The word Francophonie is written with and without capitalization. When capitalized, it refers to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, created at the 2005 summit of heads of state in Antananarivo, based on ideas going back to the 1960s. When not capitalized, it can refer to a linguistic grouping (i.e., the population of French speakers in the world), or a geographical grouping of countries containing a region where French is spoken, as well as countries where French is an official language. It can also refer to a concept or set of ideas and values notionally tied to the use of the French language. In addition to these linguistic, geographical and spiritual definitions, there is a more controversial one that identifies non-French writers writing in French as "francophone." Some writers associated to this definition, as well as some French writers, have rejected this usage as a form of cultural "neo-colonialism." This rejection shows how the word and the idea of francophonie carry a heavy legacy, evoking the subjugation of people and territories to French (and Belgian) colonization whose very opposition is voiced during a "post-colonial" period. The first part of this article will recall the history of the word francophonie and the second part will describe the current challenges to its use in public discourse. Both parts will rely on several recent works and will focus on the transatlantic dimension of the francophone question.

Francophonie and Colonialism

The word first appeared in the work of geographer Onésime Reclus (1837-1913), brother of another famous geographer, Élisée Reclus. Both were Protestants, republicans, and anarchists. Onésime was much more stridently colonialist than Élisée, and his work is part of Jules Ferry's larger movement of justifying the French colonial project in the 1880s. The term is used in chapter 6 of his book France, Algérie et Colonies (published in the Histoire Universelle collection edited by Victor Duruy) whose first edition appeared in 1880. Reclus suggested that "all those who are or seem to be destined to remain or become participants in our language" are part of "francophonie" — according to his calculations some 47 to 48 million speakers. The population of France at the time was barely 39 million. The difference was made up by Asian and especially African populations in the French "empire." Onésime Reclus encouraged colonization for demographic and cultural reasons. Defeated by Prussia in 1870, and numerically inferior to the Second Reich, France could hope to establish a balance of power only by acquiring new lands that would supply more resources and population. According to him, Africa should be the focus of these efforts, as Asia was out of reach. Through the spread of the French language and the humanist values of French civilization, France would attract a mass of humanity that would permit it to be a force in the world's future. For Reclus, language was the unifying principle of all peoples, while also being the feature that makes them distinct from one another. "There are no longer races, because all the human families have intermixed infinitely since the dawn of time. But there are environments, and there are languages,"¹ which are the pillars of cultural identities, and between which power is balanced. French must abandon its pretense of dominance in Europe or the world, which has made the French poor students of foreign languages. French must, however, entrench itself in world regions that will be important in the future.

Reclus was a realist who believed that it was not the masterpieces produced in a language, but the number of speakers that would guarantee its perpetuation. He developed a very modern vision of what could be called anachronistically "cultural globalization", dreading a sort of linguistic uniformity born out of a kind of "cosmopolitanism" that would reduce all differences to a common "pidgin."² He thus identified the French ambivalence and ambiguity still known today, where the struggle to maintain cultural and linguistic diversity in the world is carried out through the defense and promotion of a language that is simultaneously dominant and threatened by other languages. This pioneering work, which nonetheless fell into relative obscurity after the First World War, is the beginning of a discourse that both rejects narrow-minded nationalism and exalts the greatness of the French language.

A literary francophonie emerged in the period between the two world wars, shaped by the founding of the Association des écrivains de langue française in 1926. Black authors of African or Caribbean origin began to gain notoriety in the French literary world. One example is René Maran (1887-1967) from Martinique, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1921 for his novel Batouala. The lesser-known Bakary Diallo (1892-1978), a Fulani pastor who joined the French army in 1911, retold his experience in the 1926 Force-Bonté (Strength-Goodness) — named for what are, according to him, the two cardinal virtues of France.

These two writers, while critical of the excesses of colonialism, also lauded the beauty and goodness of France, and especially its language. Francophonie was thus positioned as a justification of colonial initiatives. This position was essentially confirmed by other black intellectuals, like Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire (whom Maran met in the literary salon of Paulette Narda and whose concept of négritude Maran challenged in the name of a universalist humanism). These two would later restore the term francophonie in the early 1960s in the context of African independence, though their position would still tacitly maintain the (at least cultural) legitimacy of the colonial project.

