This dissertation was first published in the appendix in this book . A paperback version exists on Amazon as well as an ebook version for 1 euro.

Grammar is, like morality, a normative activity. In this sense, it has nothing to do with language itself, from which it is distinguished in the same way that baking is distinguished from eating; in the same way that dancing is distinguished from movement; in the same way that writing is distinguished from thinking. From the fundamental need – to eat, to speak, to share, to express – comes a principle of society that regulates it.

normative grammar and official history

Rules and pastiches

To begin, let's return to the question at the heart of the book, namely the issue linked to the practice of a spelling put forward as a demand emanating from public and private administrations. Because, on reflection, it seems obvious that the real demand made by the supporters of inclusive writing concerns the integrated control of the language of administrations. Indeed, no one expects Amélie Nothomb to write a book in inclusive writing: it would make no sense, no success and no publisher would dare publish a book written entirely in inclusive writing. And what reader would be stupid enough to impose such a chore on themselves? Let's try. Let's take a book. An average book, crowned with success and close to us. La Modification, from Butor, here, at random:

You put your left foot on the copper groove, and with your right shoulder(?) you try in vain to push the sliding panel a little further. You insert yourself through the narrow opening, rubbing yourself against its edges, then, your suitcase covered in grainy dark leather the color of a thick bottle, your fairly small suitcase for a man/woman used to long journeys, you tear it off by its sticky handle, with your fingers that have warmed up, however light it may be, from having carried it so far, you lift it and you feel your muscles and tendons taking shape not only in your phalanges, in your palm, your wrist and your arms, but also in your shoulder, in the whole half of your back and in your vertebrae from your neck to your kidneys. No, it is not only the time, barely morning, which is responsible for this unusual weakness, it is already age which seeks to convince you of its domination over your body, and yet, you have only just reached forty-five years old.

We are touching on the sublime here. Come on, let's try it with a beautiful text, like the Taste of infinity by Baudelaire in Artificial Paradises (finally, “the Taste of infinity” in “Artificial Paradises”):

Those who know how to observe themselves and who keep a record of their impressions, those who, like Hoffmann, have known how to construct their spiritual barometer, have sometimes had to note, in the observatory of their thoughts, beautiful seasons, happy days, delicious minutes. There are days when the man/woman awakens with a youthful and vigorous genius. His eyelids barely freed from the sleep that sealed them, the outside world offers itself to him/her with a powerful relief, a sharpness of contours, an admirable richness of color.

And why not a new edition of Montaigne, where I predict some difficulties for Book III, chapter V:

I say that the male and female are cast in the same mold: except for the institution and the usage, the difference is not great. Plato calls indifferently the one and the other to the society of all studies, exercises, responsibilities, warlike and peaceful vacations, in his republic; and the philosopher Antisthenes eschewed all distinction between their virtue and ours. It is much easier to accuse one sex, than to excuse the other; this is what is said: the van mocks the shovel. 

Ah, what a joke! What is the aim of this pure exercise in conservative bad faith? To make people understand that the issues of inclusive writing, in the minds of reformers, only concern the controlled reform of the language of institutions. It is an administrative issue that associates grammar and the State. And somewhere, if we are allowed this familiarity, it is fair game. Because language has to do with the State. French, if one is secular, is born^{[1]On the question of the birth of French, one will read Bernard Cerquiglini, The birth of French. Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. On the more nuanced question of whether it is possible to conceive of the birth of a language, one would prefer to read: Michel Banniard, From Latin to Romance languages, Paris, Nathan, 1997 (Collection 128/Linguistique, 160). On the question of the representation of linguistic change, we will refer in general to the work of the philologist Eugen Coseriù, particularly The man and his language. Studies of linguistic theory and methodology (Madrid, Gredos, 1977).} as an institution in a first political text – the Treaty of Verdun – which is above all a political oath that tyrants take in front of their familiar troops to ensure, by speaking in their vulgar way, their loyalty. And if one is a mystic, one will also remember that French was born in a council, in Tours, in 813 where the servants of the ecclesiastical Institution were required to adopt the language of the parishioners to ensure their loyalty to the dogma and other teachings transmitted during the sermons. Modernists who are bored by the Middle Ages will say that French was born with Francis I who, under the growing pressure of an overly invasive Italian language, decided to institutionalize French to make it the official language of his administration. As for contemporaries, they will finally remember that French was the main weapon of the school of Talleyrand and then of Jules Ferry to odiously eradicate regional languages ​​from the territory of France, to force the French to live together and share a common ideal of fraternity, and even to try to export internationally the universal values ​​carried by revolutionary ideals. Language has to do with institutions, that is undeniable. But let us not be mistaken when it comes to reforming the language of the administration: it is not a question of attacking the language of a people, nor its culture, which cannot be summed up by the use it makes of its grammar. Let us compare our previous literary adaptations to this short extract from the official communication of a university doctoral school addressed to young enrollees:

The doctoral student carries out his or her research under the supervision and responsibility of a thesis director, and within the framework of a research laboratory, in accordance with the terms specified in the thesis charter […] The doctoral contract constitutes a fixed-term contract entered into between the University of Paris 13 and a doctoral student in order to allow him or her to devote himself or herself fully and exclusively to his or her research work. […] The doctoral school participates in the financing of conferences with communications, after favorable opinion of the thesis and laboratory directors.

The text appears legitimate and is admissible. There is a certain apparent common sense which is expressed elsewhere in this embryo of grammatical correction. The very canonical hesitation on the determiners "la or le" seems to conform to a traditional use of grammar, then the text enters into a total break from the third word. However, what is paradoxical in this exemplary text is that we can easily see that all the efforts made on the texts ultimately only concern the gentilic nouns, that is to say the nouns relating to the denomination of human beings in their relation to their origin. We speak of "doctoral students" and "director(s)" (with some approximations, moreover, which are difficult to qualify as errors, and which we cannot denounce in an erratum without reducing this innocent and playful use to the old reaction which was concerned with orthographic morality^{[2]This is probably where the problem lies: by wanting to establish libertarian spelling practices as rules, sooner or later the old usages will regain the upper hand in the crowd of converted weaklings who will begin to set themselves up as guarantors of the new spelling. And the practice, outdated, will fade away.}) but we do not worry, for example, about the gender of words denoting inanimate objects ("a school", "a duration", "a thesis"?), as if usage had the force of law in certain cases; but was questionable in others.

For what secret reasons is there this distribution of uses, which on the one hand makes “director” admissible and “the thesis” ridiculous. If one had to question this practice, no doubt the response of the human animate would immediately arise, as if the relationship between gender and sex were self-evident in the case of human names but had no importance for the rest of the lexicon. Why then would the question of gender be relevant to the designation of humans? The answer is, as we have just emphasized, common sense: it goes without saying, let's see! Humans have a sex, and that sex is consistent with gender. This thinking at work in the establishment of inclusive writing is based entirely on a gigantic error, practiced in good faith, linking biological sex to grammatical gender. And what could be a reasoned critique of institutional spelling collapses under the weight of this false interpretation. In fact, the whole inclusive posture is obviously based on a reflex linked to cratylism which models this use, and immediately discredits it. Indeed, to consider that sex and gender are intimately linked, as do those who denounce institutional spelling, is to consider that language in some way reflects the biology to which it is linked, as if (it is therefore an image) language emanated from the world that it names. Based on this idea, which has always had a certain success in the oldest mysticisms, we must therefore consider that names have a gender because the objects named have one... and therefore, that things must have a sex for them to be thus divided into masculine or feminine gender in French. But we must not stop there, and therefore continue on the path traced by such a philosophy of language: if the fish is called "fish", it is because the word "fish" is linked to the shape of the "fish" from which it borrows the fins to form its two "s"; the word "table" must be round or rectangular; the word "man" must come from the "earth" and "God" must be a very complicated word. We quickly see the limits to which Cratylic common sense leads us: considering that the gentiles must imperatively be "inclusive", that is to say reflect biological sex by an exhaustive orthographic practice, is basically considering that spelling, grammar and therefore language, were doing their job badly by not reflecting well enough the sexual diversity of human biology. Because if there is a gender of words, it is to reflect biological diversity; otherwise, what is its use? And so our "student(s)" find themselves, so to speak, assigned to their biology, which we are nevertheless entitled to contest: on the one hand because biology is undoubtedly more diverse than grammatical spelling summarizes it (and we are quite justified in affirming its sexual differentiation from the old categories as reflected by the "+" sign of the LGBTQ+ acronym); and also because language is not a social institution, no one has the right to impose on it a mission that would be to reflect biological sexual reality.

To grasp the duality of the relationship that arises in the minds of speaking subjects when we approach the question of the linguistic representation of things in the world, it is perhaps a good idea to start again with Proclus' commentary on Cratylus. The entire dialogue between Socrates and Cratylus is placed under the sign of an encyclopedic hermeneutic, which seeks to know the thing rather than the name. And yet, the dialogue ends with a contradictory injunction from the philosopher who says:

Let us simply agree that it is not from names that we must start, but that we must learn and research things starting from themselves rather than from names.^{[3]See source}.

Why is this a paradox? Because all maieutics has consisted, precisely, in a nominalist dialogue between the philosopher and his antagonist. To resolve this paradox, Proclus, in his commentary, brings into play the imaged dimension of language staged by Plato, who considers "names not as pronounced, but as images of things^{[4]Procl., in Ave.. 9, 3, 10-11, ibid.} ". It is possible to access the essence of being through knowledge of the name to the extent that the name, as a linguistic signifier, carries a part of the truth of which it is in some way the pale reflection. But a pale mimetic reflection not of the essence itself, but of a part of the truth as "figura", as "figure", "capsule" of the essence of the object. It is therefore not a question of considering that the name is a consequence of the thing, which would imply that the word is the truth itself of the thing to which it would be procedurally linked, but rather that it maintains a relationship with the word from which it does not derive but to which it belongs, a bit like the feather of the bird participates in the definition of the bird (a bird must have feathers: the feather participates in the truth of the bird) without however being able in any way to summarize the definition of the bird to the fact of being linked to the feather.

