Clever-clogs Hollande and the great Shakespeare mash-up

IN A SPEECH earlier this week, Francois Hollande, the Socialist who looks likely to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as French President this spring, chose these words of wisdom, when describing the failure of others to find the path ahead for France:

"Ils ont échoué car ils n'ont pas commencé par le rêve”. (“They failed because they did not begin with the dream.”)

In doing so, he attributed the quote to Shakespeare. Which was where the trouble began.

The French paper Liberation searched the Complete Works and, finding no evidence of William Shakespeare ever writing these words, lit upon a fantastic notion that Hollande had completely cocked up and was quoting not the Elizabethan playwright but the alive-and-well English journalist and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare.

The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and even Channel 4 News jumped on it: not only did the story question Hollande’s intellectual credentials, but the idea that an English novelist should be quoted in error by the next French president was delightful.

Except that no one can find any proof that Nicholas Shakespeare wrote the words in his 1989 novel, The Vision of Elena Silves, as was suggested, nor indeed in any other of his books.

So where did Francois Hollande get the quote from?

The romantics among us would like to believe that Hollande padded into his library in his slippers one January morning, spotted in a shaft of sunlight his dog-eared, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare, dusted it off, and fondly turned to his favourite passage for just the right quotation for his upcoming speech at Le Bourget.

The more likely scenario, let’s face it, is that one of his speechwriters or aides de camp handed him a print-out of famous quotations taken off the internet, on the subject of dreams and success, in an effort to help the boss inject a little life into his speech.

Hollande read them all, and regurgitated them, and the result was surely  a ‘mash-up’ most likely combining Shakespeare (William, not Nicholas) and the French author Anatole France.

Quotations from a 16th-century English playwright and a late-19th century Frenchman of letters would not normally be found side by side - except where ‘inspirational quotes’ are listed online for the benefit of modern businessman looking for words with which to encourage their sales staff.

Such websites are also popular with speechwriters, faced with sprucing up the image - and language - of dull political candidates.

On a typical website, Career Success for Newbies.com, a whole section is devoted to ‘famous quotes about success,’ with this helpful introduction: “Sometimes when you are faced with a challenging day at work, my suggestion is to read famous quotes about success to give you the confidence to overcome the challenges and succeed. Here you'll find a compilation of my favourite success quotes by successful people. Choose a quote that best suits your situation.”

Type in ‘dream’ and – if you want to avoid Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”, which even Hollande might have thought a little hackneyed – you come up with two goodies:

William (not Nicholas) Shakespeare (from Hamlet): “The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”

And, tellingly, this from Anatole France: “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
 
Mash them up, and you have Francois Hollande. And as Liberation said, it was still a good speech and a worthy sentiment. ·