{"id":72247,"date":"2014-06-05T13:04:31","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T17:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=72247"},"modified":"2014-06-06T12:58:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-06T16:58:51","slug":"french-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/05\/french-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"French in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mourning Pierre Capretz<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"robert-et-mireille\"<\/a>

\u201cRobert,\u201d in his ubiquitous Yale T-shirt, with the fetching \u201cMireille\u201d in a still from French in Action<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I carry vivid memories of a boy named Robert, who insisted on wearing his horrible Yale T-shirt everywhere\u2014to Chartres, to La Closerie des Lilas, to that seedy little rental-car hub on the Boulevard P\u00e9riph\u00e9rique, even (sacr\u00e9 bleu!<\/em>) under a white blazer. What tone-deaf Ivy League foolishness, I remember thinking. The corollary bummer was that Robert wasn\u2019t a caricature of the average American exchange student; he was more or less the ideal version thereof. He bopped through France, always encountering the lovely Mireille, who seemed to appear\u2014without explanation or apology, and often without a bra\u2014around the country\u2019s every corner. And most important, he took every conceivable opportunity to improve his French. Robert was in Paris not to chase tail but to learn the language, to become a citoyen du monde<\/em>. And yet he insisted on wearing that horrible Yale T-shirt everywhere<\/em> \u2026<\/p>\n

Such were my first high school impressions, in 1999 and 2000, of the video pedagogy of French in Action<\/em>, the language course cum<\/em> TV series that taught me (and millions of other Americans) the rudiments of the Francophone lifestyle.<\/p>\n

\"pierre_ear\"<\/a>

Pierre Capretz<\/p><\/div>\n

French<\/em>\u2019s wild-haired emcee, Pierre Capretz, died earlier this year, in Aix-en-Provence, at eighty-nine. Capretz\u2019s eyes always brimmed with mischievous possibility. He struck me as Henry Kissinger\u2019s magnanimous French cousin, a man whom the world had weathered in the best possible way, imbuing him with wisdom and a philosophical cheer without which no one who teaches French in America can stay sane.<\/p>\n

As I learned more about Capretz, I started to get the jokes, which, of course, included the Yale T-shirt that Robert seemed never to wash. My teacher-guru, Madame Demaray\u2014a sanitization of de marais<\/em>, \u201cfrom the swamp\u201d\u2014had helped Capretz beta-test the program at Hotchkiss, a very swish prep school that had taken me in; it wasn\u2019t terribly far from Yale, for which Hotchkiss\u2019s founders hoped to groom their young men and eventually (thank God) their young women. Relations between the two schools were still cozy in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and Mme. Demaray worked closely with Capretz as he developed his legendary regimen for the oral and aural teaching of French, imparting knowledge through a long-form video narrative that moved with the rhythms of a mystery novel. My teacher, with whom I was in half in love as one is with a glamorous great-aunt, told me in private about the million-plus dollars Capretz had gambled in making French in Action<\/em>: about securing funding from the CPB and from WGBH in 1985, about the multiple heart attacks he suffered during the scripting, filming, and editing of part two. I saw my hispanoparlantes<\/em> classmates toting Destinos<\/em> and realized that the workbook\/video\/language-lab triad owed its current pedagogical vogue to Capretz, who believed, correctly, that the musical tools of language might succeed where 501 French Verbs <\/em>had failed. <\/p>\n