A Second Francophonie in the 1960s

In November 1962, the words "francophonie" and "francophone" stormed back into the public debate, thanks to the publication of an issue of the journal Esprit dedicated to "French, a living language", edited by Jean-Marie Domenach and Camille Bourniquel. Committed to challenging colonialism intellectually and politically, Esprit published contributions from Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of the Republic of Senegal (founded two years before), Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State of Cambodia (which achieved independence in 1953), Jean-Marc Léger, secretary general of the Association des universités partiellement ou entièrement de langue française (AUPELF) and director of the Office de la langue française in the ministry of cultural affairs for the government of Quebec. Other contributors included diplomats, directors of foreign French Institutes, university professors from Lebanon, Morocco, the United States, Madagascar, Belgium, Senegal, Switzerland, and journalists and writers such as the Algerian Kateb Yacine. As demonstrated by Kaoutar Harchi in a forthcoming work, the collection is not organized as a binary or confrontational relationship between France and the rest of the world; rather, it envisions French from a global perspective.³ The terms "francophone" and "francophonie" are used in some contributions in a somewhat positive way, though not devoid of perplexity, such as in the introduction by Camille Bourniquel, who congratulates himself for "having nothing better at hand than this badly-grafted hybrid which seems to mask some initial disorder." This "flotsam of destiny that we will call, for lack of a better term, francophonie" is the future of French, purged of imperial ambition and cleansed of the sins of colonialism.⁴ The case being made was that France's global ambition can no longer be framed as imperialism, but rather as a future for the French language outside of France after the end of colonization. While the language was the weapon of the colonizer, it was also the weapon of the struggling colonist before becoming, today and in the future, that of the emancipated citizen.

This issue of Esprit reverberated considerably at the time and even more afterward, solidifying francophonie as the replacement for terms like francité, francitude, communauté francophone, communauté de langue française and commonwealth à la française. The contours and content of the term, nonetheless, remained fluid 15 years later, as expressed by the Quebecois Jean-Marc Léger in a colloquium in 1977: "A term whose gratification is highly debatable, Francophonie is like a contemporary version of the Spanish hostel: each person finds or believes they find what they brought there themselves."⁵ The term was developed during the 1960s and 70s by additions of institutional and spiritual definitions stemming from the work of a number of political leaders in newly independent former colonies that had made French their official language. Among those pushing for the creation of a meeting of education secretaries in francophone countries were the Senegalese Senghor, alongside the Tunisian Habib Bourguiba, the Nigerian Hamani Diori and the Cambodian Norodom Sihanouk. This project was the basis of what would become the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) 45 years later. Besides having French as a common language, these heads of state emphasized a community of "values" best transmitted through the French language. A humanist heritage, the emancipatory message of the French Revolution, freedom and the rights of man belong not just to France, but to all peoples, and especially to those who have French in common. Supporting the spread of these values means building international institutions that favor and organize relations between francophone countries.

At first, however, French officialdom was reticent to support these projects. When in 1966 Hamani Diori, the president of Niger, proposed the creation of an international francophone organization, the French government stonewalled him.

As a rule, General DeGaulle mistrusted multilateral intergovernmental institutions that could inhibit French sovereignty and autonomy. He also feared wasteful expenditures that might upend the privileged bilateral relationships France maintained with African partners (which he unsuccessfully tried to transform into a Franco-African community). His open support of Quebec independence also sowed discord with the other great francophone power, Canada. In addition, as hypothesized by Frédéric Turpin, he likely narrowly associated the French language with the French nation, seeing the French language as part of a national identity that could hardly be shared with other countries.⁶ Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing would undertake more initiatives, but would essentially maintain the Gaullian precedent, especially with regard to African policy. (The long tenure of Jacques Foccart as presidential counselor on African Affairs maintained a certain immobility in this area). In the 1960s and 70s, the French policy regarding former colonies essentially took the form of cultural and technical cooperation, with priority given to francophone Africa. The massive exportation of French teachers, paid partly by local governments, allowed French school systems to function during these two decades. Nonetheless, years after achieving independence, countries like Algeria created a policy of arabization designed to break with the colonial legacy.

France was not entirely uninterested in francophonie in the 1960s but preferred to support associative and less-binding projects, like the AUPELF (mentioned above), founded in 1961 in Montréal, the Institut international de droit des pays d'expression française in 1964, the Conseil international de la langue français in 1967 and, the same year, both the Association de la jeunesse francophone and the Association internationale des parlementaires de langue française. In 1965, Georges Pompidou succeeded in creating the Haut Comité de défense et d'expansion de la langue française, but it was still a group of African heads of state who spearheaded the signing of an agreement among 21 countries (including France) in Niamey for the creation of the Agence de cooperation culturelle et technique (ACCT) whose initial leader was, again, Jean-Marc Léger. France was not enthusiastic about this project, but believed that it was better to participate, in order to control (and contain Canadian ambitions in the francophone world) but their condition was that the powers of the agency be limited to cooperation only, and that this cooperation not be transformed into policy making.