The word is a capsule of the essence of the object, a container of its fundamental substance (a noun) but in no case does the knowledge of the word allow one to exhaust the truth of being. The aim of Cratylus is to show the generative activity of souls and their assimilative power in the very last beings; souls have received this power as a lot by their essence and they show it by means of the correctness of names.^{[5]Alain Lernould, “Names and assimilative powers of souls” in interference, op. cit.}.Socrates' reply to Hermogenes that probably best sums up the motivation for his investigation is the following. In response to Hermogenes, who defends Cratylus, Socrates states: "the name is an instrument that serves to instruct and distinguish reality as the shuttle makes the fabric". We are at the heart of the problem: the name participates in the essence of the thing but does not exhaust it. Cratylus' position, reported by Hermogenes, is summarized at the beginning of the dialogue: "According to Cratylus, Socrates, a just denomination exists naturally for each being". What is the issue then of wanting to impose a different spelling, which is superficial and does not touch the word itself? Because practicing inclusive spelling in fact does not alter in any way the denomination of the object of the world. The inclusive modification of the spelling of the word "student" for example, or "doctoral student", only superficially modifies the morphology of the noun. How is this a philosophical position? In the manner of Hermogenes, inclusive spelling seeks to correct the denomination in order to integrate into daily practice a "better" way of saying the essence of beings. The proposed reform corrects by naming better than classical French does, blinded by its indifference to sex. "Students" would better describe the divided reality of the group of young people. "Director" would better say the reality of being, and therefore, would be a more ethical approach and more in line not with morality; not with the truth of being; but with the classification of individuals by the lowest denominator that they would have in common: sex. By wanting to "better say", that is to say "better stick" to the biological "reality" of human beings, inclusive writing cratylises as much as possible. And in doing so, it claims a sociological practice of grammar that is the exact opposite of what linguistics wants to be.

Gender and number are related.

In inclusive writing as it is practiced today, there is therefore a desire not to say well, which would be in the style^{[6]See Jean Mazaleyrat on this subject in particular. Elements of French Metrics. Paris, A. Colin, 71990 [11965] (Coll. U2) and especially Georges Molinié G., “Stylistics and rhetorical tradition”, Argumentation and Rhetoric, Hermès, 1995, 15 as well as Georges Molinié and Pierre Cahné (dir.), What is style?, Paris, PUF, 1994.}, but to better express reality, which is a fantasy. In this fantasy, it should be noted that spelling implies a double descriptive paradigm: gender and number, inseparably attached to each other in a double morphological articulation that would like to be systematic, but which does not succeed. And which in doing so, contradicts the practice of language.

Indeed, the number in French is expressed syntactically by the use of a category of determiners, the indefinites, which have the function of regulating the extension (significatio) and the intension (suppositio) of the noun to which they are attached. These are two complicated notions, but which have a real relevance for understanding how the language works. The intension, with an "s" therefore, refers logically to the dictionary definition of the noun (What is a "cat"? What is a "man"? What in the definition of man and in what I see of a particular individual, makes me think that I can affirm that he is a man, or a cat?). The extension refers to the individuals who enter the class induced by the intension. For example, if I posit a definition of the word "cat" based on biological criteria and therefore define the intention of the concept by a set of remarkable traits of the class of this mammal (meows, hair, eating habits), then I can define very precisely the number of individuals existing or having existed likely to excessively meet the definitional criteria. When I say "director", for example, or "student", I am using a noun whose intension programs the biological sex of the individual and which excludes "director" men from the extensive class. From these two descriptive notions comes the idea that the word in discourse adapts more or less to the abstract issue of extension and intension by a form of adjustment carried by the determinant which restricts the (maximum) extension of a concept. For example, when I use a word ironically or by image, I play on the criteria of extension to bring into the extensive class individuals who had no place there. If extension is therefore an intrinsic property of the noun, the determiner, for its part, embeds in the syntax of French the adjustment of the quantity of individuals (in extension) targeted by the use in discourse. This is what linguists call "extensity"^{[7]See on this subject in particular Marc Wilmet, Nominal Determination, Paris, PUF, 1986, p. 194. Extensity is defined there as the “quantity of beings or objects to which a noun or nominal phrase is applied”.} »; and everyone can experience this adjustment: if I compare, for example, the following statements, (A) "a soldier rings the doorbell" and (B) "a soldier lives and dies standing up", I find that the subject noun phrase is strictly the same in both cases. However, it is obvious that if the intension (the definition) of the noun "soldier" is ne varietur from one statement to the other, and if it is obvious from a logical point of view that the extension of the class "soldier" is invariable, in both cases, the number of individuals of the class targeted by the statement is absolutely not the same in (A) and (B). In the first case, the extension is equal to 1, i.e. an individual taken from the general class; and in the second case, the extension is equal to ALL individuals (and ALL individuals too, as long as they wear a helmet), i.e. the maximum extension of the class. And the same observation can be made with the definite article: if I compare the statement (C) "the soldier who knocks at the door is armed" and the statement (D) "the soldier is the bulwark against the enemy", I note a similar operation of the extent reduction ratio from the maximum in (D) to 1 in (C).

So that playing on the ratio of extensity, we see that the definite and indefinite articles come together in their property of defining the individuals designated by the noun phrase. If extension is a property of the noun, extensity is a property of the noun phrase. This adjustment operates in the French language in a rather subtle way by creating a tension around the notions of quantity induced by the statement and of the plural expressed. Let us consider the following statements:

(1) Every soldier is brave.
(2) A soldier is brave
(3) The soldier is brave
(4) Every soldier is brave
(5) A soldier knocks at the door
(6) No soldier survived
(7) No soldiers returned

The gradation that one feels when reading (1) to (7) is linked to the variation in extent carried by the subject noun phrase "X soldier" which goes from (1) to an external, morphological singularity, which is dissonant with respect to the maximum quantity carried by the meaning ("The set of soldiers existing or having existed") to an external singularity carried by the morphology in perfect adequacy with the meaning in (4) and (5) to an external singularity which is dissonant again with respect to the negativity of the number carried by the determiner in (6) and (7).

This list can be compared with a similar plural expression:

(1) Every soldier is brave – All soldiers are brave
(2) A soldier is brave- Soldiers are brave
(3) The soldier is brave- Most soldiers are brave.
(4) Every soldier is brave - Many soldiers are brave
(5) A soldier knocks on the door - Some soldiers are brave
(6) No soldier survived
(7) No soldiers returned - No charges will be incurred

The relationship maintained here between each statement allows us to show the reality of the language: the extensiveness, regulated by the determiner, is accompanied by a visible manifestation of plurality. A tension is then expressed between the semantic plurality and the morphological mark of the plural which can be disconnected from the extensive reality. When I write that "Each soldier is courageous", I express in a singular way a plural, distributive reality, but which implies the totality. And if I add that "each soldier received his lot", I imply not only that all the troops are well treated, but I also add that I take into consideration each individual for what he is (man or woman, small or large, hero or coward) in his relationship to the extensive class whose defining traits (the intension) belong to no one but are the result of consensus: the dictionary. This is also obvious in the use of the indefinite determiner "most of" which governs the plural extension, which is itself singular, but whose agreement is plural according to traditional grammar (see Grevisse, etc.). We thus write "Most are interested", even if the determining phrase is singular or feminine: it is a form of agreement mirroring the subject. However, the inclusive spelling proposition, contrary to a common sense impression, governs the thought of number much more than that of gender. By writing "each student", I am making a proposition which overdetermines the question of number by embarrassing it with a question, gender, which it does not have to worry about in some way. Why? Because the defining intention of "student", apart from the fact that it is a human being, is linked to a set of traits which have no connection with biology, unlike for example "cat", "microbe" or "horse". "Student" is a category of human anime that is extremely open to all types of human anime, gendered or not, transgender or retired, as long as they all pay their tuition fees. By introducing into the spelling a morphological trait of the dual number (biological male students and biological female students), I introduce a restriction of the intension which is a reduction of meaning.

This is why, embarrassing syntax more than it liberates it, such a practice that might seem common sense, embarrasses the speaker. Finally, by playing on a regulation of extension in favor of an extremely traditional male/female distribution, such a practice unconsciously reinforces the bourgeois practice of the classical representation of humanity, of youth. This is undoubtedly what explains why so many old professors, cowardly and grumpy, but also conservative administrations had no difficulty in switching their communication to the inclusive side: it only reinforced, in their eyes, that one can only be a student; and that this is ultimately the only thing that matters for the bourgeois couple in the making. You have to choose your side, and they had no difficulty in doing so.

The duel proposal

We can therefore clearly see that the question of inclusive spelling goes beyond the framework of a spelling reform, which is a normative practice to fully attack the structures of the language by posing the case of a reformed nominal morphology on the basis of an identification of gender (masculine or feminine) in relation to sex (male or female), modifying the thought of number (one or the other) on the basis of a hallucinatory presupposition: the nouns of human animates must better reflect the reality of being. This astonishing preamble in fact founds all the criticism that contemporary linguistics addresses, or rather: "should address", to this proposal for debate. However, there is no debate except in the media which are far from being the most peaceful place to advance ideas. In this thought of gender/number morphologically linked in the morphology of the noun, there is something interesting however: it is the expression of the dual number, or what could be presented as such. In Old French, for example, when I use the indefinite article "un" in the plural, I mean "deux". This is how it is: for example, "unes stivales" literally means: "deux bottes", or "une paire de bottes". This is what descriptive linguistics calls "duel", for this particular form of extensity where the "un" does not exist without the other. The use of the dual is quite widespread in ancient languages. In Indo-European, this very particular case had a double meaning: the pair or the couple^{[8]To grasp the nuances of meaning of the declensions of Indo-European, consult Jean Haudry, Indo-European, University Press of France (What do I know), 2nd edition (1984).}, as in some Semitic languages^{[9]This point in particular has always attracted the attention of linguists who have seen in it a reason for bringing these two linguistic branches together. As Charles Fontinoy explains, "it is obvious that the existence of this number in the two groups proves nothing in favor of their relationship: it is not a significant fact since the dual appears in many other languages. But, while elsewhere it is restricted to certain categories of words, it can, in these two branches [Indo-European and Semitic languages] affect all the parts of speech that are inflected […]" (The Duel in Semitic Languages, Les Belles Lettres, 1969, p. 205). The characteristic of the endings of Indo-European (ô, ò) allows us to "dualize" in some way everything that is naturally expressed in pairs ("the eyes", "the arms") but also what is expressed in the form of a couple, like the Vedic ("Varuna Mitra"). This characteristic of ancient languages ​​allows us to understand that in the psycho-mechanical structures that govern the formation of statements in a certain linguistic context, there is a tension of number that is not limited to the triplet "0, 1, some, all" but which includes in deep structure a paradigm of the type: (A) "0, 1 or 2" and (B) "indefinite quantity - total quantity".}

It is from this tension that the expression of degrees of extensity by morphologically singular articles (tension of the one towards either the totality or the null) or the plural (tension of the totality towards its restriction) probably arises. We can therefore legitimately ask ourselves whether this practice of inclusive spelling would not be the surface resurgence of a deep structure, the dual, which would find an echo in the expression of a morphology of the couple. When I write for example "les étudiants.es", the new ending imported by the use of the intermediate point, the addition of the feminine ending and the mark of the plural seems to go in the direction of a dualist claim. If this were the case, this could explain the apparent satisfaction of common sense which characterizes the docile users of this spelling practice, of which one could suspect that the use of the ".e" would refer to a form of satisfaction of an intellectual archaism: the resurgence of the duel finally reintroduced in French.

