We must not give up on teaching French

I had to suffer at school. Why shouldn’t my children?

I hated French at school. The subject I dreaded more than any other, it was the only one I really tried hard to revise for at GCSE level, because I just couldn’t accept that I was so bad at it. I ended up with a C — a glorious future in the Foreign Office cut short.

This was even more impressive considering that my mother has a degree in French literature and her mother was an obsessive Francophile, my dad spoke fluent French and we had lots of French books in the home. To add to this, dad also spoke German, Spanish and Serbo-Croat, among other things, and once struck up a conversation with a bunch of Croatian builders who had been working on our building for weeks (much to their horror).

I sometimes wonder if the problem can be traced back to primary school, where my French teacher took a great dislike to me, for some inexplicable reason thinking me arrogant. At secondary school I was no better, and at one parents’ evening when mum asked my Lancashire-born teacher why I had such an aversion to French, he replied: ‘Madame, it is the natural condition of an Englishman.’

Yet as an adult I felt completely different. From my early thirties we started visiting France, taking that epic journey from Calais in our VW Golf with a baby in the back, naively unappreciative of the sheer size of the place (for Americans, about the same as Texas). I still remember the intense sense of tiredness and exhaustion after almost a day of non-stop driving, yet feeling we were towards the end — then seeing a sign showing that we still had another 500 km to go (ie roughly London to Scotland).

It was entirely worth it; it always is. I came to love visiting France, and taking in the sights and smells, the food, and especially the history. I even grew to love the language, a beautiful tongue that will always sound sophisticated and sexy to English ears.

A couple of years later I started French at night school. Before the birth of our first child, I had done a couple of terms of German in the evening, which was both easier and harder; the vocabulary was fairly straightforward, being so closely related (95 of the 100 most common words in our language come from Old English.) But when it came to the grammar, I just wanted to cry. (WHY do you need five different ways of saying ‘the’?)

But French is hard, I never reached proficiency, and I tried again a few years later, to no great success. I can read it reasonably well, but in conversations clam up, and for some reason all I can think to say is ‘Pour aller à la gare?’

French has always been a tricky language for English speakers to master, perhaps in part because of the residual love–hate relationship and the often difficult pronunciation; indeed, even the shapes one’s mouth has to make to speak it feels unnatural. PG Wodehouse famously described the ‘look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French’. More recently, audiences laughed at ‘Allo ‘Allo, with its British spy Officer Crabtree mangling the language in a way that many of us could empathise with. But it is perhaps because it is so hard that we never try.

When my children went to primary school I was disappointed that they learned no French at all, only some Spanish and (impressive for England these days) a little bit of Latin. I decided to send my daughters to French school on Saturday mornings, and then, when those ended, a group tutor. I wanted them to get a grounding in the subject, and I was acutely aware that, since language-learning ability declines sharply with age, by the time they’re in secondary school the battle is already uphill. But perhaps there was also an intrinsically spiteful parental thought that, since I had to suffer, so they should too.

Yet my eldest has no option to learn it in secondary school either, half the children being allocated French and the other half Spanish. This strikes me as sad, but it is hardly uncommon; indeed two in three state secondaries in England now only teach one language.

French proficiency on this island has been in decline ever since the glorious year of 1759, when Britain defeated its rival in the battle for global dominance. Yet in recent years it has accelerated sharply. Just 7,929 people in England and Wales took French-A level in 2022, down from 13,907 in 2010, part of a wider decline in European modern languages learning.

It’s been said that Brexit was in part a product of our inability to master foreign languages, and it is true that the issue did shape Britain’s relationship with the EU. Many of the most influential European founding fathers came from bilingual areas of western Europe, including Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak, Robert Schuman, who grew up in Luxembourg of Alsatian stock, and Tyrolean Alcide De Gasperi. For people in the borderlands, used to conversing in two, three or even four languages, such a union was self-evidently sensible.

Britain could never see the project in such terms, and Edward Heath’s famously bad French seemed to personify our difficulty with membership. Heath’s Europhilia was hugely influenced by his experiences of the Western Front in the Second World War, and a desire to never fight our friends again; but, ironically, his Eurosceptic opponent, Enoch Powell, was one of the last great polyglots in British politics, and spoke French fluently enough to give speeches in it against our membership of the Common Market. Nick Clegg, who can converse in Dutch, German, French and Spanish, is perhaps the only more recent equivalent to Powell in this way, if no other.

But rather than making us insular, it’s just as likely that our monolingualism makes us more globally-minded than the continent, in ways I would not particularly like.

And if blame is to be laid, declining ability in French was accelerated by the Blair government abandoning the requirement for foreign languages at GCSE level, causing the number to drop by almost a half. Perhaps there is something to the argument that the cosmopolitanism of centre-left progressives is quite thin, stemming from a strange lack of interest in the world and its different cultures. But conservatives are no better on this issue, being a problem running right through the British establishment, which is not so much insular as only interested in global affairs when it’s served up in our language.

But one cannot blame Blair for everything, tempting though it is, because this is really part of an unstoppable trend begun by the victories of the Seven Years’ War. The same pattern is also evident in the US, where in just five years French college applications fell by almost a quarter.

It is hard not to compare this unfavourably with Britain’s past imperial adventurers, who had less fluffy views about foreigners but also took far more interest in their culture. It was in India that William Jones, the father of philology, first noticed the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, so discovering the Indo-European language group. Jones was a political radical, but explorer Richard Burton, who learned around 26 languages during his trek across the globe, certainly wasn’t. In contrast, today even most British ambassadors in the Arab world can’t speak that language.

This surely puts us at a huge disadvantage, and perhaps there will come a time when our man in Paris will only be able to stumble around, muttering ‘Good moaning’ and ‘I was pissing by the door when I heard two shats.’

Of course, there is the argument that, French and German no longer being world languages and the young in both countries reaching very high English proficiency, we are best focusing our efforts on other things — but those things tend to be easier. There’s something defeatist and feeble about closing our minds to these worlds, the literature and poetry and, in the case of German especially, the access to a range of disciplines once dominated by scholars from that country, like classical music. There is also the fact that speaking more than one language may help us to think in different, better ways, and to keep our brains active and healthy — a form of exercise, even if it has less ‘practical’ use.

That’s why I’m trying again. I’m on the podcasts every day, I’m listening to the music — Brel and Brassens are particular favourites — and I’m hiring a tutor. It’s never too late; after all, Alfred the Great felt despair about the decline of the Roman language and lamented that ‘So far has it fallen in England that few there are on this side of the Humber who understand the English of their service or can translate a letter from Latin.’ Rather than just scold others about it, though, he learned it himself — in his forties. And if you think you’re too busy with work and childcare and all the other distractions, he had the Vikings to deal with.