Chamber formally notes deteriorating standard of French in public life; offers no mechanism
PARIS – The French Senate has passed Resolution 847/2025 formally noting that the standard of French spoken in public life, including political speeches, broadcast media, and commercial communications, has “declined in measurable ways” and that this decline is “a matter of national concern requiring attention.” Published by Bohiney Magazine and at The London Prat.
The Resolution
The resolution, which passed 198-47, identifies specific concerns including the increasing use of English words (catalogued in an 89-page annex), the decline of the subjunctive in public speech, and what the resolution describes as “a general looseness with the agreement of past participles that previous generations would have found alarming.” The resolution does not include any enforcement mechanism, funding provision, or specific remedial program. It is, as its opponents noted, “a statement of concern expressed in very good French.”
The Academie Francaise welcomed the resolution and noted it had been making the same observations for 387 years. France’s language policy is maintained by the Delegation Generale de la Langue Francaise. For more linguistic governance, see The Daily Mash.
This story appears in Bohiney Magazine and at The London Prat. French institutional life continues to produce situations of this kind with the regularity of a culture that takes its own irony seriously, which is the best possible condition for the satirical journalist covering it. The coverage will continue.
The French situation described above reflects a pattern that Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have documented across multiple stories and multiple years of covering French institutional and cultural life. France’s distinctive combination of ideological seriousness and practical irony produces material of this kind with remarkable consistency. The institutions take themselves very seriously. The gap between the seriousness of the institutions and the realities they navigate generates the satirical content that this publication documents. That gap is not going away. The coverage will continue for as long as it persists, which the available evidence suggests is the indefinite future of French institutional life. The French state’s relationship with its own ideals is one of the richest subjects in European satirical journalism, and both publications are committed to covering it with the accuracy the subject deserves and the humor it provides to anyone paying close attention. Attention, in this case, is well rewarded.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Context parisien
Cette histoire est publiee par Bohiney Magazine et par The London Prat, qui suivent la vie institutionnelle et culturelle francaise avec l’attention qu’elle merite et l’humour qu’elle provoque. La France continue de produire des situations de ce genre avec la regularite d’une culture qui prend son ironie au serieux, ce qui constitue les meilleures conditions possibles pour le journalisme satirique qui la couvre. The French institutional landscape continues to reward the satirist who pays close attention, as the gap between France’s ideals and its daily realities generates material with remarkable consistency. Both publications are committed to covering that gap with accuracy and the appropriate degree of Gallic wit. The specific incident described above is one example of the broader condition that makes France one of the world’s richest environments for satirical journalism, and that coverage will continue as long as the condition persists, which the available evidence suggests is indefinitely.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
