Ah, The French
French president Jacques Chirac and the entire French delegation to a European Union summit walked out of the meeting when a French lobbyist switched from speaking French to the English language.
"I have to say I was profoundly shocked to see a Frenchman express himself in English at the (EU) Council table. That’s why the French delegation and myself walked out rather than listen to that," Chirac told reporters.
"It is not just national interest, it is in the interest of culture and the dialogue of cultures. You cannot build the world of the future on just one language and, hence one culture."
It seems old Jacques and George Lucas think a lot alike.
Thankfully, my forebears had the intelligence and good taste to get themselves thrown out of France.
Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, World news | Gaius Friday, 24 March , 2006
By Tom, Friday, 24 March , 2006 @ 3:35 pm
Go ahead & have your snit! At least they’ll take the snails off the lunch menu…
By Gauis Arbo, Friday, 24 March , 2006 @ 3:41 pm
Insane level of arrogance, isn’t it?
By Patrick EMIN, Saturday, 25 March , 2006 @ 4:27 am
Hi, Chirac did not walked away because M.Seilliere spoke english (Chirac is fluent in english and has certainly no problem with the language!), but because M.Seilliere, who started his speech in french, suddendly turned to english because he said “english is the language for business”. English is no more the language of business than french is the language of poetry, or italian the language of arts. Any speech can be given in any language, in other words, a language is not used according to the content of a speech but according to your audience. In this case, the audience was the european council and as far as I know, the very vast majority of attendants don’t have english as their mother tongue. All speeches are translated anyway and english was absolutely not necessary. M. Chirac was right to point out this anomaly, but wrong to walk out, he should have said to the audience “Et maintenant, mesdames et messieurs, we are going to hear M.Seilliere speech”. That would have had much more impact…
By Gauis Arbo, Saturday, 25 March , 2006 @ 6:33 am
Patrick, that is a distinction without a difference, is it not? I rather doubt the majority of attendees had French as their mother tongue, either.
English IS the language of air traffic control, is it not?
I agree, it was incredibly inept to walk out. IT was basically asking for bad press. Ask yourself, what would the headlines be if Bush had walked out over what language had been spoken at a meeting. OR if someone had said “French is the language of {pick a subject}” as you point out.
Chirac could have easily made his point, as you suggest, be being very, very polite instead of arrogantly rude…
(O/T, for some reason your comment did not queue up properly, but I rescued it and got it in the right spot. It may have been that you hyperlinked your name, I’m not sure. I’m still learning WordPress.)