PRESIDENT CHIRAC stormed out of the first session of a European Union summit dominated by a row over French nationalism because a fellow Frenchman insisted on speaking English.President Chirac and three of his ministers walked out of the room when Ernest-Antoine Seilli
Life, Liberty, and Property
France’s president Jacques Chirac walked away from the last european council in protest over M.Seilliere talking english.
To be precise, Chirac did not walked away from the European Council because M.Seilliere spoke english (Chirac is fluent in english and has certainly no problem with the language), but because M.Seilliere, who started his speech in french, suddendly turned to english because he said “english is the language for business”.
English is no more the language of business than french is the language of poetry, italian the language of arts or spanish the language of flamenco dancing
Any speech can be given in any language; a language is not used according to the content of a speech but according to your audience. In this case, the audience was the european council and as far as I know, the very vast majority of attendants don’t have english as their mother tongue. All speeches are translated anyway and english was absolutely not necessary.
M. Chirac was right to point out this anomaly, but wrong to walk out, he should have said to the audience “Et maintenant, mesdames et messieurs, we are going to hear M.Seilliere speech”. That would have had much more impact… Anyway, the wrong thing to do would have been to do nothing.