From a certain point of view, this interesting hypothesis does not stand up to the interpretation of the corpora in inclusive writing in practice, which is a shame. We realize that restricting the use of the inclusive ending in speech to human animates seems prohibitive to its use in other forms of language. It seems that practice very naturally admits that I write "les professeur.es", but that it is inadmissible to write "*les tabl.es". The reason may be twofold: the first is undoubtedly that the same common sense that presides over the expression of a category of the duel around biological sex (it is a simplistic and somewhat BOF thought that considers that it goes without saying that one is either a man or a woman) resists the idea of ​​a parity of the object: one is a table, or one is not, but there is no duality of modality of "being a table". As a result, the category of the duel, which is precisely a conceptualization of number, does not fully describe what is at work in the use of the ".e" to the extent that the current regulation does not play so much on duality but rather on the reinforcement of distributivity ("les étudiant.es" means "each student"). To this must be added, of course, that the orthographic ending is not heard, and does not enrich the thought of the number of the speaking subject. As a result, and starting from this observation that the orthographic ending is an embarrassment of thought, it is difficult to rely on it to see a phenomenon of linguistic resurgence of the archaic structures of the psyche. It is therefore indeed a fact of innovation, which has a prescriptive and orthographic vocation. And if we refuse to allow the grammatical masculine to be a neutral or an undifferentiated gender as classical grammar has done since the Third Republic, it is very difficult to grant the inclusive ending the status of a dual case.

A reform of the state language

Once the linguistic and grammatical issues of inclusive endings have been clarified, we must return to the basic idea that the target of inclusive practice is the state apparatus in its two most obvious forms: the language of administration and the language of school. The examples of pastiche that we produced at the beginning of this chapter alone allow us to grasp that the issues of this debate do not revolve around facts of the language of literature, nor of everyday language. Editorial practices would immediately break the attempts to introduce such an embarrassment into their professions. For what reasons? Because quite simply, since publishing obeys the rules of the market, that is to say, of pleasing the greatest number, the question of the reform of spelling expected by the public of books would not pass the test of a single sale. The subversion of spelling practice, which aims to reform morals, cannot therefore involve the aggression of the common reading and writing practices of the good people. As surprising as this may seem, it is understandable if we are willing to see that the supporters of inclusive writing do not aim to denounce an old normative practice that should be gotten rid of in favor of greater freedom, but rather to substitute another norm based on sociological issues.

It is therefore the language of the administration that is targeted by the heart of this reform; and it is a soft underbelly that is easy to reach, so much cowardice and irresponsibility are expressed there openly. This offensive characteristic against the language of the French State explains two things:

It is a reform of writing, and only of writing...
which is based on an extremely simple constraint.

The first point has not gone unnoticed in the media and in the many comments generated through social networks by the supporters of one or the other position (the "position.es"?). This spelling practice is based on the use of the internal point, which is a trifle, and on the insistent use of the feminine marker in its most identifiable form, the "e" inherited from the old endings of the first Latin declension, "rosa". And since Jacques Brel, we have known how to decline "rosa" in France. This spelling proposal radicalizes a little the infinite variations of the expression of the feminine in French, we will not return to it. It is true that the "e" is clearly perceived, and always perceived, as a mark of the feminine by the speaking subjects as in the words "poet, sign, landscape, visagist, jurist, egoist, parallelism, prosthetist, mirage, toll, fur, dentist, fascist, trauma, baggage, cloud, grimoire, costume, father, brother, crime, sugar, book, capitalism, romanticism, Catholicism, socialism, liberalism, Hinduism, Protestantism, ravage, cleavage, marasmus and chibre", where all the final "e"s obviously serve to underline the morphological force of the feminine. Conversely, moreover, Pérec in Disappearance does not use a single feminine word, it's obvious: he doesn't want an "e"! For the record, a little extract:

He took a novel, he opened it, he read; but he grasped only a confused imbroglio, he stumbled at every moment over a word whose meaning he did not know. 

Oh gosh, so there are feminine words in The Disappearance? How come?

The second point has been insufficiently commented on: the normative proposal, contrary to the impression of disorder that a text written in an inclusive manner can give, is extremely simple and easy to integrate. We could summarize it like this: "for any animated (preferably human), it is necessary to integrate the feminine mark." And very quickly, this practice imposed itself in a completely disorderly manner in email correspondence, in political and administrative communication tools, without anyone having thought of framing this use, or of proposing a clear line. And the reason is obvious: if you want to apply inclusive writing appropriately, you have to be really good at French to know how to sequence the word correctly. However, this is an extremely discriminatory practice which confronts each employee of the administration, according to their rank or quality, with their own competence. Let's take the word "student." Here is a simple word: at first glance it would seem that there is no problem since my previous knowledge of marked gender teaches me that one must sequence at the end to insert the final "e". But things quickly become indecent with a word like "cafe owner". My practice of the language teaches me that “coffee maker” is not the feminine of “cafetier”. Meaning resists inclusion, because if I say today that the coffee maker is in a relationship with his coffee maker, I risk not being understood. But no matter, and let's suppose that usage bans the use of the word "coffee pot" for anything other than a human being. What is the morphological rule for the feminization of the word? (1) I take the word “cafetier”, I remove 2 characters at the end: “cafeti” and I insert the feminine mark which is therefore no longer “e” but “ère”. Which becomes more complicated, because there is a collapse of the myth of the administrative simplicity of the single inclusive ending. Or else, I consider that the rule for forming the feminine is indeed the addition of the "e" in the final position, with alteration of the base, that is: (2) I remove 2 characters at the end, I insert the grave accent (3) I take back the masculine form and (4) I add the final "e". But here again I run into a thorny problem: should I consider the "è" to be a unique character? Or should I consider on the contrary that it is the accent, the important character? And don't answer this question too quickly, because you have to be very careful, the commercial stakes are enormous. So, in computing, the ISO or UTF-8 character implementation standards mainly disagree on this issue. Traditional grammar, the one you learned at school, leans towards the accent: the "grave accent e" is not a character in the alphabet; its sound realization is neither obvious nor systematic. This is a cumbersome old legacy, again. But anyway, getting back to my coffee maker, I'm really struggling to know which of the three spellings mentioned I should use:

(1) cafetiere
(2) cafetiere
(3) cafetiere/`.re

The honorable reader will probably lean towards the first solution, on the pretext that common sense requires it. But it seems that common sense has too much to do with this practice to determine the future of the language of administration on its own. And besides, "the reader"? What is interesting here is to understand that the apparent simplicity of the inclusive spelling rule actually hides an obscenity: the staging of its spelling practice. And therefore, it confronts each person with their own conception of the rules of grammar, depending on whether they have learned them (and learned them well). This inclusive practice is therefore a secondary practice, a second-degree practice that exists only in the makeup of the rules that, in deep structures, frame the use. And the poor administrative secretaries who will one day find themselves having to correct all the communication sites in light of this practice would do well to be very good, very very good, in traditional grammar in order to be able to apply to the letter the doctor(s) that they are supposed to be made to swallow.

On the other hand, from a political point of view, it is important to understand that this war of influence around the language of the State also crystallizes around the question of the language of schools.

The “nobility” of the masculine

The birth of French grammatical awareness, and by this we mean the idea of ​​a French culture that involves mastering rules and standards that are the expression of a "beautiful mind", is inseparable from the culture of "remark". In other words, alongside and at the same time as the cult of a beautiful style in literature develops, we see the emergence of a rhetorical tradition that aims to correct the common speech of the people by pointing out the uselessness, or on the contrary the beauty, of this or that writing practice. Vaugelas and Ménage are the characteristic authors who, through their extensive work, have provided posterity with a vast list of notes to assimilate. At the heart of the practice of the remarkers is undoubtedly a moral approach, placing the author on a pedestal, and condescending to share points of discernment with his readers. Now the discernment in question is a central issue in the very artificial construction of French grammar:

"Discernment" is one of the essential concepts, and perhaps even the central concept, to describe the approach of classical moralists: they themselves explicitly claim it, and we condemn ourselves to misunderstanding their thought, their writing and their method if we forget it for a moment. It is an art to see a spectacle clearly, but also to sort out the referents, and to establish meticulous typologies, based on distinctions that are all the more stimulating as they are more subtle: hyperbolic finesse, infinitely tenuous nuance, microscopic grasp are all required here. We can say precisely the same thing about the enterprise of the remarkers: "Vaugelas's book shines with the spirit of discernment"; "the principle of discernment literally haunts the universe of Characters". The notion of "preciosity" is only the hyperbole or caricature of discernment: "an unfortunate tendency towards preciosity"; "the work that the Précieuses had already begun, La Bruyère continued with remarkable concern"^{[10]Eric Tourette, “Moralists and commentators”, Studi Francesi Rivista quadrimestral, 175 (LIX, I), 2015, p. 29.}.

To this vision of a "discernment" of the "moralist" who places him in a position of authority in relation to the average speaking subject, is added the peremptory tone of the prescriptions of this new grammatical practice which ultimately aims to reform the innocent practice of popular language by aristocrats in love with good taste. In the vocabulary of academic analysis, the terms "moralists" and "remarkers" are, in this regard, used in an equivalent manner and without nuance. However, as Philippe Dumonceaux perfectly explains, "Vaugelas, very probably ignorant of the word, could not have had the linguistic awareness of the Norm^{[11]"Is good usage a standard?" Texts and languages, n. 12, 1986, p. 38, quoted from ibid. On the subject of the “norm”, see G. Siouffi and A. Steuckardt (dir.), The Lexical Standard, Montpellier, Dipralang, 2001.} " However, the issue of normative prescription resonates, in France, as a fundamental patriotic issue. It could not be formulated better than Eric Tourette when he writes:

"The respective genres of moral reflections and observations on language have in common that they are often perceived and presented as typically French. An imaginary of the national spirit then manifests itself, inevitably superimposed on the objective description of cultural traditions: there would be in France a specific thought, expressing itself by a specific form. Such views are based on observations that everyone can easily make: the same French people who maintain a certain tradition of the "thought of the day" have retained a completely singular idolatry of their language, even - or especially? - when they mistreat it.^{[12]Ibid., P. 31.}"

Sorry, but we will stick to this last observation which seems well established: morality and grammar are closely linked. In this perspective, the birth of the first "rules" of French is clearly linked to a thought of the social norm. In this context, the duality of grammatical genders is the subject of a particular ideological treatment. In linguistics, the question of gender goes beyond the simple rule of agreement where "the masculine prevails over the feminine" and concerns the distribution of words into morphological families; the study of the history of this distribution, the underlying rules which explain this distribution in discourse. But as soon as we are interested in the question of the feminine, it is very quickly that everything comes down to the question of "agreement of nobility" (as opposed to agreement "of proximity", or agreement "of meaning") which ensures the noble domination of the masculine over the feminine. And the problem is that this rule is born in French on an ideological bias sociological, normative and assumed. It is therefore to a commentator that we owe the rule of agreement and it is Vaugelas who was the first to write in 1647 that "for a reason which seems common to all languages, the masculine gender being the noblest must predominate whenever the masculine and feminine are together^{[13]Vaugelas, Notes on the French language, useful to those who want to speak and write well, 1647, p. 27} ».

