the reading of it at times is very exhaustive - as in, citing the methodology and everything, it really is readable for anyone interested in this specific question of language substitution, especially in the case of France and its territories.
Because the way France treated its territories IS specific.
The French language one thinks about and most probably most French people you know speak, even if there is obviously differences in how they speak it because of their backgrounds, class, gender and such, but in any case the French that is taught in school, is a version of French dialects that was imposed from the capital area to the rest of the territories - would their « dialect » be related to it or not.
Now this is Etienne speaking, not the author, but one thing to remember is that this is not necessarily the case everywhere.
Nepal has various languages one learns depending on their ethnicity & cast, as well as Nepali, for communication between each other. The people are, and the nation is, bilingual.
It is to a certain extend the case in Spain as well, even if Spain also imposed the Castellano to other territories, regional languages - Euskara, Asturianu, Gallego, Catalan…- still are quite strong relatively speaking - yet one speaks Castellano too.
The author shows, and we’ll develop that later, that in most African colonies of France, other vernacular languages such as Wolof, Sereer, Peul, etc. coexisted and still coexist alongside with French (or English for that matter, in other parts of the continent).
Then there’s places like Switzerland, India or Belgium, where people speak complete different languages, without any unifying language that is proper to them..!
Many places in the World don’t need to impose one language to be a nation.
Rezenn Milin shows that the intent of France’s territories necessarily adopting one (and only one) language is historically dated to the events called the "Terror" period of the first Republic, starting in 1793. For the Republicans, it was vital to prevent any counter-revolutionary ideas that they wouldn’t understand to spread, the Republic and therefore its people had to speak one language, the one of the ruling class, Parisian French.
To do so, France would pass a number of laws, intensifying under the 3rd Republic and the obligation & gratuity of public schools (1882), where teachers would implement a number of practices that would durably influence the way regional, vernacular languages such as Breton, but also Basque, Occitan, Gallo, Catalan and many others would (not) develop.
She insists a lot on the practice of the « symbol », inherited from Roman times when Latin had to be learned by the elite throughout Europe, a continent with many different languages.
The use of the « symbol » in the 19th and then 20th centuries took many forms and was called different things in diverse contexts.
It was most often a degrading and stigmatizing object tied around school kids’ necks - « la vache » was often a sabot - broken wooden shoe - in Bretagne ; a small wooden plank with « WELSH NOT » inscribed on it was used in Wales ; monkey skulls were reportedly in use in Senegal.
If kids were surprised using their native tongue, they would be given the « symbol ». The only way to get rid of it was to give it to another kid, while surprising him using his native tongue himself. The last kid with the symbol at the end of the day would be punished by the teacher, often with physical punishment as beatings, especially beatings on the hands with rulers, but sometimes taking form of a fee, that had to be asked to the parents of said kid, or suspensions, lines to copy...
Because the interdiction of using vernacular languages extended outside the classroom and into recreation time or on the way to/from school (and sometimes even at home!), school became a ground for delation and deception for many children, making it very hostile to many, especially the ones from disfavored backgrounds & living in the countryside - as vernacular languages were often their only way of expression.
I’m feeling very sad writing these lines.
Also, because the book is very extensive and exhaustive, it is filled with testimonies & anecdotes of what happened in these classes and at homes.
A teacher convoking a father to beat up his own kid in front of the whole school for speaking his language, even though the father spoke very little French himself and the teacher himself would be a Breton speaker.
An old lady turning stone-cold at the mere evocation of the « symbol » 60 years after she left school, and refusing to talk about it.
Stories of incomprehension, stories of abuse, stories of kids choosing silence over the potentiality of other kids denouncing them.
The thing is, according to Milin, that these practices, if they were often cruel, violent & degrading as we’ve seen (very briefly), would often not be enough for in themselves make Breton disappear. As she shows, Breton disappearance would happen in two times, first and foremost because of school, as she says :
- First, children were obligated to make French their only language at school, including in their games; - Then, the practice of the Breton language was associated with the idea of a "fault", of punishment, of beatings, of pain, etc; - School was also the place where kids were humiliated because of their language, and it is there that they started to integrate the shame of speaking Breton; - It is also often by the intermediary of these schooled children that French entered into homes, where it ended replacing Breton; - The exclusion of regional languages from school inferiorized them and made them useless in a good deal of circumstances in life; - The fact that Breton was neither taught, nor studied in school contributed to making it a dialect, which in return slowed down its diffusion.
It is then the internalizing of how shameful one’s own language is, the symbolic violence of it - in French, a very common expression still says « plouc » as a derogative, describing a « good for nothing » person, which comes from the many towns starting in « plou » in Bretagne (because plou means "community" in Brezonegh) and the supposed unproductive nature of it that would be the decisive tool of destruction of the Breton language.
Most kids of this time, when becoming parents in the 50's and 60's would consciously commit a « linguistic suicide », deciding not to pass on their language to their own children, decision many children now grown up regret their parents have made, as the ideas around regional languages changed in the recent decades, but too little too late, as Breton speakers are now only not even 10% of what they were in 1900, to an amount of about 100 000 speakers, and is classified as a "severely endangered" language by UNESCO.
She also dives in the way France used the same methods in its colonies, exploring mostly West Africa and in particular Senegal, even if the intent was not the same and the effects differed greatly.
The methods were, as stated before, remarkably similar, if not even more gruesome. We are talking kids with rotting rests of animals tied around their necks. We are talking about severe beatings, in the intent of making children speak the language of their colonizer.
But it differed in the way that these schools didn’t target all children, but were reserved to a certain elite - an elite that would have to be modeled to be responsive to the interest of France, of course.
The rest of the population, in a very racist way, were viewed as not worthy to be taught a « hierarchically superior language » such as French, and were not brought into schools at all.
Paradoxically, because of this, a relatively big amount of the population in West Africa was therefore able to escape the imposition of the French language, and if French was - and is still - a language used in the administration and many fields, a huge part of the life of the different countries in former West African Colonies was kept in vernacular languages.
This book is a very interesting read about a very sad, violent, unnecessary part of French (and World) history.
Now there seems to be a revival of Brezonegh, as there are language schools, as well as normal schools that dispense bilingual classes (33% of them currently!), and a cultural movement around regional languages.
I write these lines with the hope that reading about history makes us learn about it.