Training to improve is also the goal of Florence Darblay, retired. "My spelling has deteriorated over time because I write less. To improve myself, I started bridge a year ago. This card game allows me to get my brain working," she told AFP.

This event, which received more than 50,000 applications, is a world first. Among the registrants, 5,100 people were drawn at random to be able to participate in one of the three major dictations, or 1,779 participants per exercise, with novelist Rachid Santaki as master of ceremonies.

Marc-Antoine Jamet, president of the Champs-Elysées Committee, at the initiative of the dictation, aims for an inscription in the World Guinness Book of Records, whose official judge, Anouk de Timary, specifies that only the "active participation" of the participants will be counted: "It takes at least one hundred words corresponding to the text for participation to count".

Thousands of people aged ten to 92 take part in a giant dictation on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, June 4, 2023 © ALAIN JOCARD / AFP

"You are remarkable. You are beautiful. You are the best!" says Marc-Antoine Jamet to the participants sitting at their desks and facing their exam paper, a few minutes before the start of the first of the three exercises. On the menu: a passage from the Pope's Mule, a short story from Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin, dictated by the journalist and president of the association Bibliothèque sans frontières, Augustin Trapenard.

"I only made two mistakes!"

It's 14:15 p.m. and it's total silence on the most famous avenue in the world. Young and old are bent over their copy, pen bic in hand. But after a few minutes, 10-year-old Samson no longer listens to the professor perched on the huge platform. "I think it's complicated because it's going too fast. So, I gave up," explains the CM1 student.

Twenty minutes later, the dictation ends. A relief for Adrien Blind, 42: "Through this exercise, I remember the stress, the worries, this feeling of losing the thread". To his left, his son is upset. In CM2, Antoine is one of the best in his class. Yet his copy is almost empty: "It was almost impossible! It was a dictation for adults."

Thousands of people aged ten to 92 take part in a giant dictation on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, June 4, 2023 © ALAIN JOCARD / AFP

There are also those who have succeeded, such as Touria Zerhouni, who launches a cry of joy during the correction in autonomy. "I only made two mistakes! I expected a lot harder," said the 65-year-old retiree. A team of about thirty French teachers from the company Acadomia, specialized in support courses, is mobilized to validate the answers.

The next two dictations will be a contemporary text read by writer and journalist Katherine Pancol, and a text on a sporting theme, dictated by rugby player Pierre Rabadan.

Thousands of people aged ten to 92 take part in a giant dictation on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, June 4, 2023 © ALAIN JOCARD / AFP

The great dictation of the Champs is an opportunity to test its spelling but also to celebrate the French language, according to Marc-Antoine Jamet: "The dictation is an instrument of living together. It is unifying. It's a monument," he said.

Hervé Fernandez, Director General of the National Agency for the Fight against Illiteracy, sees it as a way to fight against this phenomenon that affects 2.5 million people in France: "this dictation makes it possible to reconcile people with words in a playful, relaxed and unapologetic way".

© 2023 AFP