It’s been a rough week in France. First of all, the French are determined to teach Apple Computer a lesson and tell them how to sell iPod and iTunes in France. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
French politicians have approved an online copyright bill that will require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players.
This is a great relief. Finally someone is coming to the rescue of battered consumers and teaching our big American tech giants how to run their businesses. And there is nobody as qualified as the French to do this.
Of course there is always the danger that Apple will just decide not to sell iPods and iTunes in France. And why not? The French, being a cultured people, surely do not need the ersatz music offered by cowboy American corporations. They can make their own music.
The iTunes kerfuffle is bad enough. But then also this week the president of the French Republic couldn’t take it any more. As reported by Tom Braithwaite and Tim Smyth in the Financial Times “Jacques Chirac stormed out of a meeting at the European Union summit...because he had been "profoundly shocked" to hear a French industrialist speaking in English.”
Despite the appearance that the French president often presents of being an arrogant old man completely out of touch with his nation and the times this incident makes it clear that he is, in fact, profoundly sensitive. Anyone would get upset when subjected to the kind of insult President Chirac suffered when he heard
Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of the Unice employers' organisation, explain he had decided to deliver his speech in English because it was "the language of business".
As usual in such cases, the politicians are trying to shut the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The rule at Alstom, the French electrical manufacturer is that email is conducted in English and that any meeting at which a non-French person is present is conducted in English. Braithwaite and Smyth agree. According to their source Jean-Loius Muller:
the rise of English in French boardrooms appeared unstoppable: "I witnessed a meeting at [engineering group] Alstom where there were only French managers in the room but English was still the language."
Business French has become peppered with anglicisms - from "les roadshows" to "le spin-off" - and few managers prefer "une marge brute d'autofinancement" to "le cash-flow".
It’s enough to make a grown Frenchman cry. And what is worse, we know that this is just the thin end of the wedge.
Sooner or later (cue the Fram oil filter guy) the French are going to have to ditch their vaunted Social Model and accept reality, the Anglo-Saxon (and rapidly becoming Indo-Chinese) cowboy model.
They can do it now, or they can do it later.
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