The problem, because it is a historical problem, is therefore that this rule taught at school is based on an ideological and moral bias that flourishes among all the precious, the moralizers and the commentators who have never ceased to repeat this expression, hammering it home to make it the leitmotif of the orthographic thought of the genre. Furetière, in his Dictionnaire from 1690, takes up the expression ("masculine qualifies the noblest of genders"), Beauzée in 1767 ("the masculine gender is considered more noble than the feminine"), up to Girard in 1747 who makes the masculine "a relationship to the first sex". The background underlying the idea of ​​nobility is easily identifiable. Except in Girard, who evokes the primacy of the creation of Adam, the idea that the masculine is "noble" can only be understood by the image of a society in which nobility, understood as a family virtue, is transmitted by the father's name in the aristocratic family. The masculine is "noble", and this goes without saying for the precious, because they associate with the masculine gender the moral virtue of the transmission of the Christian values ​​of the family of the old regime. This idea has been permanently implanted in minds to the point of being included in school textbooks. This idea, however, contrary to what the media doxa suggests, did not immediately come from the aristocracy of the old regime to the school of the XNUMXst century via the Académie française, an odious institution of oppression aiming to fight insidiously to maintain, through linguistic fable, the patriarchal structures which have allowed the head of the family to remain the head.

For French grammar to become an issue of public education, and for grammar, once reserved for the precious, to become an issue of democratic debate synonymous with universal liberty, equality and fraternity, it was necessary to impose an educational model that gave a premium to French. This story probably begins in the Nièvre, under the impetus of apostate red priests gathered in a dissident group who took the name "enragés" and who began, the first, to establish a communal school in their village where the first republican catechism was taught. As an example, here are two extracts from the catechism of Étienne Parent:

In browsing the annals of the world, one would be tempted to believe that man was placed on earth only to become the prey of lies and imposture. Everywhere priests have preached to him an absurd, extravagant, murderous doctrine; and if the lights of philosophy had not come to dispel the thick darkness, with which superstition has covered the globe for thousands of centuries, we would still be handing over our goods to ministers of worship, either for fear of the pains of hell, or for that of metempsychosis […]

Asking: What are the feelings that a man should have for his wife? Answering: Those that a wife should have for her husband; for between husband and wife, the rights are reciprocal; they are tenderness, decency, consideration and condescension for her weaknesses. It is difficult in this context to imagine a republican school acquired to the cause of the noble sex.

How was the Institution of a French school born? Well, it was born on the basis of an idea that, without being far from the norm, goes beyond the issues of the old regime: on the basis of a questioning on the standardization of the territory. It was indeed Talleyrand, the first, who in 1791, addressing the Assembly, proposed the idea that "primary schools will put an end to this strange inequality; the language of the Constitution and the laws will be taught to all; and this crowd of corrupt dialects, the last remains of feudalism, will be forced to disappear: the force of things demands it."^{[14]According to Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, Ideology, revolution and uniformity of language, Sprimont, Mardaga, p. 108} ". The assembly gradually integrated the idea of ​​a combative communal school, made to work towards the standardization of the territory. It was therefore necessary for the State to equip itself with an effective tool for standardization, and this is what Pierre Claude François Daunou proposed in 1793 in a Essay on Public Instruction where he writes:

I ask for the restoration of the entire orthographic system, and that, according to the exact analysis of the various sounds of which our idiom is composed, a correlation be established between these sounds and the characters of writing so precise and so constant, that, the ones and the others becoming equal in number, never be the same sound designated by two different characters, nor the same character applicable to two different sounds. But this renovating impulse was interrupted by the Corsican Bonaparte, whose regime restored the fashion of the Grand Siècle. We think in particular of the writings of Charles-Pierre Girault-Duvivier who, for any program of public instruction, had the modesty to affirm wanting to bring together "in a single body of work everything that has been said by the best grammarians and the Academy^{[15]Grammar of grammars or reasoned analysis of the best grammarians, p. ii.} ».

However, its grammar, concerning the agreement of the adjective, takes up the usages in vogue under the old regime:

When an adjective relates to several singular nouns that designate either persons or things, in the subject, it is put in the plural because the adjective modifying at the same time the two singular nouns must take the only form that indicates this double modification because there is only the plural that can make known that it is the adjective of the two nouns. If the nouns in the subject are of the same gender, the adjective is put in the plural and in the gender of the nouns. If they are of different genders, the adjective is put in the plural and in the feminine because this gender is the primitive gender and any noun capable of two genders is masculine before being feminine; If the adjective qualifies two nouns, one masculine and the other feminine and these nouns are placed in the regime of a verb […] there is uncertainty as to whether this adjective will take the gender and number of the last of the nouns^{[16]Ibid., P. 163-164.} [...]

From this moment (1811), we witness a sedimentation of grammatical usages as they were defined by Girault-Duvivier, then taken up by the Restoration, all leading, under the impetus of the Guizot laws, article 2 of which ("Primary education necessarily includes moral and religious instruction, reading, writing, the elements of the French language and calculation, the legal system of weights and measures") perpetuates the challenge of teaching French in France, to permanently establish this state of affairs, relayed by literature and by good usage where school grammar finds the repertoire of its examples. This state of affairs, which strictly speaking fetishized the commentators of the 80th century, found its perfect incarnation in Noël and Chapsal's French Grammary (1832 editions between 1889 and 1650!) which asserts once and for all: "If the two nouns are of different genders, the adjective is put in the masculine plural", without judgment of nobility or value. Those times are over, but the usage is definitively established in literature. In this context, the inclusive reform comes to the end of a journey that seems, and by far, to be completed. To go to war today against the masculinist Vaugelas, the odious La Bruyère or the old-fashioned people of the French Academy in ignorance of the social rules that forged the context, is perhaps to forget that the old regime is over... since the Revolution and that the perception of grammatical issues has evolved considerably since XNUMX.

Many societal battles absolutely must be fought today to support the evolution of society and we all fully support them, but to postulate that grammar is a societal issue for the emancipation of women is wrong and an abuse of language. Sorry, but there is more social progress in a statement like "I campaign for equal pay for workers around the world" than in a statement like "I want workers to be able to serve capital". In other words, what matters above all in grammatical work, and in the normative pedagogy that accompanies it, is above all the liberalism of ideas more than the morphology of its expression. And we are probably fighting the wrong battle if we want to import into schools a practice that is only a second-class practice: to understand that "director.eur/rice.(s)" is the dualized expression of "director and directress" based on old spelling rules that you have to know well to divert them, you have to have learned the grammatical norms in force. A real reform of gender would involve a profound modification of the rules not of gender, but of number. But it is a little more complicated to understand.

Historical issues

On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to grasp the historical and political issues that led the social sciences to move from the role of decipherer of the world to that of "active participant" in the unfolding of the world and to make the grammar of gender an issue of educational policy. The first reason is undoubtedly found in the historical context of the post-war period, a context that saw the emergence of the first cells of school programming in the wake of Jean Zay's prescriptions. The history of the school institution was built, from the 1950s, around a common cultural baggage imposed on the widest possible school audience in the wake of the teaching of history. This new universalism, as defined by Mona Ouzouf:

"The Third Republic's civics believed it could achieve universalism by denying particularities. Our civics [...] in no way turns its back on a universalism without which we will not even be able to understand what difference is. It posits the unity of the human race, but it postulates that it is [...] in the affirmation of their cultural particularities that the universal is expressed.^{[17]Mona Ozouf, “History and Civic Education,” National Colloquium on History and its Teaching…, op. cit., p. 95-96. She takes up this idea in her work French composition. A look back at a Breton childhood, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.}"

actually fits in with recent history and offers prospects to all schooled children. The debate in social sciences, in connection with the construction of school curricula, inherited from the 1960s the profound contribution of structuralist thought, itself closely linked to post-war communism^{[18]On this subject, see Tzvetan Todorov, La Littérature en péril, Flammarion, 2006. Let us also think back to the analysis produced by Jacques Derrida on Michel Foucaud's "Madness and Unreason" when he writes: "Structuralist totalitarianism would here operate an act of confinement of the cogito which would be of the same type as that of the violence of the classical age". "Structuralist totalitarianism", an expression which has caused much ink to flow, delicately underlines the links which naturally exist between the political vision of Hegelian structures in Marxism and the thought of literary structures or of the social body.}. The contribution was fundamental and invigorating for literary studies, and allowed the integration of many areas of reflection linked to the construction of societies themselves. To use Todorov's expression:

We do not have to choose between returning to the old village school, where all the children wear grey smocks, and full-on modernism; we can keep the beautiful projects of the past without having to denounce everything that finds its source in the contemporary world.^{[19]Ibid., page 24.}.

However, if structuralism^{[20]We cannot resist recalling what the philosopher Eugen Coseriu wrote about the introduction of structuralism in linguistics: "As regards the recent and current [1980] development of linguistics, I do not think I am dramatizing in saying bluntly that our science, considered as a whole, far from being in a phase of extraordinary theoretical and methodological progress [...], is in reality in a state of crisis. [...] Structuralism, in its classical forms [...] is dead: not because it was killed by generativism, as some believe, but because it simply died of boredom; and perhaps also because it was not capable of recognizing in all conscience what, deep down, constituted its strength, that is, precisely, the limits of its validity." (The language and understanding of current language, 1967, 4.1)} and communist ideology are closely linked, it must be understood that in the social sciences, as in the human sciences, the theories of the founding fathers of political structuralism have partly contributed to giving new impetus to the thinking of each of the old sciences of the University. And in this context, the thought of the family as a productivist unit and expression of the relationship of exploitation between men and women are not without impact on the emergence of gender studies in the French University. But what exactly are we talking about?