That is, however, what the agency gradually became during the 1980s and 90s, with France's endorsement and even encouragement under François Mittérand. France considered an organization of French-speaking countries as valuable for supporting its international policy positions. The French president took the initiative to call the first Sommet des chefs d'État et de gouvernement des pays francophones in Versailles in 1986, which was attended by representatives from about 40 countries.

The second summit took place in Quebec City the next year and since then, this type of gathering has taken place every two years, each time institutionalizing the relations between francophone countries a little more. François Mittérand's successor, Jacques Chirac, kept up the momentum and made francophonie the rallying point for France's incursions into cultural expansion, first through a policy of "cultural exception," and then through a policy of "cultural diversity." Parallel to the institutionalization of francophonie (adoption of a charter and designation of a secretary general at the Hanoi summit of 1997, revision of the charter and transformation from agency into the OIF at the Antananarivo Summit in 2005), a group of countries was organized to resist US-centric cultural and linguistic uniformization. This group consists of France and Canada, supported by nearly all member states of the OIF, who were the originators of the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity adopted by UNESCO on November 2, 2001. This Declaration led to the creation of the Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity, and to the convention on the protection and promotion of cultural diversity adopted by a large majority of UNESCO member states on October 20, 2005, just one month before the Antananarivo Summit. The closeness of these dates is more than a coincidence.

Institutional Francophonie

Today, several organizations work to expand the use of French in the world. First, there are the official bodies of francophone countries: The Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises in Belgium, L'Agence pour l'enseignement du français à l'étranger (AEFE, created in 1990 and responsible for monitoring and content for the network of schools teaching French in foreign countries) and the Centre international d'études pédagogiques (CIEP, founded in 1945 and now called France Éducation Internationale). Next, there are the associations: the Alliances françaises (combined since 2007 into a single foundation), the Conseil international de la langue française (founded in 1968), the Mission laïque (founded in 1902), as well as associations of journalists, teachers/professors, parliamentarians and lawyers, and, finally, networks of francophone booksellers and publishers.

Additionally, there is an intergovernmental Francophonie, the OIF, according to its official site in 2021, totaled 54 "full rights" member states, 7 "associated" member states and 27 countries with the status of "observer." The map of the distribution of the full rights member states shows that most of them are in Africa, but that there are some on every continent.

There is an institutional apparatus that regulates relations among these states: The summit of heads of state and governments (Le Sommet de la Francophonie) which meets every two years, is the highest policy-making authority. Next in line is the Conférence ministérielle de la Francophonie (meeting annually), followed by the Conseil permanent de la Francophonie, under the authority of a Secretary General. This Conseil arranges the summits and oversees the application of decisions made at them. Louise Mushikiwabo was named as Secretary General at the Sommet de la Francophonie in 2018 at Erevan. Finally, two permanent interministerial conferences — for education ministries and youth and sports ministries — complete the list of decision-making bodies. There are four main drivers of multilateral francophone cooperation: the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), the international television network TV5Monde, the Association internationale des maires francophones (AIMF) and the Université Senghor d'Alexandrie. The OIF also has a consultative body, L'Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie (APF), and associated organizations such as the Forum francophone des Affaires (FFA). Every two years, the secretary general of the organization calls a Conférence francophone des organisations internationales non gouvernementales (OING). In 2017, there were 127 OING and other civilian organizations accredited by OIF authorities. These organizations are consulted and participate in work of certain OIF programs. There are also cooperation agreements with the principal existing intergovernmental organizations.

The offical objective pursued by the OIF is as follows: "contribute to improving the living standard of the people in the member states by helping them become agents of their own development." Four broad missions were assigned to the OIF by the Sommets de la Francophonie: "Promote the French language as well as cultural and linguistic diversity; promote peace, democracy and human rights; support education, training, higher education and research; develop cooperation to support sustainable development." These goals reveal a remarkable evolution, if not a complete transformation of the OIF. While defending the French language and common values were already part of the founding documents of the ACCT in 1970, cultural diversity and sustainable development were added later, responding to changes in international concerns, as well as to the changing role of the organisation itself. Over the years, the OIF became a multilateral diplomatic organization and a consultative forum for exchange of ideas relating to broad international political issues. Defense of the language has tended to become a secondary concern, as indicated by the large number of recently-joined associated or observer member countries whose populations are largely not francophone. In 2018 alone, there were three new observer countries and one observer region added: Gambia, Ireland, Malta, and Lousiana, none of which being really francophones.

