02 The Magic of Languages

La magie des langues

Brussels |

Belgium

French

Behind the scenes

I wanted to dedicate this text to the magic of languages, privileged witnesses of human history and its migrations, conquests, and encounters. French itself is the result of multiple layers-Gaulish, Celtic, Latin, and Germanic-and belongs neither solely to France nor even to the Francophone world.

In Brussels, a crossroads city, this becomes immediately clear: languages circulate, blend, and shape the way we think.

While creating the illustration, I imagined Charlemagne structuring a European space and reforming writing; Erasmus, a humanist figure deeply connected to Brussels, reflecting on the circulation of knowledge and languages across the continent; Joan of Arc embodying political unity at a time when French was asserting itself over Latin; Margaret of Austria turning Brussels into a cultural centre. Then Charles de Gaulle defending French on the international stage, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry carrying it to the world through writing, Léopold Sédar Senghor envisioning Francophonie as a “civilisation of the universal,” Marie Curie anchoring it in science, and Marie-Josée Pérec making it resonate in sport.

Nine faces for a language in constant motion.

Echoes of the world

French is not an isolated language: it lives within the Francophone world, connecting places such as Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and many African countries. Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is now the largest French-speaking city in the world. And it was in Brussels, an international crossroads, that the inspiration for this text came to me.

I wanted to celebrate the beauty of a language with multiple origins: the text includes Latin words such as liberté (“freedom”), words likely of Germanic origin such as blessure (“wound”), Greek echoes such as grammaire (“grammar”), and a few almost hidden Gaulish remnants such as brasser (“to brew”).

I also evoke a fascinating linguistic mystery: Basque, which intriguingly does not belong to the Indo-European language family.
Languages allow us to communicate, to transmit, and to think. They shape each people’s view of the world. When a language disappears, a part of humanity’s heritage fades away.

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Listen to an audio excerpt of the text