SUZANNE COMMERÇON was having fun. “This is a wicked one — a wicked, wicked one,” she said as she slipped an acute accent into a fiendishly difficult dictation.

Mme Commerçon is the finest exponent of the French language in Plouay, a town of 5,000 residents in Brittany, and so has the honour of presiding over its booming spelling club.

In the evening, as France was engulfed in unrest over labour reforms, her admirers gathered in the library to hear her read a text of extraordinary complexity. Then, amid gasps of horror, wry smiles and laughter, she corrected their mistakes.

Every fortnight, Mme Commerçon gives a new dictation to her audience, testing grammar and ability to spell awkward words. The club’s membership has risen from four to thirty-five in five years. “We just love spelling here,” she said, and Plouay is not alone. Les clubs d’orthographe are springing up across France, bringing tens of thousands of people together to conjugate verbs, check tenses and ponder whether grommeler (to grumble) has one “m” or two.

“This is about pleasure. You can see how much everyone is enjoying themselves,” Mme Commerçon said.

There was no sense in the club of the encroaching globalisation or Anglo-Saxonry that is fuelling the Gallic malaise. Instead, the club’s mostly elderly members bathed in the reassuring glow of the proper French that they were taught when they were children. “Dictations have a nostalgic flavour,” said Jean-Pierre Jaffré, a linguist with the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “As people grow older, they want to go back to their past.”

Michel Couot, an electrical engineer who writes text for some of the 50 national dictation competitions in France each year, agreed. “I think part of the reason for the success of these spelling clubs is a desire to defend the French language.

“But the main thing is that you have a great time here,” said Vonick Epaillard. “I expect dictations in English are not very exciting, because the only difficulty with English is the accent. In French, we have irregular verbs, complexities with past participles, lots of rules, exceptions to those rules and exceptions to the exceptions. It’s a real challenge.”

Mme Commerçon’s dictation proves the point. “There is, of course, a circumflex accent on dûment [duly],” she said, provoking mostly self-satisfied nods. “And there is, of course, no circumflex on éperdument [desperately],” she added, to much dismay among her audience.

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