Archaeology and etymology of gender: Domesticity, a cell of oppressive productivist production

When Monique Wittig writes, "We can consider the origin of language as an act of authority emanating from those who dominate^{[21]Monique Wittig, The Guerrillas, Paris, Minuit, 1969, p. 162.} ", it is likely that she poses a slogan that still sums up today the positioning of a historical part of the supporters of inclusive writing. In the context of liberation of speech by victims of violence, we come to overdetermine any relationship to gender, too often confused in the media with sex. Any individual can legitimately find themselves in the position of victim without being expected to justify their belonging to the strong or weak sex: it does not matter, the media discourse is homogeneous and constantly questions only the social oppression exercised by men on women of which violence is a visible consequence, that is to say, proof. However, the question is not without impact on the grammatical debate where the question of the neutral, clumsily called masculine for the reasons previously mentioned, is coming up against a wave of incomprehension that undoubtedly makes the reform, not of the language itself, but of grammatical terminology urgent. Or, as a dear colleague says:

The French language has the good taste to have a neutral form. Stupidly called the masculine, with the famous rule very poorly formulated, but a neutral form nonetheless. That is to say, which has no marked gender. A lieutenant, for example, can be both a man and a woman. But where it is fabulous, is that it can also be a transsexual, an androgyne, a Japanese adolescent fantasy or whatever: it is included in it. Because the neutral is exhaustive. It includes all genders. Present, past and future. No questions to ask, everything is provided for^{[22]See source}.

The shift that has taken place is quite interesting: from a legal concept, we have moved to a political, structuralist construction, which sees in the facts of harassment a link with the structures of capitalist and bourgeois domination. Sex is, from this point of view, to the family what unemployment is to the question of employers: the demonstration of the relevance of Marxist analyses. If it is not up to us to pass judgment, it is perhaps good to remind each of the actors in the political and media world today that the rhetorical stakes of discourse analysis are the main place where ideological propositions crystallize. However, to pose ethical assertions in grammar is to transpose into language a political ideology which, in this case, finds its source in a certain vision of history, of violence and of the role that social institutions such as grammar play in supervising the masses in the service of the State apparatus. Let us return for a moment, if you will allow us, to the intertwining of the relationships that exist between the Marxist analysis of history and the definition of copulative relations. Indeed, in the man-woman relationship, the construction of patriarchal social structures denounced by Engels has always been at play, who believes, in the continuity of Hegel's work, that the family is a structure of civil society. In The Origin of the Family (1884), Engels proposes an interpretation of the construction of the State through the supposed distribution of male-female roles from patriarchal society to civilization:

[In the first stage,] the woman takes care of the house, prepares food and clothing; she cooks, she weaves, she sews. Each of the two is master in his domain: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each of them owns the instruments that he makes and uses: the man of weapons, hunting and fishing gear; the woman of household objects. [Then, in a stage of appropriation of the industrial apparatus by the man, the woman is forced into domesticity.] Here already, it appears that the emancipation of the woman, her equality of condition with the man is and remains impossible as long as the woman remains excluded from productive social work and must limit herself to private domestic work.^{[23]Friedrich Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Publication of the Classics of the Social Sciences, Presses Universitaires du Québec in Chicoutimi, "classical authors", IX, "Barbarism and Civilization"}.

From this approach he draws the conclusion that "the supremacy of man over woman and the conjugal family is the economic unit of society^[24]Ibid. ". The stakes of the construction of the patriarchal couple are understood from the end of the 19th century as a struggle around the appropriation of a production apparatus (the forest, industry) from which domesticity is excluded, or thought of as a background, a form of withdrawn office where the wife reigns, made dependent on the capitalist forces of production which are nevertheless dependent on these necessary backstages: the proletarian needs to be fed by his wife in order to produce well. This is what Aleksandra Kollontaj will theorize, whose essay Marxism and Sexual Revolutions (1927) is a landmark in the debate. She believes that the proletarian couple remains a fundamental structure of the relations of oppression on which the capitalist system feeds. The "family" is an economic notion that is built on the supremacy of man over woman for the needs of the bourgeois production apparatus. The relations of production that, for long centuries, have linked woman to the home, to the nourishing man, suddenly tear off the rusty irons that chained her and, pushing her, weak and unsuited, onto the thorny path open before her, encircle her in a new knot: economic dependence on capital.

Threatened with the loss of all asylum, under the blow of deprivation and hunger, the woman is obliged to learn to assert herself alone, without the support of the father or the husband […] With surprise, she realizes all the uselessness of the moral baggage that she has been made to carry on the road of life. The feminine virtues cultivated in her for centuries – passivity, submission, gentleness – are revealed to be entirely superfluous, useless, harmful. The harsh reality demands other virtues: activity, firmness, decision, hardness, that is to say the virtues that have been considered until now as the exclusive property of men.^{[25]Translation in Aleksandra Kollontaj, Marxism and the Sexual Revolution, Judith Stora-Sandor, Claude Ligne (trans.), Paris, Maspero, 1975, p. 128-129 after Magali Delaloye, “The New Woman – Russia, 1919”, Europe of Women, Julie Le Bac and Fabrice Virgili (eds.), Paris, Perrin (Édi8), IV. "What does Kollontaj tell us? The new woman is a single woman. Not in the sense that she is not married, but in the sense that she has freed herself from the tutelage of men, that she has obtained equal rights, but also that she has freed herself from feelings such as passion or jealousy that prevent her from emancipating herself [...] The transformation of contemporary societies and in particular the rise of factory work make unacceptable the values ​​traditionally attributed to women such as gentleness and passivity. The new woman is the one who protests against multiple subjugations, who defends her rights to equality and overturns gender stereotypes."}In the Communist Manifesto, the authors affirmed with one voice that "the bourgeoisie has torn away the veil of sentimentality that covered [family] relationships and reduced them to nothing but money relations", that is, relations of capitalist domination. But gradually, the denunciation of the fundamental structures of the capitalist apparatus led to analyzing male-female relations as the translation of a conflicting relationship between two spaces of economic production. The whole challenge of sociological studies in recent years has consisted in moving the domestic space into the sphere of analysis of the production of public goods. Violence within the couple, which is a reality, in addition to being a heinous crime, is a demonstration of the exercise of a supremacy of man over woman and the manifestation of a claim to authority arising from the bourgeois apparatus of which the proletarian family is both victim and actor. And this, regardless of the ideological structure of the couple, their militant faith, their political commitment. She already proposed to promote a vast social policy aimed at emancipating working women from "household worries", to defend the child and ensure maternal insurance. This laudable program is accompanied by a fascinating reflection on free unions between men and women freed from the capitalist structures that hierarchize them, in a very particular reading of ancient religions moreover. This cultural background, treated too summarily here, must be perceived to explain the introduction in France in the 1960s, of the concept of feminist revolution in the social sciences which led to the sociology of gender. As an example, we must consider the remarkable work of Christine Delphy who proposes in particular a strong paradigm drawing a parallel between the capitalist production of consumer goods in industrial society and the production of domestic goods in the family unit; the first explaining capitalism and the second, patriarchal exploitation. In doing so, she profoundly subverts the approach originally proposed by Engels (he considered that women were "excluded from work"), who saw domesticity as a space removed from capitalism. She proposes a model within which domesticity has fully acquired its title of "work". And thus, the husband, his title of foreman of the capitalist political industry within which patriarchy plays the role of basic unit:

What is the patriarchal mode of production? It is precisely the extortion, by the head of the family, of the unpaid labor of the members of his family. It is this unpaid labor carried out in the social – and not geographical – framework of the home that I call domestic labor.^{[26]Delphy, Christine. “How to attack the “unequal sharing” of “housework”?” New Feminist Questions, flight. flight. 22, no. 3, 2003, pp. 47-71, p. 4.}.

The emancipation of women from the domestic production cell allowed their inclusion in the group of industrial workers, which the sociologist perfectly analyses: From the rebirth of the feminist movement in Western countries, between 1968 and 1970, the question of housework or domestic work was raised by feminists who affirmed its character as work. Three decades later, we can see that, on this point, feminism has succeeded, and that the perception of "housework" as real work is no longer hardly questioned in society. During the same period, the proportion of women working "outside" - having a paid job - increased in all Western countries, while birth rates decreased, these two variables being considered correlated, without it always being clear which is the primary variable.^{[27]Ibid., P. 5}.The two systems having in common the fact that they have as their stake the domination over a system of produced goods. From the importation of the notion of gender into French studies, claimed as such, we come to question with a sociological perspective the fundamental structures of Western thought, first and foremost the question of language, whose social avatar (grammar) is condemnable.

Christine Delphy, however, very quickly defended the French translation of "gender" coined by the British sociologist Ann Oakley (1972). Like the latter, she sees in the term the means of distinguishing between biological sex and its cultural dimension, which varies from one society to another. That said, at the same time as she favored the importation of this concept into France, Christine Delphy participated in modifying its definition by affirming the inevitable hierarchy contained in the social construction of this difference, and by reversing the logical link between sex and gender. The legitimate questioning of the place of women in the liberal space of capitalist production must not be confused with grammatical activism, and an ocean often separates researchers in social sciences and media supporters of the inclusive question. The problem, however, remains that the two notions seem, in the contemporary mind, intimately intertwined to the point that we assign to all feminisms^{[28]"Feminism has never been a unified movement and there are many ways today of thinking about the struggles to improve the condition of women and achieve equality with men." Cadolle, Sylvie. "Feminisms, or the debate on sex and gender", French Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 25-30. The plural is also inspired by reading Christine Machiels' work, Feminisms and prostitution (1860-1960), Rennes, Rennes University Press, “Archives of Feminism” collection, 201.}

a militant position on the grammatical question. This is probably not the case, but the question of the gendering of language is based on the postulate of the conditioning of children to the idea of ​​the supremacy of the productive man, more noble and major, over the oppressed woman in the productivist family cell on which capitalism feeds. And if it is conceivable that grammar can condition children to be adults obedient to the established order and the imperatives of the market, it remains that the only place where this conditioning takes place is the school, the last living bastion of the universal language promoted by the sovereign state. To educate is to "colonize minds^{[29]Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, “Françoise Vergès: We must decolonize minds”, Young Africa, 17/04/2013.} "... In this context of questioning patriarchal structures, and all patriarchies, grammar appears as the stranglehold of the white supremacist man on the mind of the people transformed without his knowledge into a defender of capitalist interests by the oppression that he relays within the private space on the domestic backdrop necessary for proletarian rest.

School grammar, in particular, is accused of conditioning minds and imposing a straight norm on children subject to professorial authority, which authority is only the relay of the state institution. For this feminist movement, it is normative heterosexuality, the cultural domination of "straight" thinking, which assigns individuals a specific identity and sexuality while there are a whole series of deviations and exceptions. It would therefore be a question of freeing oneself from this principle of normativity which is linked to dominant heterosexuality and categorizes sexual identities and sexualities. It must be disturbed, thwarted, subverted, which calls for the proliferation of gender identities. J. Butler highlights how each person plays their gender role through a repeated stylization of bodies. Gender is performative, like a theatre role where each actor wears the emblems of a gender, but the male actor can play female roles and vice versa.^{[30]Cadolle, Sylvie. “Feminisms, or the debate on sex and gender”, op. cit.}.

