PARIS — The reaction was loud, swift and fierce this week to a proposed law that would allow French universities to teach more of their courses in English, a measure that a well-known scholar had called a “suicidal project” that would lead to France’s sacrificing its language to “Americanization disguised as globalization.”
But supporters of the proposal, which won initial approval in the lower house of Parliament on Thursday, said the lack of English was a major factor in France’s declining competitiveness in the world. The left-wing newspaper Libération printed its cover page in English and urged the French in an editorial to “stop behaving as if they were the last representatives of a besieged Gallic village.”
“Teaching in English,” read a banner headline on the front page. “Let’s do it.”
The measure, part of a broader overhaul of the universities, was introduced in March by Geneviève Fioraso, France’s minister of higher education. It is intended simply to increase the number of students from abroad, in particular from emerging countries like India, Brazil and China, who often prefer to go to universities in English-speaking countries.
Mrs. Fioraso’s proposal is an effort to ease a 1994 law that required — with a few exceptions — the use of French in classrooms, from nursery schools to universities.
But the proposal has raised some eminent hackles.
In March, the Académie Française, an elite institution founded in 1635 that monitors and debates the subtleties of the French language, issued a news release emphasizing the “dangers” of an approach that encourages French “to marginalize itself.”
And that was the least of it. A linguist, Claude Hagège, called the measure a “drive toward self-destruction.” The philosopher Michel Serres said it was the product of “a colonized country whose language can no longer say everything.”
In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Fioraso scoffed at the criticism.
“France gives again the impression of being an inward-looking country,” she said, before calling for greater international cooperation from universities.
Foreign students make up about 12 percent of students here, but France is losing its attractiveness in part because “Germany went past us by developing courses in English,” Mrs. Fioraso said.
English has been invading normal speech in France for many years, which is one reason for the angry reaction to the law.
Many words in English, like “weekend” and “cool,” are common in French. French is also losing ground in Brussels, where an expanded European Union of 27 nations does most of its business in English.
Nevertheless, some eminent scientists, including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine, promoted the expansion of the use of English in universities in a column published in the newspaper Le Monde.
“The voices that are raised in the name of the defense of the French language seem to us totally out of touch with the current reality of universities, but also seriously counterproductive concerning the interests of France and French-speaking nations,” the scientists said.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Fioraso herself played down the importance of the controversy, describing it as “one of those debates that the French like, which are more about posturing than about substance.”
She insisted that the measure was not mandatory, and that it would affect only 1 percent of university courses.
“I’m not worried about it,” she said. “I tell myself that, after all, it is a lack of confidence in our culture.”
Because of an editing error, an article on May 24 about a proposed law on teaching English in French universities overstated the scope of the proposal. It would allow the universities to teach more of their courses in English; it would not require them to do so.