We may be hearing a lot of French spoken, around Dublin anyway, over the next six months of our Presidency of the EU. And how the French revere their language and guard it. And insist on its place in the world. Quite right. One of their more spectacular and amusing coups on be half of the language occurred over 50 years ago at the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations was established.
Alger Hiss was the secretary general of the conference. He wrote afterwards, in Recollections of a Life (1988), that the French under Georges Bidault, leader of their delegation, "without prior consultation or warning, abruptly asserted French prerogatives by an adroit last minute ploy that succeeded in having French accepted as the second working language". English being the first, naturally in the USA.
Hiss tells how the secretariat had tried to find adequate French interpreters, but the war had scattered "the famous League of Nations interpreters" and the search for substitutes had been fruitless. The French "protested our elimination of their language from the conference, to which we replied that we had no alternative".
Then came the French "ploy", as he called it. At the initial meeting of the steering committee, the US Secretary of State, Stettinius, began by welcoming the guests. He had hardly finished a couple of sentences when a man stepped forward and repeated his words in flawless French. Stettinius, without acknowledging the interruption, went on with what he was saying. Again, after only a few sentences, a man spoke up from the other side of the room, translating into French what Stettinius had said.
When Stettinius asked Hiss what was going on, Hiss records "I replied that we had just been outwitted by the French, and that I thought we should accept their `victory' as gracefully as possible by promptly making French the second working language of the conference. It was evident that the French had been more successful than we in rounding up qualified French interpreters."
A man who had sat for years on an international committee, which was supposed to be bilingual in French and English, noted what he called "a certain linguistic imperialism" in that anyone who preferred to speak in English, be he or she English, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek to whatever, would be asked sympathetically by the French, "So you don't speak our language very well?" Meaning for what other reason would anyone not prefer French?