The nation of France continues to crackdown the far-left attempts to make the country “woke.” The government has officially banned “gender-neutral” language from all classrooms across the country, given that officials believe that such language ends up doing irreparable harm to French children. It seems, so far, the French are practicing a lot more common sense than the general American society today.
The French government is using an identarian and nationalist frames of reference to ban the use of gender-neutral language. The French see the attempt to “de-genderize” language as something very specific to English. This is true also for any romance language, such as Spanish, and multiple other languages around the world where most words are gendered.
The French Education Ministry said that “gender-neutral” words, cement the status of English as the world’s dominant language. The Academie Francaise, which is responsible for guarding the French language, said that the move to introduce the gender-neural language was “harmful to the practice and understanding of French.”
In French grammar, just like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese grammar, nouns take on the gender of the subject to which they refer, with male preferred over female in mixed settings.
Advocates of the gender-neutral terminology being introduced in French say that it will make French “more-inclusive,” but critics say that it will simply make the language harder to learn and different between spoken and written French, and therefore it could threaten the language’s entire existence.
This is not the first time the French government has done this. Back in 2017, the previous Francois Hollande administration also banned gender-neutral language for basically the same reasons. Seeing gender-neutrality in language as a form of American imperialism.
It seems obvious that French officials are becoming increasingly concern that leftist woke ideas coming from American left-wing activists are a threat to their national identity and way of life. The Macron administration is mostly blaming the American University for “out-of-control leftism and cancel culture.
Of course, this is in part an attempt by French President Macron to recapture the public favor by pivoting to the right. Since his administration has sparked a backlash from the right-wing, especially an increased support for Marine Le Pen and the Yellow Vest protests which lasted without a single break for over a year. Macron is seemingly trying to recapture right-wing voters by pivoting as much as he can to the right, as his country suffers from left-wing and globalist policies. The Macron government, which initially was making all kinds of concessions to Muslim elements within France, seem to now be cracking down on that religious group. The French President has even doubled-down on the French Burka ban.
Will it be enough for French voters? Certainly he is causing a lot of resentment among Muslim migrants and left-wing activists, but many on the center and the right see his moves as attempt to get re-elected, but that he will go back to his globalist ways once he is comfortably back in office. It might be too late for Macron, as all he may be doing, is legitimizing France’s turn to the populist right, and a possible rise of a true right-wing leader.
