“Exhorted (…) exuded (…) crocs-en-jambe”, Agnès Martin-Lugand did not lack imagination to add some difficulties to the texts that she had prepared especially for the Grande dictée games, organized April 12 on the occasion of the Paris Book Festival.
Under a blue sky and a still fairly discreet heat, amateurs, writers and “dicopaths” met at the Champ-de-Mars to test their level in French or just to have a friendly time. The 800 chairs were 3/4 full for the first dictation which took place at 2 p.m. Sometimes delayed by the vagaries of live broadcasts – France Télévision captured the event for the program “La grande bibliography” – the first lines were dictated around 3 p.m. by the novelist.
The exercise is not graded but participants take it very seriously. Like, applied, before the tongue sticking out a little, to the side. After a reading of around twenty minutes, the journalist and writer Rachid Santaki took over for a second reading. No supervisors like at school, the organizers focused on the discipline of the participants.
At the end of the last reading, the corrected text was projected on the giant screen. Rejoicing for the good students, astonishment for others who discover their errors. “I heard someone say that he had made 27 mistakes,” laughs Agnès Martin-Lugand. When the presenter of “La Grande Libraire”, Augustin Trapenard, asks the public if some have done it flawlessly, around ten hands go up in the audience. “Who made five mistakes?” More of the audience raises their hands. “The dictation was a bit complicated. There are words that seem simple and ultimately we realize that we don’t know how to write them,” admits Lina, 16 years old. Ingrid and Clara, 28 and 30 years old, are average: “Six mistakes”. “I didn’t think I had done so much,” regrets the older of the two participants.
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“Spelling must become a game and a sport. The more we write, the more we read, the more we learn and it ends up getting into our minds,” explains Agnès Martin-Lugand. The sporting dimension was also at the heart of the event. One hundred days before the Games, the texts were inspired by the Olympic motto created by Pierre de Coubertin: “Faster, higher, stronger”. Paralympic athlete Théo Curin, double silver medalist in swimming at the disabled sports world championship in 2017, also made a brief appearance to warm up the audience.
During the second dictation, prepared by David Foenkinos, former Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak took her place among the participants. The one who supported this initiative when it was in place on rue de Valois, is delighted to see this “mix of generations” participating in this event. “We must restore the desire to read and write. At a time when we are all spending too much time on screens, it’s important to still be able to enter a text,” she says. As for her grade, the former minister already admits defeat: “I’m sure I’m going to make mistakes.”
The most important thing was to have fun. The Great Dictation of the Games awarded all participants a gold medal, giving them free entry to the Paris Book Festival which runs until Sunday.