French is urged on EU as the language of law

BRUSSELS -- An elder statesman of French literature who fought for the Resistance in World War II is gearing up to do battle again, in Brussels: Maurice Druon, 89, is campaigning to make French the supreme language of legal documents in the European Union.

A member the Académie Française and the author of 60 books, Druon has been joined in this initiative by an unlikely assortment of Francophiles, politicians, and aristocrats -- among them Nicole Fontaine, a former president of the European Parliament; Otto von Habsburg, a descendant of the German royal house; Antoinette Spaak, daughter of Paul-Henri Spaak, a founding father of the EU and once a Belgian foreign minister; and Bronislaw Geremek, a Polish historian.

They support his proposal that French should become the deciding language when there are differences over what a legal document actually means -- all the more so in an expanded EU of 27 countries, where French is struggling to retain its historic primacy alongside the EU's 22 other official languages, including Maltese and Gaelic.

"Italian is the language of song, German is the language of philosophy, and English is good for poetry, but French is best for precision," Druon said of his quest. "French should be the authoritative language for law because it is related to Latin -- in which Roman law was written -- and it was also the language of the Napoleonic Code."

Druon's battle is open-ended -- there is no deadline or crucial vote looming -- but he wants resolution before the EU gets bigger and even more linguistically cumbersome.

The EU comprises 489 million people, who are trying to speak with one voice while maintaining a Babel of languages and cultural identities. In order not to offend any one country, the EU uses each of the 22 languages spoken in member states, at a cost each year of as much as 1.2 billion euros, or $1.6 billion, in translation and interpretation expenses.

Every country is entitled to have EU documents translated into its native language, although to save time the first draft of documents, including legal material, is often available only in one of the Union's unofficial working languages: English, French, and German.

Druon, who recently came to Brussels to lobby EU officials, insisted that he was no cultural nationalist and recalled, in broken but colorful English, that he learned to love the queen's language as a soldier in wartime London.

"I love English," he said, "though I now call it 'Anglo-American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power." But Anglophilia aside, Druon remains steadfast that the language of Montesquieu is the superior language for legal discourse. He notes that it is no coincidence that the EU's highest court, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, uses French, not English, as its working language: French has fewer syntactical ambiguities, he said.

"It sounds nice to French ears, but let's get real -- we are living in the 21st century and English is the language that everyone understands," huffed an EU official, who declined to use his last name for fear of offending Gallic sensitivities and Druon , whom he called "a French monument."

An EU official from France added that the initiative was strictly that of a private individual and did not reflect his government's policy -- although Druon said that he had discussed the idea with President Jacques Chirac and other top officials and that they had offered encouragement.