For this school of thought, grammar is the place par excellence of the formation of sexual identity, not in accordance with the aspiration of the child, but promoted by the state norm in the interest of reproducing generations of proletarians more capable of producing. This is exactly the process described by Monique Wittig when, in her reference work, Straight Thinking, she writes (p. 83): "Humanity must find another name for itself, and another grammar that would do away with genders."

It is from this observation that the idea arises that "in terms of number, according to current grammar, the partial feminine can only represent a minority, since it no longer exists when the sex is unknown or as soon as there is a man."^{[31]Kate Robin, “Beyond Sex: Monique Wittig’s Utopian Project,” Journal of Anthropologists, 124-125, 2011, 71-97.} ».

Monique Wittig's work, her denunciation of straight thinking, are undoubtedly part of the post-war momentum around the construction of a descriptive model of the foundations of the construction of sexual identity. The important place she gives to grammar, and particularly her denunciation of gender, carry the premises of a fight that has installed in public opinion the idea that school and the language of administration were places of construction of the identity of the social body in the service of an economic ideology. In France, the radicalization of distrust of business and capital relays in a more or less avowed way the communist theses: from then on, it seems admissible that the inclusive movements have benefited from this political scheme carried by the philosophical currents of early Marxism, finding an original outcome in the tension of the debate around education in general, and the teaching of grammar in particular. The importation of gender studies into the French academic landscape, the denunciation of the school's methods of indoctrination in the service of bourgeois society, the blacklisting of competing normative practices for both history and language have made it possible to assign new missions to the State. And in this innovative framework, inclusive spelling has largely imposed itself on the basis of a preparation begun a long time ago aimed at assimilating any State to a repressive force instrumentalizing the school and its citizens in the service of capital. For what purpose? To assign the couple a productivist mission linked to the needs of industry. What to do against it? According to them, reform grammar. This simplistic proposal, however, comes up against the reality of language, the subject of which goes far beyond the stakes of an instant political debate. The body of language spans millennia, and its face is shaped by centuries of practices – not moral or political norms – that can be accompanied or commented on but over which political reforms have no influence.

A brief history of the genre

The study of language in diachrony, that is, across time, is distinguished from philology in that it postulates that the states of the system are deducible from internal observations of the language, and not only from literary texts. To understand its richness and fundamental issues, it is necessary to establish a clear distinction between history, in the sense that we give it at school, and the study of the evolution of systems such as language.

We do not make a "history of language" as we would make, for example, a "history of fashion" for the simple reason that the object "language" is confused with the tool of analysis. In other words, the first and not the least of the paradoxes is that when I formulate an analysis in language on language, I modify the object at the same time as I claim to take distance to analyze it. While I can classify and list fashion objects until the moment when I can hope to have finished going through my catalog, it is difficult for me to claim to go through the whole of the language since at the very moment when I would state an analysis my corpus would be immediately amended by a new occurrence. To this first point is added the question of metalanguage, which is nevertheless central in linguistic studies and from which the question of grammar arises. Indeed, when I study insects, or chemical compounds, language provides me with a set of instruments to name, label and designate entomological or chemical objects. Since observables are by definition located outside the linguistic field, I can quite easily claim to objectify my study by the language that mediates the gaze. On the other hand, in the field of linguistics, since observables are in language, it is difficult for me to be able to state my observations in the language itself since my linguistic analysis is itself idiomatic. This paradox has long explained that all the grammars produced on a given language such as French were produced in a language other than French: linguistic heterogeneity allowing one to distance oneself from the language analyzed. Thus, the first grammar of French that was ever produced, well before the remarkers, dates from 1530. It is the work of a Catholic priest of the court of the King of England Henry VIII, John Palsgrave^{[32]The easily available reissue by Jean Palsgrave can be consulted, The Clarification of the French Language followed by Grammar by Giles du Guez, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1852, edited by F. Génin. Here is what his editor says about him, which is worth mentioning for the curiosity of the character: "This learned writer received his grammatical education in London, his native city. He studied logic and philosophy at Cambridge where he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after which he went to Paris […] He acquired such a thorough knowledge of French that in 1514, during the negotiation of a marriage between Louis XII of France and Princess Mary, sister of Henry VIII, Palsgrave was chosen to teach French to the future Queen of France […] in 1531 he stayed for some time at Oxford […] A remarkable fact is that Palsgrave was the first to reduce the French language to grammatical rules and attempt to fix it by the authority of examples."}, which provided insight into the French language intended to help the Queen learn the basics needed.

The question of gender is obviously addressed there:

“Of the nowne substantive: Nownes substantive have three chief accidents, genders, number and parson.To know the gender of substantives: Genders they have thre, the masculyn, feminyn, and the common both to the masculyn and feminyn. Causes whiche move them to use a substantive of the masculyne gender be thre, signifycation, termination and coming out of a Latin nowne of the newter gender, ending in um. Diversytes of signifycation, whiche move them to make a substantive of the masculine gender be of three kinds. For, if the substantive betoken any name belong only to man, or be the name of any beast, of any tree […] Signifycation, whiche move them to make a substantive of the feminine gender be also of three sorts: for if a substantive betoken any name that belongseth only to women, or be the name of any she beast, or the name of any frute^{[33]Quoted from ibid., p. xxv.}… ”

Indeed, an illumination in ancient or Renaissance thought on language can only be brought from a foreign observatory, the foreign language providing the metalanguage necessary for objectification. This postulate, inherited from the grammars of Donatus and Priscian, is taken up by the first French grammar written by a Frenchman… in Latin. This rare text, entitled L'Isagωge, written by Dubois renamed Sylvius for the needs of the cause, clearly explains in the same years (1531) as Palsgrave the need to resort to a grammar in a foreign language:

Latinè autem sum rem exequutus, vti hæc Anglis, Germanis, Italis, Hispanis, ac reliquis gentibus externis linguam Latinam non omnino ignorantibus, sermonis nostri ratio communis fieret^{[34]Jacobus SYLVIUS Ambianus [Jacques Dubois], In linguam Gallicam isagωge and Grammatica Latino-Gallica, Paris, 1531. C. Demaizière (trans.), 1998: "It is in Latin that I have expounded this subject so that the system of our language would be accessible to the English, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish and all other foreign nations who are not completely ignorant of the Latin language.]}.

And this approach, which surprised contemporary minds who had benefited from the work of modernity to flatten and make known the power of their own language, continued throughout the century. If Meigret's grammar (1550), the first of all to be written only in French, is an exception that can be explained by the very difficult nature of reading this innovative text in terms of spelling, the most flagrant example remains without doubt the grammar of Robert Estienne (1557) republished in 1558, a year later, by the author's own son but ... in Latin, so that the grammar would be clearer and "to serve foreigners wishing to learn our language".

Oh yes, because it seemed important to have a metalanguage of description, a grammar, which was universal and Latin was self-evident to grammarians wishing to develop their natural language. Today, let's bet that the same grammarians would undoubtedly rush to publish their works in English. In short. In fact, we have to wait until the end of the century, 1572, to see Ramus' grammar appear in French, which is established as the language of the arts and sciences: Quelle apnne a parler Francoys a ses compaignes, Rhethorique, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astrology, Physics, Ethics, Politics, by thus which opens the way to the liberal arts to return from Greece and Italy to Gaul^{[35]Ramus, 1572, Preface to the Queen.}.

Grammar, from 1572, established itself as an academic model alongside (1) the Poetic Arts, such as Defense and Illustration by Du Bellay, which is specifically aimed at poets to instill in them a framework and a rhetoric suitable for developing a literature of French-speaking expression, one of the challenges of which is to compete worthily with the Italian model, and (2) conversation manuals, strictly speaking, such as The Manner of Language, a text from 1399 intended to teach conversation to children, some of whose rather hilarious passages will provoke mockery.

Grammar at the end of the Renaissance is a genre that has acquired its letters of nobility in the service of the defense of the French language in order to provide it with a metalanguage capable of making it valiant in the face of other languages ​​that it largely dominates in terms of diplomatic and literary uses. This craze for the French language, which concerns all of Europe, makes necessary the invention of teaching manuals, of good conversation, of good expression which will serve as models of learning almost everywhere in the courts of the great kings, and this well before the fashion for the mirrors of Princes was born, as The Adventures of Telemachus of Fénelon who from the end of the 17th century served as models for the education of children from good families of the old regime.

If we are to consider this rather faithful overview of what the birth of the grammatical genre was, we will see in it efforts not to establish the hegemony of a dominant caste in an unprecedented effort of prescription, but rather the means to equip ourselves with a language of description, inherited from Greek and Latin models, in the service of an unquestionably political effort, to offer a framework for the beautiful emerging style. This renewal of grammatical thought is also a break with medieval thought, but that is another story.^{[36]. The universality of language is an idea that developed at the end of the 12th century in the medieval university. Previously, grammar was only the science of "speaking and writing well" in a given language. On this subject, consult Olga WEUERS, The “disputatio” in the Faculties of Arts in the Middle Ages, Turnhout, Brepols, 2002.}.

So where does the definition of gender come from in grammar before the odious moralists and the hateful commentators?

Here we must distinguish two remarkable points: the first is the existence of gender in the history of the language; the other being the place of gender in grammars. To understand the second point, namely the place of gender in the thought of the noun, we must finally return to ancient languages, first and foremost Latin which shaped the French heritage. In the canonical thought of descriptive grammar up until the Renaissance, the parts of grammar are littera, syllaba, uox, oratio (the letter, the syllable, the word, the discourse). Each part is carried by its own science: the study of littera is orthographia; the study of syllaba is prosodia; the study of dictio is etymologia; the study of orationis constructio is syntaxis. The first level of description of the Latin word is its belonging to a family of words, to an easily identifiable class which conditions its use in language. In French, our words are either masculine or feminine. This is even the only criterion we have to establish a systematic classification of the words of the language, apart from imagining a semantic classification – but that would be ridiculous. Latin is, for its part, more complex… and more intuitive. There are two poles of study for the noun in Latin: declension and gender. What does this mean? That Latin morphology is linked to the way in which the mental lexicon is organized in the minds of the speaking subjects. And this morphology, predominant over the organization of the lexicon, is based on nothing other than the knowledge of the language transmitted in the homes of the gens romana, of the old Latin families. Donatus, a grammarian from the 4th century, divided speech into eight parts: De nomine, de pronomine, De verbo, De adverbio, De participio, De conjunctione, De praepositione, De interjectione. It is to him that schoolchildren throughout the world owe the chapter organization of their textbooks. He writes in fact, in the chapter of names: Casus nominum quot sunt? Sex. Who? Nominativus genetivus dativus accusativus vocativus ablativus. Per hos omnium generum nomina pronomina participia declinantur hoc modo^{[37]"How many cases? Six. Which ones? nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative. With them, nouns, pronouns, participles of all genders are declined in the same way" (our translation).}. "Omnia generum" and "casus" are the two axes of an orthonormal reference point on which the Latin language evolves. A word can be declined in one of the six cases: how do we know the natural ending of the word (vox) that we use or read? Well, contrary to school practice which has democratized knowledge of the language by the application of pedagogical methods, knowledge of the language is only transmitted in the secret of the families of the gens, from parents to children.

