This book traces the history and development of language defence in France and examines the sometimes contradictory attitudes of French people to their beloved language. It assesses the necessity for and the usefulness of the many activities in defence of French and suggests what its future might be.

Robin Adamson is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, working on contemporary French language. For many years she was Director of the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Dundee, where she worked mainly in the fields of second language acquisition, communicative language teaching and discourse analysis, and also contributed extensively to the new generation of university textbooks such as Le français en faculté. She became an officier in the Ordre des palmes académiques in 1989. Her interest in the defence of French springs from a lifelong passion for the language and the discovery that among her Scottish ancestors are several who died defending France.