Minorities protest at failure to get their voices heard

As Several thousand musicians and dancers from Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Asturia and Galicia paraded through the streets of Lorient in the 28th annual Festival Intercelt ique on Sunday, a Breton group campaigning for the ratification of the Council of Europe's 1992 European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages slipped in among the bagpipe players.

The object of their protest was President Jacques Chirac, and his refusal to allow the French constitution to be changed to ratify the charter.

The Festival Interceltique - which continues until Sunday - shows how difficult it is to separate cultural and political demands. Two of Brittany's best-known singers, Gilles Servat and Dan Ar Braz, have used their presence in Lorient to express what Mr Servat calls "cultural resistance".

When the French Culture Minister Catherine Trautmann showed up in Lorient - the first time such a minister has attended in 14 years - Mr Ar Braz asked her to convey his wishes for greater Breton independence to Paris.

As a cabinet member, Ms Trautmann was not likely to advocate Breton independence, but in the confused and angry dispute over the language charter, she is on the side of the Bretons, Provencaux, Creoles, Alsatians, Corsicans, Catalans, Basques and French speakers of 68 other regional and minority languages identified in a study delivered to the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, last April.

Ms Trautmann called the Lorient Celtic festival "one of the best ways of fighting the globalisation of culture". She proposed creating a Conseil Superieur des Langues de France in the autumn. The Breton protesters were not impressed; the language council set up by an earlier Socialist government in 1985 did nothing.

Yet in a recent opinion piece in Le Monde, Ms Trautmann wrote that "a language is a living heritage, located in the brain of the person who speaks it. The only way to protect it is to ensure that it is handed down and used."

On May 7th, Mr Jospin's government endorsed 39 of 94 articles of the European charter, committing itself to teach regional and minority languages from preschool through university level, to provide legislative texts in these languages, encourage broadcasting and cross-border contacts (for example between French and Spanish Basques), and forbid limits on the use of regional languages in the workplace.

The constitutional council stymied the project, ruling on June 16th that France could not ratify the charter without changing its own constitution.

A 1992 revision stated that "French is the language of the republic". In the European Union, the French constitution is alone in recognising only one official language and making no mention of the others.

President Chirac has the power to call a constitutional referendum to change this, but on June 23rd he refused to do so.

Mr Jospin - who will almost certainly stand against Mr Chirac in the next French presidential election - must have been delighted.

He had presented his rival with the choice of infuriating either the anti-European Jacobin "sovereigntists", or the regionalists. Mr Chirac chose to offend the latter. Newspapers noted with irony that Mr Chirac had promised Breton politicians that France would ratify the charter three years ago.

Mr Chirac's decision was condemned by regional councils from Catalan Peripignan to Alsatian Strasbourg. The most colourful denunciation was made in a speech delivered in Breton by the robed Grand Druid Gwench'lan Le Scouezec at a July 18th conclave of the Gorsedd Druid fraternity in Finistere.

The French government has discouraged regional languages since at least the 15th century, when Louis XII's adviser Claude de Seyssel told the sovereign he could achieve "eternal domination" of conquered peoples by teaching them his language. In 1794, the revolutionary priest Abbe Gregoire persuaded the convention presided over by Robespierre of "the necessity of annihilating various patois and universalising the French language".

Over the centuries, political expediency grew into a conviction best expressed by the writer Anatole France (1844-1924):

"The French language is a woman," he wrote, "and this woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so daring, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so noble, so familiar, so crazy, so wise, that one loves her with all one's soul, and one is never tempted to be unfaithful to her." Perhaps this explains why half of all French people say they have no command of any foreign language.