France sets new Guinness World Record for the largest spelling contest ever

France set a new world record this month, certified by the Guinness book, for the largest spelling contest ever.

The Avenue des Champs-Elysees was converted for an afternoon into a giant open-air classroom, with 1,779 desks arranged in formation. Fifty thousand people ranging in age from 10 to 90 applied to be among the participants, who were chosen by lottery. Their task? To transcribe dictated texts without error.

In aerial photographs, the desks looked like military units parading on Bastille Day. Observed at closer range, the repurposing of an urban artery was dramatic and incongruous, like Christo’s wrapped monuments or livestock brought to graze in the city by protesting farmers.

The Bic company, producer of the world’s best-selling biros, financed the operation and placed one of its trademark four-colour pens on each desk.

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Novelist Rachid Santaki presided over the event from a stage in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Santaki has organised 180 dictation contests – or dictees – across France in a decade, including the previous world record, broken at the Stade de France in 2018, and the reading of a text by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet which was beamed from outer space to earnest scribes in the Air and Space Museum in 2021. He is holding eight other dictees in France this summer.

The Dictee Geante on the Champs-Elysees on June 4th was divided into three sessions totalling more than 5,000 people. Representing the NGO Libraries Without Borders, radio and television commentator Augustin Trapenard read the first text, by the 19th century writer Alphonse Daudet. It told what a hopping place Avignon was during the rival papacies of the 1300s. Daudet’s text most resembled those traditionally read in French schools.

The second, contemporary text, about the joys of being six years old, was read by novelist Katherine Pancol, while the third, about the sport of rugby, was read by French international player Pierre Rabadan.

Not a single contestant managed to write an entire text with zero errors. The highest score was one mistake. That is much better than Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in 1857, when she persuaded writer Prosper Mérimée to compose a dictee for the court’s amusement. The emperor made 75 mistakes, the empress 62.

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The French language may sound like heavenly music but it is hellishly difficult to write correctly. One must place acute, grave and circumflex accents, indicate whether adjectives and past participles are masculine, feminine, singular or plural. And, there are always exceptions. Apres-midi (afternoon) can be masculine or feminine. Amour (love) is masculine in singular form, feminine in the plural.

Some French people are so daunted by the rules that they fear expressing themselves in any language.

The idea of correct spelling was born with the Academie Francaise in 1637. Nearly 200 years passed until the first dictee was devised in 1821, “to put presumptuous schoolchildren in their place”.

“The dictee is part of French cultural heritage,” Trapenard said later, when I spoke to him on the sidelines of a meeting of the patrons of Libraries Without Borders, which fights illiteracy around the world. “Every French child does the dictee. It is part of l’exception Francaise.”

Despite priding itself on being a book-loving country, France has one of the highest illiteracy rates in western Europe, at 7 per cent, with a huge disparity by region and social class.

Trapenard credits Bernard Pivot, now age 88, with having turned the dictee into a popular parlour game with a televised show from 1985 until 2005. In another sign of France’s attachment to language and literature, Pivot presented a literary chatshow, Apostrophes, every Friday night for 15 years. Trapenard follows in his footsteps, with a prime-time programme called La Grande Librairie.

The Francophone Ivory Coast holds an annual Grande Dictee with cash prizes but there were no trophies on the Champs-Elysees. “Everybody won,” Trapenard says. “It wasn’t about marks but about having fun together, about going back to childhood memories, with nostalgia.”

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As a child, Santaki, now known as Monsieur Dictee, dictated texts to his Moroccan-born father in the Paris banlieue every Saturday.

My friend Anne-Elisabeth performs a similar family ritual with her 12-year-old granddaughter Jeanne, who lives on Vancouver Island, Canada. Every Friday evening, Anne-Elisabeth dictates a literary text to Jeanne over the telephone. “I find it touching to hear her pencil scratching on the copybook, 8,000 kilometres away,” Anne-Elisabeth says. “When it is silent, I ask why she has stopped writing and Jeanne says, ‘because I am thinking’.”

Jeanne sends a photograph of the completed dictee, which her grandmother corrects before calling back. The Franco-Canadian schoolgirl divides her errors into the unavoidable and the unforgivable.