Zut alors! Patricia Russo, an American, took over last week as chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, the combined Franco-American telecoms equipment group, and she doesn't speak - nor plans to learn - French, writes David Gow.
Pas un seul mot, even though she will be based in Paris most of the time.
Jacques Legendre, a French senator and vice-president of the Senate's cultural affairs committee, finds that shocking, according to a news agency report. "If I worked in New York I would try to speak English." Evidemment, mon brave.
But the senator, clearly a paid-up member of France's "civilising mission," is talking rubbish. Here in Brussels, where President Jacques Chirac memorably stormed out of an EU summit in March because Ernest-Antoine Sellière, French head of business lobby group Unice, spoke English, French has been virtually replaced as the lingua franca of EU institutions by English.
In French boardrooms, more to the point, French has ceded its place to what Mr Sellière called the "language of business." A decade ago, if I met with French executives, it went without saying that the conversation was in French; now, politely acknowledging my fluency in their native tongue, they switch immediately to English.
The same is even more true of German boardrooms, with Siemens, the technology group, conducting its business in English and others following suit.
Companies with overaseas investors and international directors find it the most convenient way to conduct business - and, after all, Helmut Schmidt, the ex-German chancellor, and Valèry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president, planned the eventual arrival of the euro in English, too. It's not uncommon to find Germans speaking English to each other in multicultural settings.
It's another nail in the coffin of "economic patriotism" - the modern French expression for protectionism. A survey last year found that 16-out-of-26 top French companies gave English as their official working language, including car-maker Renault, drugs group Aventis - and Danone, the foods group that provoked a fresh outbreak of economic patriotism when it was supposedly being stalked by PepsiCo. Nine of these have dropped French completely and seven use it in conjunction with English.
Global French groups investing in overseas, often Anglophone, companies see no purpose in insisting on speaking in their mother tongue.
The Acadèmie Francaise, which has long campaigned against le franglais, may succeed in getting some people to substitute courriel for email or la toile for the web but it's fighting a losing battle in business. French finance directors will simply carry on speaking in mongrel franglais about "le cash-flow" or even "les profit margins".
It may be sad that a state that promotes its own movie industry (while its young people flock to cinemas showing Hollywood films) and even forces radio stations to play a minimum ratio of French songs is losing out to this nouvelle vague of Anglicismes.
And the decline of foreign languages in British schools is genuinely shocking. But, if France wants its business community to modernise, expand and thrive, it will have to come to terms with what's being spoken in its boardrooms. Anything else would be a sale hypocrisie.
