When Jacques Chirac stormed out of a meeting at the European Union summit, he said it was because he had been ‘profoundly shocked’ to hear a French industrialist speaking in English. On this basis, the French president may wish to stay away from a number of his nation’s boardrooms. Mr Chirac’s outrage was all too visible on Thursday night when he heard Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of the Unice employers’ organization, explain he had decided to deliver his speech in English because it was ‘the language of business’.

But in the boardroom of Air Liquide, the French industrial gases group, meetings are usually held in English. So too at the media group Thomson, once chaired by Thierry Breton, the French fi nance minister, who joined his president in boycotting Mr Seillière’s meeting. At France Telecom – where Mr Breton was also once chairman – English is commonly used in internal memos.

French companies choose English because they do most business outside France and because of an increased foreign presence on their boards.
Meetings at Total, the oil group, regularly take place in English, even when only Frenchmen are present. ‘It’s the language of the oil industry’, explains a spokeswoman. English is also the lingua franca at Thales and EADS – the French government has stakes in both defence groups.
Air France-KLM holds meetings of ‘the strategy management committee’ in English, while competence in the language is compulsory for managerial recruits at Renault. Mike Quigley, the chief operating officer and heir apparent at the telecoms equipment maker Alcatel, is an Australian who does not speak French. 

‘The English language has connotations of liberalism’, said Jean-Louis Muller, the director of Cegos, a management training school. ‘The defence of the French language by politicians and unions is the defence of the French social model.’ Mr Muller said 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.’

Questions

1. What may explain the sudden departure by the president of France when a French industrialist used English to address the summit meeting?

2. Why, according to the interviews, is English used more and more in French boardrooms?

3. What, according to Jean-Louis Muller, do French and English seem to represent in terms of cultural identity?