The candidate of the National Rally (RN) in the presidential election, Marine Le Pen, pledged on Tuesday, February 15, to “a great contingency plan” for ” to save “ the French language and the “Protection from external influences” if elected.
His project “will aim to systematically restore the exclusive and irreplaceable use of French in all the uses that found and form our civilization”she said following an external visit to the site of the Cité internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts, in the Aisne, in the company of the RN mayor of the city, Franck Briffaut.
From March 2017, then candidate, Emmanuel Macron had said that during a visit to the castle – abandoned for several years at the time – he wanted it to be renovated to become “one of the symbolic pillars of our Francophonie”.
Built by François Iis from 1532, the building is the place of signature of the so-called ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, signed in 1539: among the 192 provisions then taken by the king, two require legal acts to be “written in French mother tongue and not otherwise”. The decision is primarily a rejection of Latin, which is still widely used, more than a promotion of the French language – the “mother tongue” targeted was still the local or regional patois for many French – but remains a strong official gesture in favor of the French language.
Exclusive use of French in communication and
It is from this symbolic commune that Marine Le Pen deplored, on Tuesday, the fact that France “faced a double cultural and linguistic submersion, the Anglo-Saxon hegemony (…) and the flooding of crops imported en bloc into the territory”. “In some neighborhoods it is not only another France that is settling in, with its own laws, its own customs, its own mores, it is also another language”believes the far-right candidate.
To remedy, “the use of foreign languages in and communication in France will simply be prohibited with very few exceptions”suggests M.me Le Pen, recalling that it would also prohibit “definitely inclusive writing at school, at university, in administrations”.
senior officials “will receive strict instructions to use and defend the use of French”. The RN candidate also promised that she “would carry out a diplomacy of the Francophonie at the height of the historical challenges that we have before us” and would support “the creation of a French-speaking union in the continuity of the current international organization of the Francophonie”.