The changes were slight, though Molière probably wouldn’t have approved.
Montréal Campus – the student newspaper serving Université du Québec à Montréal – announced in February that it would cease favouring the masculine over the feminine.
Wherever possible, non-gendered terms are now used, and when referring to a group of people, reporters write out both the female and male nouns, and include the feminine past participle in parentheses — for example, “Les étudiants et les étudiantes sont arrivé(e)s”.
This “feminization” of the paper’s contents, as the Montréal Campus editor-in-chief, Gabriel Bernier, wrote in an editorial, sought to “re-establish balance in the matter of gender equality”.
But reaction to the initiative has been quick and vicieuse. “It’s barbarity,” thundered the Quebec author Denise Bombardier. The Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau devoted a column, a cable TV appearance and a chunk of his daily internet radio show to pillorying the paper, which serves the nearly 40,000 students at UQAM, long considered a hotbed of social activism in the Canadian province.
News articles reporting on Montréal Campus’s decision were flooded with what Bernier called “violent, ill-informed” comments – including a death threat, duly reported to Montreal police.
The reaction perplexed Bernier, 22, a journalism student at the university. “We’re not activists, we’re journalists. We didn’t invent a language, we just want to make it more egalitarian,” he said.
Written French was not always particularly strict on the subject of gender, with writers using often interchanging masculine and feminine forms.
But in 1647, the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas argued for the restoration of what he called the “purity and clarity” of the French language. Chief among his bugaboos: the tendency – de rigueur at the time – to use both the masculine and feminine in a sentence.
“The masculine gender, being more noble, must predominate whenever the masculine and feminine find themselves together,” he wrote.
A member of the Académie Française, the powerful body overseeing the rules and usage of the language, De Vaugelas was able to ensure that his recommendation became standard linguistic practice.
The Académie has been characteristically hidebound ever since.
In 2017, it issued a “solemn warning” regarding gender-neutral language, saying its use would only invite “disunity”, “confusion”, “illegibility” and ultimately pose a “moral danger” to the language.
Only five of the Académie’s current 36 members, known as “Immortals”, are women.
Quebec has actually been notably more receptive than the mother country to gender neutrality in the French language.
L’Office Québécois de la langue française – which enforces the province’s language laws – recognized the legitimacy of female job titles such as mairesse for female mayors and autrice for women authors in 1979. The Académie, meanwhile, first announced it would allow for the use of female versions of job titles in February.
And in a notable departure from the Académie Française, the OQLF offers free online courses on “feminizing” the French language. When it comes to gender neutrality, “we’re far ahead of France,” said Hélène de Nayves, a terminologist at the OQLF.
Part of the reason is Quebec’s early embrace of its robust feminist movement, which has led to one of the more socially progressive societies on the continent, complete with liberal abortion laws and a low gender employment gap.
“Unlike in France, the push for changes in the language to reflect gender equality came from the population, not from linguists and researchers,” said De Nayves.
Apart from the criticism and occasional death threat, the only issue for Montréal Campus has been space-related. Namely, using both the masculine and feminine eats up more column inches in its paper edition. Thankfully, it only publishes two paper editions a year. Like many smart newspapers, it now flourishes online.