NONPARISIAN ACCIDENTS. Although everybody commits gaffes, I doubt that an American politician would make fun of somebody’s accent. What makes it more remarkable is that the politician represents Marseillle, which has its own important accent (Occitan).
I suppose that the incident happened because the prestige of the Parisian accent makes other accents fair game. The Economist article says that “a history of imposing homogeneity means that, even today, those whose French does not sound Parisian face derision….Georges Pompidou,[ a prime mister in the sixties], advised Charles Pasqua, a southern politician, to take diction classes to overcome his “handicap”.
The article also says that today those discriminated against most are from the north, whose intonation is known as “Ch’ti”.
This concern of the French people over accents is news to me! I was long aware that the French academics care about preserving the “purity” of the language and do so via the efforts of the Academie Française, but I didn’t know they only expressed disdain for a “less desirable” regional accent. I suppose the two thoughts are both outcomes of a philosophy that there is a right way and a wrong way to speak and use French.