This evolution has incited some worry and criticism. Does the constant growth through new members and the transformation into a multilateral forum (like a second UN, some say) dilute what had made the francophone organization unique? Can the budget, which is often thought to be insufficient, be spread over a growing number of projects that threaten to become more and more symbolic? Is the OIF susceptible to the same criticism that is aimed at many international and intergovernmental organizations, accused of being powerless, while bilateralism and even unilateralism have burst back onto the international scene? Some also point out the lack of coherence between the "values" advocated by the organization, and the barely democratic behavior of many of the leaders of la Francophonie — but this reproach is not new. Also not new are the criticisms directed at France, which is accused of both doing too much and too little for la Francophonie. France has indeed been in a delicate position since the beginning: as the largest economic power among francophone countries and the provider of 75% of the budget of the OIF (71 million Euros in 2019), it still cannot impose its views without consultation. One recent example of this delicate position can be seen in the outcry from francophone partners when France decided to attach TV5Monde to the holding company of France Médias Monde. The suspicion of "neo-colonialism" resurfaces fairly often when France seems to overreach its prerogatives within the francophone group, of which it is, officially, only one member among others.

It is true that francophonie is, for France, a tool of global influence that serves national interests with its continuous efforts to spread French language, culture and values. This point of view, shared by François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac (much less so by Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande) is also that of Emmanuel Macron, at least according to his speeches and plan of action for francophonie made public in the spring of 2018 (reinforcement of the francophone education system and of French in media and on the web [uncapitalized below]). The fundamental ambiguity of francophonie as seen from the French point of view can be found in his words and proposals: defending national interests within a multilateral organization, and defending the position of French while advocating plurilingualism. "French is constructed by plurilingualism, and we exist through plurilingualism", stated the French president, "Francophonie must protect the rights of other languages, those in Europe and those that are threatened; it is the place where languages do not disappear." This speech is in alignment with the OIF, which makes plurilingualism (against the domination of English) one of its principle causes. But beyond the linguistic issue, there is the image of a kind of globalization that is not destined simply to impose the will of the largest economic power on the planet. The OIF would like to be the voice of diversity in the world, a space for intercultural dialogue, the tool and the message of an open, but also regulated globalization, advocating for a new form of "non-alignment," in the words of Dominique Wolton.⁷ All of this allows France, again, to combine the defense of its geopolitical interests as a middle-sized power with the idea of a noble multilateral cause.

Francophone Languages and Literatures

In North America, nearly 10 million Canadians (about one out of every three) are francophone. Most of them live in Quebec, the historical home of the the French language, along with New Brunswick, which is about one-third francophone. Not far from there, south of Newfoundland, is the French archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. In the United States, there is residual heritage French in Lousiana, Maine and in New England, but the French language is attractive, and bilingual classes are being developed. The Caribbean is another historical home for French: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Bartholomew and part of Saint-Martin use French daily alongside various creoles. In Latin America, where the Guyanese speak French, francophonie is dynamic, because of a large number of francophiles, especially in Brazil. In total, the Centre de la francophonie des Amériques estimates that 33 million francophones reside in the American/Caribbean region.⁸

The last dated report of the Observatoire de la langue française (an organization tied to the OIF), published in 2018, estimates that 300 million French speakers are distributed across 6 continents. Some projections put the number of speakers in 2060 at 770 million speakers, with the large majority being African. ⁹

Every year 49 million people in the world study French as a foreign language, with about a half-million in the Alliances françaises, making French the second most-learned language in the world.¹⁰ These optimistic numbers mask some more nuanced realities. The Observatoire counts as francophone all people in countries (29) where French is an official language, but many in these countries speak a local language and do not speak French. French for them is at best a second language for getting by in public, or a language to expand horizons. Studies on the ground show that real mastery and daily use of French tend to be decreasing in many francophone countries, due mainly to a lack of functioning school systems and enough French teachers. The number of speakers is certainly not the only measure for determining the world rank of a language. Other measures, such as the use of the language in international organizations and on the web, should be considered, and France often has a high position there (second, behind English). But this position is also fragile, as seen by the decrease of French and the increase of English as official language in international organizations, such as the European Union. The hegemony of English is solidly established, and it is striking that organizations representing three linguistic spaces — francophone, hispanophone and lusophone — found it necessary to unite in their effort to counter the most negative effects in the realm of linguistic diversity. Trois Espaces linguistiques (TEL) is an international initiative for linguistic cooperation between the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) and the OIF. The project defines itself as a "place of reflective innovation for creating new strategies of international cooperation through intercultural dialogue and the construction of a culture of peace."¹¹ But it is no longer in use.

