In his speech, Macron praised the work of the academy in a way and for reasons that prompted François Alfonsi, the long-standing Corsican Member of the European Parliament, to comment in the Corsican weekly Arritti that Macron is ‘a master of doublespeak, depending on whether he is standing at the podium of the Corsican Assembly or the Académie française’. Macron had said that French is ‘the crucible of the country’s unity’, but the dialects and regional languages were an instrument for dividing the nation.

The association of Breton immersion schools, Diwan, stated that dialects and regional languages do not ‘divide the nation’ but rather ‘strengthen its diversity’. The Council of the Corsican Language expressed a similar sentiment, calling for the promotion of cultural diversity.

‘The strangest thing about Emmanuel Macron’s appearance at the Académie française was that a few moments later he did not hesitate to greet French-speaking speakers in Quebec and call on Quebecers to resist uniformisation by systematically using the French language to counter the dominance of English in a predominantly English-speaking Canada, without anyone pointing out the blatant contradiction,’ writes Alfonsi.

The Corsican politician also points out two other events from the same period. A court of appeal in Marseille ruled that Corsican members of the regional parliament are not allowed to speak in their language, even though their speeches are simultaneously translated into French. The regional parliament had unanimously adopted the relevant rules of procedure. In Toulouse, an identical ruling was made in the case of the Catalan language, because ‘the language of the Republic is French’. ‘The deep state rules and continues its Jacobinical language murder project,’ writes Alfonsi. The Corsican regional authority plans to appeal the rulings all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. ‘On this question of language, an identity issue par excellence, which is crucial for the future of the Corsican people, we are confronted with the most reactionary people in the world. Only China goes this far...’, concludes Alfonsi.

France denies the existence of national minorities on its territory, although a total of around four million Occitans, Germans, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans, Basques, Flemings and Franco-Provençals. The basis of the state is the assumption of a homogeneous nation, although some French people also speak dialects or regional languages. One of the pillars of this principle was the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts, issued in 1539, in which King François I decreed that French would be the sole language of administration, marking the beginning of a policy of imposing French as the national language.

Emmanuel Macron’s Janus-faced speech is an expression of this policy. It is not without reason that he explicitly paid tribute in his speech to the former permanent secretary of the Académie française, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who died a year ago. The historian was born in Paris in 1929 as the daughter of a Georgian emigrant with the family name Surabischwili. Throughout her life, she advocated for the exclusivity of French as the state language in France. In 2002, she wrote the following remarkable sentences under the premise that she feared that the supremacy of the French language was in danger: ‘The danger is all the greater today, as the probable development of Europe towards regionalisation and the promised decentralisation in France, which some would like to see extend beyond the political and administrative spheres to include languages, could lead to a weakening of national identity and consciousness. In this already initiated and probably irreversible development, it will be the common language, namely the French language, that alone will embody and maintain the moral and cultural unity of the French. Must it be condemned to share this role with the languages of France, of which there are, moreover, many, so that our cultural heritage and our identity will be lost in a blur? I am not conjuring up a science fiction future, but rather specific projects are insidiously developing in the shadows of some institutions and cliques. Let’s not ignore this danger, let’s save our language while there is still time, because what is at stake is us, our long history, our community life, our identity.’