The Toubon Law (full name: law 94-665 of 4 August 1994 relating to usage of the French language), is a law of the French government mandating the use of the French language in official government publications, in advertisements, in the workplace, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in government-financed schools, and some other contexts. The law does not concern private, non-commercial communications, such as non-commercial web publications by private bodies.
The law takes its common name from Jacques Toubon who was Minister of Culture when it was passed and who proposed the law to Parliament. A nickname is Loi Allgood – "Allgood" is a morpheme-for-morpheme translation of "Toubon" into English – as the law can largely be considered to have been enacted in reaction to the increasing usage of English in advertisements and other occasions in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law
"In 1999 the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin signed the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but it was not ratified. The Constitutional Council of France declared that the implementation of the Charter would be unconstitutional since the Constitution states that the language of the Republic is French.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a European convention (ETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe, ratified and implemented by 17 States, but not by France (as of 2007[update]).
The charter contains 98 articles of which signatories must adopt a minimum of 35 (France signed 39).
The signing, and the failure to have it ratified, provoked a public debate in French society over the charter.
One argument against was the fear of the break-up of France "one and indivisible" leading to the threat of "babelism", "balkanization" and then ethnic separatism if the charter were to be implemented, and that therefore there should be only one language recognised in the French state: the French language. This was also linked to a wider debate about how power should be apportioned between the national and local governments.
Another was that in an era where a widely spoken language like French was threatened with becoming irrelevant in the global arena, especially in economic, technical and scientific contexts, officially supporting regional languages was a mere waste of government resources.
As an example of what proponents of ratification considered racist and scornful, here is a sample quote from an article in Charlie Hebdo, a well-known satirical journal:
The aborigines are going to be able to speak their patois, oh sorry, their language, without being laughed at. And even keep their accent, that is their beret and their clogs.
Likewise, President Jacques Chirac, putting an end to the debate, argued that it would threaten "the indivisibility of the Republic," "equality in front of the Law" and "the unity of the French people," since it may end by conferring "special rights to organised linguistic communities."
France, Andorra and Turkey are the only European countries that have not yet signed the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This framework entered into force in 1998 and is now nearly compulsory to implement in order to be accepted in the European Union, which implies France would not qualify for EU entry were it to apply for membership now."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France