In his dialogues with Didier Eribon, published in 1989, Claude Lévi-Strauss commented on the linguistic work of the Académie française, and especially a campaign to amend the gender terminology of professions. Should, for example, a female politician be referred to as le ministre or la ministre? In other cases it might require a different spelling rather than just a change of article:

I’m not against adopting certain feminine derivatives if they are current usage and are not contrary to the spirit of the language or the rules of word-formation. What seems unacceptable to me is to bow to a pressure group and promulgate words by decree. Especially when it is the result of something as blatant as the confusion between sex and grammatical gender. Dumézil wrote an outstanding article on the subject in Le Nouvel Observateur that is worth handing down to posterity (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, De près et de loin, p. 126; Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 86-87). 

Lévi-Strauss was elected to one of the forty chairs of the Académie française in May 1973, and Dumézil in June 1979. Lévi-Strauss inducted Dumézil as one of the immortals in the ceremony, with Dumézil having the names of Franz Bopp, Michel Bréal, Sylvain Lévi, Marcel Mauss, Marcel Granet and Émile Benveniste inscribed on the ceremonial sword.

The immortality is not of the 40 members, who are only replaced when they die but are often quite elderly when elected. It is supposedly the immortality of the French language, of which the Académie is the authority, and produces its dictionary. This particular dispute which Lévi-Strauss mentions arose in 1984, when the Minister of Women’s Rights under President Mitterand, Yvette Roudy, set up a committee on terminology of occupations. The journalist and novelist Benoîte Groult was the president of the committee, established on 29 February 1984 by decree 84-153. The aim was to examine “the feminization of titles and functions, and more generally, vocabulary relating to women’s activities”, to itemise the “gaps in vocabulary”, and to “establish rules for forming unusual feminine forms” or propose new words if necessary to avoid confusion. The aim was “to make the necessary proposals to prevent the French language from promoting sex discrimination” (on the history, see Khaznadar, Baider and Moreau, “Les enjeux de la parité linguistique”). 

The more general debates about the French language are quite widely discussed, but I was interested in the piece Lévi-Strauss mentioned written by Dumézil. Lévi-Strauss’s biographer Emmanuelle Loyer says that this was published in 1983, but it is actually from a year later (see her discussion in Lévi-Strauss, French pp. 680-81; English pp. 532-33). And in looking at Dumézil’s article, I realised it was a reply to a piece in Le Monde, which itself was a response to a declaration by the Académie, and this led me backwards through a few pieces. Here is what I think is the correct sequence of key pieces in this debate, at least as they relate to Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss.

After the initial role of the Groult committee was reported in the French press, the Académie française presented a negative declaration of principle concerning any change to the language. They indicated that the grammatical genders of the French language, like other Indo-European languages, while traditionally called masculine and feminine, were misnamed, and might be better understood as unmarked and marked. The Académie was effectively claiming the “masculine” gender was really a neuter form. The Académie’s advice was written by Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss (as the Académie itself reported in 2014) and was adopted unanimously as the position in a session of 14 June 1984. Loyer indicates that Lévi-Strauss was the author, and that a typed copy is in his archives at the Bibliothèque nationale (Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, French p. 680, English p. 687; referencing NAF 28150, box 218).

The Académie’s resolution suggested that the “task assigned to this commission is based on a misinterpretation of the concept of grammatical gender and that it will lead to proposals that are contrary to the spirit of the language”. It gave examples to illustrate how grammatical gender and natural gender were not equivalent. There are collective nouns of masculine gender which apply to both men and women, while feminine gender nouns are exclusive. They therefore proposed that “the unmarked [i.e. masculine] gender be preferred for professional designations”.

