It is funny how French is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world yet both the French and Quebecois language wonks have the paranoia of speaking a dying regional dialect deep in the hinterlands.
I feel like France must be this way because their authorities instinctively understand that the French language was the metaphysical formula by which Louis XIV conjured France from the primordial chaos (confusingly also called "France"). They're worried that if they stop honouring the ancient pacts and just let people talk however, the whole thing will fall apart like Cinderella's chariot turning back into a pumpkin.
I'm fairly sympathetic to this in the context of Quebec, though, even though their laws often go overboard and it ceases to be cool when they cause trouble for their own local minorities. They're not really worried about French abstractly but its use in Canada, and there mainly as a proxy for a historically-embattled regional culture. And actually, since languages are the geographic boundaries of Internet-oriented mass culture, that part of the country is the main bulwark against Americanization, so I think it's even useful to the rest of us to have it there.
The problem with all this is just that languages belong to the young, and the young are traditionally not fans of language authorities piloted by a mix of career politicians and 65-year-old prestige authors. At this point new restrictions just feel like political pandering with a light dose of protectionism for local companies, and if they actually hope to arrest the decline of French rather than just use it as a vehicle for stunts, they will need to get a bit cleverer about it.