To echo a distinction posited by Jacques Calvet, the struggle to maintain "horizontal" linguistic diversity between languages on a global scale should be accompanied by advocating for a kind of "vertical" diversity for languages less privileged than French (or Spanish or Portuguese) in the hierarchy of languages.¹² The official relationship between francophonie and plurilingualism would gain credibility through such advocacy. But French does not co-exist only with local languages in most francophone countries; it also co-exists with itself, in a sense, as local forms of French emerge almost everywhere that official francophonie struggles to recognize, since it is still in great part a tributary of "reference French", that is, the French of France and, even more precisely, French as spoken and written by professors and guardians of the temple of the French language. Many words from African, Quebecois and Walloon French have made their way into the dictionaries of the Hexagon, but the diversity and richness of these vocabularies are still far from being well-represented in such dictionaries, because they suffer from a deficit of legitimacy. At stake is the strong and ancient tie between the French language and the French nation, even though French youth seem more amenable to Anglophone influences. A true pluralism would infer a form of de-nationalization of the French language, and a recognition of the contributions of outlying areas, or even a deconstruction of the mental framing that assumes a center/periphery dichotomy.

For the past several years, it has been this same relationship of the national and the marginal brought to light by the political and literary debate over francophone literature, which some prefer to call "littérature-monde." Launched in 2007 by the publication of a manifesto in favor of a littérature-monde, signed by several dozen authors, this debate revisits old divisions that go back to the emergence of a French-language literature from outside France in the first half of the 20^th century. The debate is also fed by texts written in the framework of postcolonial discourse — a set of ideas that has been with us since the pioneering work of Edward Saïd at the end of the 1970s. For the signatories, it was time to end both the obsolete and condescending notion of francophonie and the narrow, navel-gazing and formalist conception of the novel that had dominated French writing since the 1950s. Instead of francophonie, they borrowed (without attribution) Goethe's notion of littérature-monde. They were against the "Saint-Germain-des-Prés novel," and in favor of the novel as "world atlas." Justly pointing out the downgrading effects caused by the classifications and categorizations of literary journalists, publishers and booksellers, the advocates of a littérature-monde in the French language promoted breaking the ancestral tie between literature and nation — a "denationalization" alongside a decolonization of literature. Several counter-arguments were advanced, which can be summarized as follows: The literature of France cannot be reduced to the caricature proffered by its adversaries, many of whom are part of that literature, whether they like it or not. This literature, described as self-absorbed, nevertheless provided a space for many foreign "translingual" authors, that is, authors who chose to write in French though it was not their native language. The "francophone writer" category, though perhaps a ghetto for some authors, also helped others to get published and recognized outside their country. (This is especially true of Algerian authors in the 1990s.)

The ambivalence between stigmatization and recognition was also seen in the controversy surrounding the 2018 dissolution of Tarmac, the only permanent francophone theatre in France. Writer Mohamed Kacimi felt that "the French language doesn't need the ideal of a francophonie that always exhales a little colonial scent" and he called for an end to "artistic Bantoustans" and the creation of a true théâtre-monde. Jacques Allaire countered that ending Tarmac was an "anachronism, a sinister return to the past, a new domination, a new form of colonialism — this time artistic."¹³ Each camp accused the other of neo-colonialism, while both advocates and adversaries of literary francophonie called for resistance to the global domination of English.

Will francophonie always be framed as the French and others, foreigners or non-French (a more racialized version)? Will it always bear the mark of symbolic and economic domination of the center over the margins? It is true that, unlike English or Spanish, French is still often considered a national property. Ever since Onésime Reclus forged the term at the end of the 19^th century, francophonie has been caught in this ambivalence. Jacques Coursil calls it a "paradox", emphasizing "the repressed colonial history contained in the signifiers of everyday language."¹⁴ The ambivalence or paradox is that of being both the expression of a kind of domination and a call to linguistic pluralism. Doubtless there is no other choice for those who participate in today's francophone reality, or who seek to promote it, than to hold both sides of this contradiction in their thoughts.