Now this knowledge of the nominal morphological system is essential to express oneself like an old Roman, to acquire the dignity of citizenship and to be, in a word, recognized as Roman by one's peers. It is the only possible way to produce acceptable statements. These declensions are in fact families of words that Latins learn naturally without questioning the motivations for grouping them. Now the question of gender is at the heart of this system: indeed, the formation of adjective agreements depends on knowledge of gender. And the Latin language is full of exceptions that make it difficult for the barbarians of the first centuries to master. There are in fact three genders in Latin: feminine, masculine and neuter. In a world where the language would be perfectly gendered, there should therefore be three genders, and therefore, three families of words because any good Frenchman knows that it is gender that counts. Unfortunately, there are at least 4 families of words in Latin.

Which means that the equation: one word family = one gender = one sex simply doesn't hold water.

Let us examine in a little detail the functioning of these families of words and their gender, to the extent that we can already hear our honorable readers exclaiming: "What, come on! We know very well that "rosa" is feminine; that "dominus" is masculine and "templum" is neuter. So, all that is very nice, but it is to confuse us. Well no. Think, dear reader and you too reader, that things are more complicated than they seem. Let us take the first declension, "rosa". Of course, the words of the first declension morphologically gave birth to the family of feminine words in French. However, many words of the first declension, starting with all the names of professions, are masculine. Apart from considering that every sailor (nauta) is a woman; that every poet (poeta) is necessarily a woman by virtue of reasons that totally escape our interpretation; that every peasant (agricola) has within him the genes of an exacerbated femininity and that every copyist (scriba) is a young lady, apart from considering therefore that the Latins had a feminine vision (in the sexual and biological sense) of all the professions, it is clear that gender is not morphologically predominant in the constitution of the words of the first declension. There you go, that's how it is.

And be careful, this also continues for words of the second declension that an overly simplistic vision would lead us to consider as being masculine in essence on the very patriarchal model of "dominus". Thus, most of the Greek words that entered Latin kept their first gender; and this is how the word "Arctus" ("the bear") for example is feminine, but declined on the model of the second declension. And apart from considering that there is a remarkable form of sexism there, nothing other than the mechanical morphology of the language explains this phenomenon which confuses the cards that we would nevertheless like to see so clear and so simple. Is the method (methodus) masculine? However, it is a feminine word in Latin. The same goes for the sea (Pelagus) or a certain variety of fish, like "virus". And there are still a few rare cases that deserve to be stated, such as "Aegyptus, Corinthus, laurus (the laurel), populus (the poplar)". But if there is one word in Latin that is masculine in the second declension, it is "uterus". Go figure... In other words, and we could continue these enumerations, Latin word families (the declensions) are not based on any criterion external to the language. These word families are not a classification of objects in the world according to a sex, or a biological reality or other: it is a legacy of even older models, which was itself based on its own linguistic mechanics, which evolved, adapted to generate the Latin system whose families practiced infinite nuances. And it is in the Latin educational model that the reasons for the use of this or that declension system at this or that moment of the statement are found. There was therefore in Latin a system of word families: the first declension, the second thematic declension "puer", the second thematic declension type "dominus", the second declension in "us" (or neutral), the third declension (the imparisyllabic and the parisyllabic), the third neutral declension, and finally the fourth declension in "u". To this strange mental topography (for a Frenchman) based on a variation of 6 cases of the word is superimposed a distribution in gender: masculine, feminine, neutral. Nothing in the morphology of the families allows a classification of the familiarity of the words in one of these two paradigms. To this mechanism of morphological distribution of the lexicon is added a last level: the knowledge of the number. Latin in fact knows at least three numbers: the singular, the plural, the dual, the mechanics of whose usage is also determined by internal rules of the language.

In French, we know two families of words: masculine and feminine; two numbers and no case^{[38]It was different in Old French, which probably had a last embryo of declension with the use of a marked case for the function of the subject which was distinguished from an unmarked case for all other syntactic uses in the position of complement of another word (in this case we speak of regime). But this system, based on the memory of an "s" characteristic of the subject in Latin (dominus), if it is attested in a regular manner in writing, is however not regularly used uniformly throughout the medieval period and throughout the territory. And, from the 13th century, the date at which we roughly stopped pronouncing final consonants as in modern French, this graphic system was not well preserved and ended up falling into disuse.}.

It is an upheaval of great magnitude that allowed the evolution of the ancient system towards the birth of the Romance languages. Where Latin, in a synthetic form, identified at the same time the meaning, the declension, the gender, the number and the syntactic function, French needs an analytical apparatus to arrive at the same result, that is to say it needs to bring in other data of the statement – ​​such as the place of the word in the sentence for example, but also the presence of an article, to resolve the meaning. lat. homo: lexical root + second declension + masculine + singular = subject. Number of forms: 1fr. un homme (va etc.): lexical root + first place in the sentence before the verb + subject article. Number of forms: 3. Is this an impoverishment? The question deserves to be asked because it is at the heart of the problem. And the answer is obviously no. Why is it not an impoverishment? The answer is simple: linguistic change does not exist.^{[39]This is an allusion to the title of a founding article by a great philosopher of language, Eugenio Coseriu (“Linguistic change does not exist”, in: Man and his language (edited by H. Dupuy-Engelhardt, J.-P. Durafour and F. Rastier). Louvain – Paris: Peeters, 1983, 413-429).}.

The expressed linguistic heritage, which is only the result of a creative energy that goes beyond the activity of naming ("tree" can designate any tree, even a tree that does not exist, which is enough to demonstrate that language is above all a creative activity that cannot be reduced to an activity of classifying things in the world with sound or graphic labels) is not quantifiable in the same way as a real estate fortune or a butcher's display. Every language possesses within it the potential virtue of language that allows everything to be expressed, whatever the number of words (lexicon), the forms (morphology) or the means (syntax) that it offers to do so. An African language such as Sango for example could be summarized entirely in a lexicon^{[40]On this subject, see in particular, Jacques Fedry, “A precious reference instrument: The Sango dictionary”, Journal of Africanists, 1980 50-1 pp. 120-127.} of about seven hundred forms. Seven hundred forms, to say the least! Compared to the sixty thousand in the French dictionary, one could, in an accounting view of history, imagine that Sango is poorer than French, just as we just judged that French is poorer than Latin. But when you think about it, can we seriously imagine that the Latins were all more intelligent than the French because their language was more "complex"? And the same goes for Sango and French? This is obviously nonsense. There are deeply stupid Latins, remarkably intelligent French. Should we then think that the Latins said more things? Or that the French, because they have more forms, say more things than Sango allows? Here again, this is obviously nonsense.

French has a word for "computer", Latin does not. Sango has a word for the animal "kalingo" ("chameleon") where French has forged a hybrid of "camel". Sango has a word for "plane", "laparä", borrowed from the French "appareil", etc. The creative resources of the language are such that the lexical, or morphological, or syntactic linguistic heritage cannot be considered as a boundary, a limit, an insurmountable frontier for the human mind which always finds the means to say and express in its language the same infinite subtle variation of feelings, species, tenses, modes of conjugation, passion or action as any other language. And this is the first pitfall that will always be encountered by tutors of all persuasions who would like, for example, to impose an inclusive standard on spelling under the pretext of "opening the minds" of the language: speaking subjects did not wait for the language to authorize them to think in order to think for themselves. This is the pitfall of all linguistic totalitarianism: the apparent limits of the language are never limits of thought. Sango, to return to it, knows how to express the future, the past, the imperfect, the hypothesis, the gender, the plural, the passive and the agreement in the same way as French. Similarly, French knows how to express the optative in the same way as Latin, even if its morphosyntactic heritage does not have a specific, synthetic mode to express it. And similarly Latin, which has fewer cases than its Indo-European ancestor, nevertheless expresses the same nuances as older languages.

Gender in the history of linguistics

In this context, linguistic change conceived as the modification, in diachrony, of the linguistic heritage countable (lexicon, morphology, syntax) contradicts an observable fact: linguistic power never becomes impoverished or enriched. If language evolves (on the surface), the expressible linguistic power does not vary and language "is a perennial bravery": the spectrum of the perception of the relationship to mode and time, the lexical aspect, gender, number are invariably expressed through language in deep structure of the psyche whatever the way that language allows it to do so. It is exactly the same with language as with a person: it is not because their skin fades, that their gaze changes, that you do not recognize your neighbor as being one and the same person every day that passes. This unity of the person is of the same order as the language that evolves on the surface, as the skin can evolve, without ever profoundly altering the power of the language, like the identity of the person. From the point of view of the noun, of the lexicon, gender is an invariant of the linguistic heritage since the beginning of time. It is expressed in language through the morphology of the noun: it is a fundamental parameter of linguistics, in the same way that gravity is a constant of space-time in the theory of relativity. In the history of analyses of the history of language, the origin of gender, according to some linguists, could have been the result of a profound sexual motivation in Indo-European. It was a proposal, an attempt at analysis. Thus, in the three genders of this venerable Indo-European ancestor according to Michel Bréal^{[41]Michel Bréal, 1882, Mixing mythology and linguistics, Paris, Hachette, 416 p.}, Antoine Meillet^{[42]Antoine Meillet, 1982, “The category of gender and Indo-European conceptions” in Historical linguistics and general linguistics, Paris, Champion, p. 211-229.}, Damourette and Pichon^{[43]Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon, From words to thought. Essay on French grammar, 7 volumes, Paris, d'Artrey, 1930-1950.}, if the word "sky" is feminine, it is because the reality perceived behind the noun could have been "feminine" in a vision mixing the linguistic and the mythical. And if "the slave" was neutral, it was because the individual was denied his human dimension. This question, however, will be debated and from Bréal to Meillet, the anthropomorphic analysis will not resist. As for inclusive writing, According to the scholars of the end of the 19th century, we must see in the creation of grammatical genders a lively anthropomorphic phenomenon aiming, by metaphorization in a way, to attribute human qualities to the objects of the world and to classify them from the angle of man/woman or even animate/inanimate (ergative) for the neutral. [Bréal] concludes that if men had first distinguished the sex of living beings, they had attributed one to inert objects by an anthropomorphizing movement. This gift of vitality, attributed to these objects, resided in these "reasons of imagination (...) which guide the poet" and was not a fortuitous phonetic phenomenon, diffused in the language according to the law of analogy, as proposed by Karl Brugmann, German philologist. […] According to Bréal, this opposition testified to the animist beliefs of the ancient Indo-European peoples who had attributed a sex to inanimate objects such as water, fire, the sun, the moon, the star, the day, the night, parts of the body, etc.^{[44]Cécile Mathieu, “Sex and feminine gender: origin of a theoretical confusion”, Linguistics, flight. flight. 43, no. 2, 2007, p. 57-72.}.But observing the transition from Indo-European to ancient languages ​​allows us to highlight a certain number of inconsistencies with this pattern of thought which gives too much space to the archaeology of the world.

