THE STORY OF FRENCH
By Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow
St. Martin's (NYP)
Knopf (Canada--NYP)

THE STORY OF FRENCH is inspired by one of the great cultural enigmas of the world: how is it that the French language has maintained its prestige and influence even as France has declined as a world power over the last two centuries? This 100,000-word book by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, two bi-lingual Canadian journalists and the authors of the acclaimed Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (50,000+ copies sold worldwide in less than a year), explains this paradox, showing how social and economic factors, and military and political decisions have shaped French as a global language. The narrative will be built on the stories of characters and places that changed the fate of the French language, like King François I’s edict on French in 1539, the deportation of Acadians in 1755 and the 1954 defeat of the French army in Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. The book will take readers on the authors’ four-year journey to meet the people and see the places that make French what it is today -- from Céline Dion’s birthplace to the mosques of Marseilles, to Paris to meet one of the French Académie’s Immortels, to Lesotho to observe an Alliance française, and to Algiers to learn what young Algerians think about the choice between speaking French versus Arabic.

Worldwide, 60 million people speak French as a second language and 25 million people are studying French, taught by an estimated 250 000 French-language instructors. In the U.S., 1.7 million people speak French, 2.5 million are studying it as a second language, and 5 million people identify themselves as Franco-Americans. France is the most visited country in the world, with 78 million tourists per year, including two million Americans. This large market of students, parents, and Francophiles is waiting for a book that tells the story behind the Academy, the grammar, the attitude and more. THE STORY OF FRENCH will pique the curiosity of many non-French-speaking readers because it will explain many puzzling features of the language. Why do the French hang on to the French Academy? Why is the language so complicated? Why are Francophones so defensive about the incursion of English, while they use so many English terms? And why is language so political to Francophones? THE STORY OF FRENCH will connect the dots and provide answers to these and many other questions.

Many authors have published works on the English language – most famously, Robert McCrum’s Story of English and Bill Bryson’s Our Mother Tongue (both international best-sellers). Yet no comparable book on the French language exists. Nadeau and Barlow are ideal authors for such a book. Both speak French fluently and write magazine-quality French on a regular basis, while publishing regularly in English. Between them, they have written five books and more than 1,000 feature-length articles in both languages. Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks, 2003) sold well in both chains and independents as well as in the UK. French, Dutch, Chinese, and other translations are in the works. Both authors are aggressive self-promoters who lectured widely and appeared on 40+ radio stations to promote Sixty Million Frenchmen.