The history of the language has become an ideological stake whose virulence we did not suspect. Activism has even just invented a new category of social injustice: etymological injustice. Yielding to a vague pseudo-historical reminiscence, the Ministry of Culture, in a call for projects concerning heritage days, therefore took the initiative to invent a new meaning for the word heritage as it is used today. and to go and pull the word matrimony from the archives of history to give it a meaning that it did not have. The text reads as follows:
“Our cultural heritage is made up of our heritage (which comes from fathers) and our matrimony (which comes from mothers). By rehabilitating the notion of matrimony, a term that has existed since the Middle Ages, the HF Movement wishes to promote the memory of creators and intellectuals by contributing to the transmission and visibility of the works of those who preceded us.It is also a question of bringing out and building our future heritage, by allowing contemporary artists to have their talents recognized. “
I wrote in 2018 in Sex and Language (Intervals): “If patrimony could have meant ‘set of goods, rights inherited from the father’ in 1150 when he was then opposed to matremoingne, this legal distinction has long been extinct. The word ‘heritage’ has designated a legacy, including in the figurative sense, with or without reference to both parents. This is how it applies today to genetic heritage, cultural heritage, archaeological heritage, etc. It is particularly ridiculous to want to reintroduce a gender distinction – ‘matrimony and heritage days’ – when the word has lost the semantic feature ‘masculine’ for centuries and especially to apply it to a word that does not does not even refer to people. It would even be particularly grotesque to look for a word that no longer exists for a long time to make a duplicate with another word… in order to designate exactly the same thing! ’to force French-speakers not to j Never say heritage without adding its ‘feminized’ counterpart? We can easily imagine the scene in a banking context: ‘Let’s talk about your wealth and your financial assets…’. Over the course of their transformations, words carry history as they carry oblivion. And above all, the words do not claim an ideological position: to say ‘heritage’ does not imply masculine preeminence because, today, it does not refer to the ‘masculine’ trait any more than patrie or Patricia, which have the same root. .. and who are feminine! If one takes all etymologies at face value, the whole language risks being the object of an assault of reformist absurdity.
Faced with the persistence of the militant lie, let us emphasize once again what everyone knows or guesses: the word matrimony has not really been used since at least the 16th century. Alain Rey points out that it is no longer anything more than “a burlesque term” in the 17th century and the title of Hervé Bazin’s novel in 1967 clearly took on the value of a neologism.
Moreover, in Latin, matrimonium means above all “marriage”: “in matrimonium ire” (Plautus) means “to marry”. In old Anglo-Norman French also, the state of matrimony is marriage: “And to legitimize, as to heritages and all other things, bastardes and all others, which are procured out of verroie matrimoigne” (1379). It is moreover in this sense, in an archaic and sarcastic way, that Molière uses it: “Someone else, under the hope of matrimony, would have opened his ear to temptation” (Le spiteamour. II, 4 . 1656).
Matrimony therefore designates the legal union of a man and a woman. By extension, in a strictly technical sense, matrimony could also designate the property inherited from the mother’s side (who can perfectly hold it… from her father – there is therefore nothing matrilineal in this filiation!) . The word has been preserved in contemporary French only in its adjectival form, matrimonial, which means “relating to marriage” (and not “to the mother”).
For its part, patrimony meant and still means: “goods received by inheritance” and also “all the goods of a person”. This has nothing to do with the contemporary, cultural and non-legal sense of heritage as defined by the Trésor de la Langue Française: “What is transmitted to a person, a community, by ancestors, previous generations, and which is considered as a common heritage. Archaeological, artistic, cultural, intellectual, religious heritage; collective, national, social heritage; heritage of a nation, of a people. “We have reasons other than the soil and the climate to defend our country. The heritage of ideas must have something to do with it, in my opinion” (Clemenceau, Vers Réparation, 1899, p.1). “General de Gaulle has always solemnly proclaimed that he would exercise his powers only essentially provisional title, as manager of French heritage” (De Gaulle, Mém. guerre, 1954, p.482)”
We therefore note that heritage, in its modern sense, refers above all to the idea of a collective legacy: the genetic heritage is provided as much by the mother as the father; the architectural heritage has no more sex than the national heritage. This word does not indicate anything about the sex of the bequest and does not include a “masculine” semantic trait, neither today nor for many centuries.
Only activists appeal to this vanished nuance in order to create a victim asymmetry that promotes an interpretation that puts women and men in opposition. This sexual differentialism rests on a pseudo-historical anachronism. We note that this “method” availing itself of distant history, reviewed and corrected by the glasses of ignorance and partiality, is at the base of many inclusive claims, in particular those of Eliane Viennot. The linguist Yana Grinshpun blasted these obscurantist assertions in an article in our collective work Le genre grammatical et l’abonnement inclusive en français. I also mention this falsification in The Sheep of Thought (Cerf).
The Wikipedia notice of the expression “cultural heritage” even claims this counterfeit: “Although the term matrimony has existed since the Middle Ages to describe the property inherited from the mother, it was supplanted by the notion of heritage and its use remained for a long time. From the 2000s, the notion reappeared in a new sense under the pen of authors wishing to emphasize the role of women in cultural development.
This manipulation could not be better described: if it is a question of a “new meaning”, it is because this word did not have the meaning that the militants of today confer on it, in the same way than the anonymous editors of the text of the Ministry of Culture. Why then a return to the Middle Ages if it is a new concept?
The evocation of the Middle Ages has two functions. First, it gives a pseudo-scholarly appearance of historical legitimacy (in contradiction, moreover, with the condemnation of this history — would the Middle Ages have been more “feminist” than our time?). Then, it imposes the revisionist narrative which is that of the “theory of masculinization”, propagated in an incoherent way by selecting facts defying any method in diachronic linguistics.
France Culture relays the same idea: “Matrimony is not a neologism, but a word erased by history”. History would therefore have “erased” this word? But, as the little understanding we have of Old French attests, hasn’t it erased thousands more? Why extract only this one and act as if “history” were a masculinist agent? Should we revive everything that has existed? In reality, pseudo-feminist militancy only selects what suits it in history to confer on itself a precisely “heritage” legitimacy…
To imagine that there would be a masculine privilege in the semantics of words, to imagine that words would be the property of social groups, that words would have a fetish value, is to create a complaint from the imagination with infinite demands. As no one sees heritage as a male privilege, a perverse genealogy is then created to make etymology the source of an injustice. These constant recriminations with historical appearances are interpretative projections, not facts.
The fetishistic sacralization of the feminine, blind to factual reality, creates its own conditions of symbolic existence, rewriting language by now adding to it an obligatory semiotic feature: virtue. From dictionaries to the intuition of each speaker, it is therefore common knowledge that heritage as it has been used for centuries absolutely does not have the “paternalistic” meaning that has just been invented for it. History, language and common sense are thus transformed in order to claim to correct them and align them with new orthodoxies. This revisionism of ignorance constitutes a serious intellectual fraud. That he does not bother with the truth is understandable from the perspective of his political propaganda, but it signals that he prefers to create historical mystification and attack a legend rather than deal with real social injustices.
It is in the nature of militant bad faith to choose to be indignant at chimerical injustices since the quest for a posture of victim today carries power. But it is alarming to say the least to note that the crudest cultural revisionism is institutionalized today: not only is it already being taught, but the Ministry of Culture claims it…
*Jean Szlamowicz is a linguist, university professor and co-founder of the Observatory of Decolonialism. He recently published “The Sheep of Thought” (Cerf).