Its concluding claim was that:

It should also be noted that in French, the feminine marker serves only incidentally to make the distinction between male and female. The division of nouns into two genders establishes a principle of classification within the entire lexicon, making it possible to distinguish homonyms, highlight different spellings, classify suffixes, to indicate relative sizes and relationships of derivation, and through the agreement of adjectives, show the variety of nominal constructions. All these uses of grammatical gender constitute a complex network in which the contrasting designation of sexes plays only a minor role. Changes made deliberately in one area, can have unexpected consequences in others. They risk sowing confusion and disorder in a subtle balance born of usage, and it would seem wiser to leave the task of modification to usage.

A few days later Groult responded in Le Monde, accusing the forty of “verbal terrorism” and “ignorance and bad faith”. Groult closed by claiming that the male Académie was using “their influence to try to discourage all change and perpetuate immobility”.  At the time, I think Marguerite Yourcenar was the only female academician, the first woman elected to one of the chairs. I do note the irony that because Académie is a feminine noun, when Groult avoids its proper name, she has to refer to it with the pronoun ‘elle’.

It was to this piece by Groult to which Dumézil responded in Le Nouvel observateur. As well as the substantive disagreement, perhaps he was particularly irritated by Groult’s claim that since the death of Roger Caillois, the Académie no longer had a linguist in its number. Given his extensive work in this area, especially on Caucasian languages, he had some justification. He would doubtless also have been unhappy with her accusation that the “arguments produced, which claim to be linguistic, are in fact only ideological and stem from the naïve phallocentrism that has presided over so many judgments, theories, laws, and historical decisions in the past”. Dumézil’s article in response was “Mme Mitterrande? Mme Fabia?”, published in Le Nouvel Observateur in September 1984, and although it was presented as an interview Dumézil wrote both questions and responses. The title comes from the idea that names could be feminised, and takes the president and prime minister, François Mitterand and Laurent Fabius, as examples.

Dumézil calls Groult’s piece a “pathetic diatribe”, taking exception to the language used (p. 48). But after this initial bad-tempered burst, he patiently outlines the linguistic case, saying that it is not due to choice, but the history of the French language, and its pre-history in Latin and further back, Indo-European. “It is an inheritance, and like inheritances sometimes, an embarrassment”. He talks of the distinction between animate and inanimate classes of nouns, and the distinction within animate nouns of “what we now call the masculine and feminine”. But he argues that the distinction is not primarily sexual, and there are peculiarities – the sun is often masculine, in French it is le soleil, while the moon is feminine, la lune. But Germanic languages reverse this – die Sonne and der Mond. Greek rhodon, Latin rosa and French la rose, all mean ‘rose’, but the Greek is neuter and the others feminine. “These are not decisions of academies, nor commissions” (p. 49). He adds: “Like any living organism, language is, at every moment, the product of an uninterrupted history, with its contingencies, crises, countless adjustments” (p. 49). He notes that Groult is a novelist, and is part of the creation of language, with innovations which will either take or not take, like all inventions in languages. But this is different from a decree, especially one which makes changes as generalisations (p. 50).

While the specific debate was about language and gender, part of the stakes of the dispute were about whether the government or the Académie française should act as the arbiter of the French language. A government-established committee could not be seen to promulgate linguistic changes without the Académie’s role being usurped; but equally, as Groult points out, the Académie was, with one exception, all constituted by men.  Unsurprisingly, in her autobiography, Mon évasion, Groult is highly critical of the Académie in general terms (pp. 184-85) and in regard to its role in frustrating the work of the commission (pp. 210-25).

Dumézil died just two years later, in October 1986, and it was left to others to defend this reactionary line, including Lévi-Strauss. As well as the dialogues with Eribon, it was also raised in his 1994 interview with Ada Giusti about the Académie. He explains the point he and Dumézil made about the distinction between marked and unmarked gender, and claimed that “by using the unmarked gender, we are putting men and women on the same level. By demanding a marked gender, women are demanding a separate place”. The point about usage is also stressed: “when a term has been used for fifty years in the feminine, it will enter the dictionary, and there will be nothing to say” (pp. 77-78). But this is about a dictionary reflecting the way language is employed, not about imposing a change. Giusti raised the two forms of the word for a lawyer, un avocat and une avocate, which Lévi-Strauss accepted was “perfectly correct”, but said that “‘une écrivaine’ seems completely absurd to me. A woman is a writer [un écrivain] just as a man is a writer”. He also agreed that un avocat alone would be better as the one and general term, though recognised this was a transformation which had already occurred. 