Thus, Antoine Meillet, observing the nouns in Indo-European and their descendants in Latin, observed that they did not possess any sexual trait. Words ending in "a", which were suspected of being feminine in essence, and words with a theme in "o" suspected of being at the origin of the masculine, were in fact capable of designating masculine words as well (nauta, scriba: we have spoken about this previously). Latin constructs the names of trees in "o" while they are feminine and the names of professions in "a" while they are masculine. However, nothing in these classes of nouns suggests any sexual motivation of the gender characteristic. Even when they designate sexual beings, Indo-European nouns do not have the same mark of masculine or feminine: kinship nouns such as Latin mater and frater, mater and soror, have neither in their theme nor in their inflection anything that characterizes them as feminine or masculine.^{[45]Antoine Meillet, 1934 [1st ed., 1903], Introduction to the comparative study of Indo-European languages, Paris, Hachette, p. 281-282.}.Damourette and Pichon, for their part, approached the problem of gender from the sexual and psychological side by seeking to determine behind the language linguistic prototypes as prototypes can exist in certain branches of the psychology of peoples. And both believe that it is necessary to attach traits of meaning to the character of gender. In this spirit, they believe that gender is obviously a sexual metaphor: Woman is passive, she is essentially a laying mother, and it is like the goddesses that these abstract qualities are conceived, a sort of mother-powers which allow their possessor to indefinitely redo a certain order of actions^{[46]Édouard Pichon, “At Ease in Civilization,” French Review of Psychoanalysis, vol. X, no. 1, 1938, p. 32 cited from Cécile Mathieu, “Sex and Gender,”op. cit. p. 16. They will indulge in poetic interpretations on the subject: "The sea is of a changing appearance like a woman, daily, of a mobile mood like a pretty capricious woman, attractive and dangerous like a perfidious beauty." (Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon, 1930-1950, From words to thought. Essay on French grammar, 7 volumes, Paris, d'Artrey quoted from ibid.).}.

The psychoanalysis at work in the works of Damourette and Pichon found in the collective psychoanalysis of the French people an exceptional playground and, in a grand metaphor of the people as an individual with a unique psyche structured by a clearly identifiable sexuality, sex and gender merge to become the keystone of all linguistic interpretation.^{[47]According to Cécile Mathieu, "Damourette and Pichon believed that sexual difference was the foundation of French civilization; it was therefore justified to use the tools made available by language to maintain this opposition."}. This linguistic system based on a psychoanalysis of peoples would undoubtedly be somewhat vain if it were not constantly found at the heart of the concerns of grammatical reform movements that continue to postulate the existence of an invariant of this type. The interpretative key to the appearance of gender, which clearly establishes the disconnection from biological sex, is incontestably found in the pen of the linguist André Martinet who published, in 1956, a founding article: "The feminine gender in Indo-European: functional examination of the problem" (Bulletin of the Paris Linguistic Society, 52, p. 83-95). In this structured article, Meillet shows that the axis of study for the linguist is not the relationship to civilization or culture, even less to a collective psyche shaping the language, but rather the paradigmatic axis of the speaking subject who determines his uses according to an imperative: the relevance of his purpose. He sees in the noun-adjective agreement the place of a necessary clarification for terms without gender at the origin but which the agreement of the adjective forced to overdetermine. For example, for epicene animal names (which do not distinguish the male and female form), the agreement of the adjective could have made necessary a certain form of radicalization of the use of certain specialized endings, such as the themes in "a" for the feminine. And once the breach of a usage opened, we undoubtedly witnessed progressively the thematization of morphology around gendered uses. As Martinet believes that "it is therefore completely inconceivable that the distinction of a feminine gender appeared in circumstances where it did not correspond to any need for communication^{[48]André Martinet, “The feminine gender in Indo-European: functional examination of the problem”, Bulletin of the Paris Linguistic Society, 52, 1956, p. 90.} ", he returns to this fundamental idea that it is the pragmatic uses of language that have conditioned the birth of gender disconnected from sex, not in connection with a folkloric representation of the world, but on the basis of formal processes that have resulted in a specialization of certain forms in relation to sex. He clearly distinguishes sex as a linguistic unit, a student opposed to a student, and gender which is not a grammatical category, but a formal constraint imposed by the use of the noun. Thus, the feminine/masculine opposition marked in adjectival agreements does not possess, and this since its origin, any value of sex^{[49]Cecile Mathieu, op. cit.}.

Today, it is accepted that gender and sex are obviously unrelated. There is no psychological paradigm governing anyone's choice to express the masculine gender in "the sky" as opposed to "the starry vault"; "an ocean" but "a sea"; "the earth" but "the ground." It would be absurd to claim, as Bréal does, that there is a system of beliefs in 21st century France which somehow structures mentalities to the point of imposing the use of the feminine article in "mer" on the pretext that the "mer" would be a procreative divinity and the "ocean" her husband. But it would be just as absurd, if not more so, to imagine, in the manner of Damourette and Pichon, that there exists in the deep structures of French civilization a psychology at work in each French-speaking subject which would lead them to consider that "sea" is feminine on the pretext that it "undulates" by evoking the forms of the primitive mother, while "the ocean" would be rough and dangerous as a father can be in the eyes of his child, which would obviously explain the masculine/feminine distribution in the use of "ocean" / "sea". It would be more reasonable, however, to admit, following Martinet, that gender is a formalism inherited from the language itself, without realistic motivation. Why is gender so important in Romance languages? And particularly in French, one should add. This is not a trivial political issue. But we have to be honest: this is an educational and political issue rather than a linguistic or grammatical one. Most colleagues engaged in inclusive practice do not care about the origins of the use of gender, its motivation in Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek or Latin. On the other hand, it is a crucial issue because it affects the teaching of the language in schools and high schools. The reason for this situation is obvious: it is linked to the need for French to equip itself with a meta-descriptive linguistic apparatus, a grammar, which is sufficiently universal to the point of accounting for the functioning of all languages, including ancient ones. And as such, drawing its source from Latin to which it owes everything, French had to learn to describe at school the mechanisms of agreement in French and Latin. And in this respect, the question of gender found its expression naturally in the pen of the first commentators and in public schools. And the circle is complete. Starting from the observation that grammar describes language, it was necessary to name the phenomena which condition it. Then motivate them, as the linguists Bréal or Meillet tried to explain, that is to say to motivate, the reasons for the appearance of the genre by relating it to universal mechanisms such as religion, folklore or psychology. The same is true today, where inclusive reform is trying to demotivate a very old debate. assuming that there could be an inclusive spelling that better describes the world, the reformers are in some way demotivating the debate on gender by definitively anchoring it in the problem of biological sex with which, however, since 1956, we have known that it has nothing to do. But by reopening the debate from a socio-political angle, inclusive practice in no way advances science or allows for the construction of a new theory of linguistic change: on the contrary, it claims not to bother with what appears to be nonsense in its eyes, in order to arrive directly at the conclusion of any scientific advance ("practices must be modified"), without having to work to demonstrate. In doing so, inclusive practice is invasive, destructive and prescriptive. Which is quite tasty if we consider the abundant argumentation developed around the supposed fascism of language to the extent that, we think we have demonstrated it sufficiently, language is incapable of fascism or theory. It can only serve as a mold, a form for a thought which itself can be fascist; or libertarian; or poetic; or beautiful; or ugly. But this is a question that does not bother the minds of our colleagues who are determined to use the "inclusive point" in their emails, in their correspondence in general. The language is fascist because it resists the evidence that is imposed on them: the administration must be modified, the State must be modified so that minds change with the changed language. This intellectual aberration thrives on a vast misunderstanding. Let us return to a presupposition that we mentioned earlier: "linguistic change does not exist." This means, in Coseriù's words, that if the signifying envelope is likely to evolve, the deep structures of language, for their part, do not evolve. They are always there, lurking in the shadows, available to any speaking subject at any time in history, to say and express everything, regardless of the supposed richness of the linguistic heritage; its depth or complexity. But this common sense theorem has a reciprocal: the change imposed by force by politics, such as inclusive writing, has no more reality than diachronic (over time) or diatopic (beyond borders) linguistic change: this change does not exist in the deep structure of the intellect; it is a conceivable resource of the language which in no way modifies the linguistic resource but which crystallizes politics, which is a science of the foam. When the French Prime Minister therefore reminds us that "in addition to respecting the formalities specific to legal acts, government departments must comply with grammatical and syntactic rules, particularly for reasons of intelligibility and clarity of the standard,"^{[50]Le Monde of November 21 2017} ", he is only politically conforming to a usage established by François I in 1539, at the time of the signing of the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts.

His statement is not linguistic, it is in no way an arbitration on gender. The inclusive reform is part of this political froth, it has no future. Without scope either, it is doomed to failure in linguistic practice. On the other hand, as soon as the administrations seize it, there is a great risk of seeing a misunderstanding persist which could, if we are not careful, fracture the unity of the nation attached to its "p/m.atrinoime". In this sense, the mass of reformed administrative writings is a latent fascism. Far from testifying to social progressivism, it marks the unhealthy confusion between the proponents of simplistic bourgeois biologism: "one man, one woman" and the proponents of a social grammar ignorant of its political foundations. Common sense and political ignorance would lead to the worst... Some authors, like Ionesco, have tried to warn of the dangers of linguistic fascisms, let us reread them.

JEAN-MARIE: Does it take a long time for French to get into my head?
MARIE-JEANNE: It takes twenty years for a head like yours.
JEAN-MARIE: In twenty years, I can forget the lessons of the other nineteen years.^{[51]The Bald Soprano}.