He was also presented with Thérèse Moreau’s claim that “language is not neutral, that it is misogynistic and establishes a hierarchy between the sexes”, and said that this too was “absurd” (p. 78). A further clarification comes later, when he insists that the point of the Académie’s dictionary project was not the same as the dictionaries of Le Robert or Larousse, which indicate all the ways language is used, from great writers to the language of the street. The Académie’s project was a more restricted one (p. 82). This does not mean modest or quick: the first volume of the new edition was published in 1992, while Lévi-Strauss was still alive, and it was finally completed with a fourth volume and supplements in November 2024, several years after his death.

It is easy to see Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil as being conservative voices, perpetuating a male view of language and society, on the wrong side of a cultural divide. But it took a long time to overcome this tradition, and it seems that it was usage which finally forced the Académie to bend. In 2019, in their report “La féminisation des noms de métiers et fonctions”, the Académie accepted that job and profession names could have a female form.

References

Académie française, declaration of 14 June 1984, reproduced in Edwige Khaznadar, Fabienne Baider, Thérèse Moreau, “Les enjeux de la parité linguistique: Un dossier de la revue Nouvelles questions féministes”, LMSI, 4 December 2007, https://lmsi.net/Les-enjeux-de-la-parite

Académie française, “La féminisation des noms de métiers, fonctions, grades ou titres – Mise au point de l’Académie française”, 10 October 2014, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/actualites/la-feminisation-des-noms-de-metiers-fonctions-grades-ou-titres-mise-au-point-de-lacademie

Académie française, “La féminisation des noms de métiers et fonctions”, 2019, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/sites/academie-francaise.fr/files/rapport_feminisation_noms_de_metier_et_de_fonction.pdf

Académie française, “La 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française”, 2024, https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/9e_edition

La République française décret 84-153, 29 February 1984, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000677343

Dictionnaire de l’académie française, Paris: Fayard, 9^th edition, four volumes, 1992-2024.

Georges Dumézil, “Mme Mitterrande? Mme Fabia?”, Le Nouvel Observateur, 7-13 September 1984, 48-50; reproduced in Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Economica, 1998, 191-95.

Daniel Elmiger, “Féminisation de la langue française: une brève histoire des positions politiques et du positionnement linguistique”, in Alexandre Duchêne and Claudine Moïse (eds), Langage, genre et sexualité, Québec: Nota bene, 2011, 71-89.

Ada Giusti, “L’Academie francaise: Entretien avec Claude Lévi-Strauss”, Contemporary French Civilization 19 (1), 1995, 70-84.

Benoîte Groult, “Réponse à quarante Messieurs-Dame”, Le Monde, 17 July 1984, 2.

Benoîte Groult, Mon évasion: autobiographie, Paris: Grasset, 2008.

Alina Iftime, “Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Feminisation of Names of Professions in the Contemporary French Language”, IJASOS – International E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences II (4), 2016, 152-57.

Edwige Khaznadar, Fabienne Baider, Thérèse Moreau, “Les enjeux de la parité linguistique: Un dossier de la revue Nouvelles questions feminists”, LMSI, 4 December 2007, https://lmsi.net/Les-enjeux-de-la-parite

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De près et de loin suivi de «Deux ans après», Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990; Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Flammarion, 2015; Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Polity, 2018.

Raphaëlle Rérolle, “L’Académie française se résout à la féminisation des noms de métiers”, Le Monde, 28 February 2019.

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This is the 42nd post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few shorter pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.