France's Love of the French Language

This from French or Foe, p. 157ff:

Bernard Pivot, the editor of a weekly literary magazine, Lire, became a cultural institution after he started a television program called Apostrophes in 1974. It was soon breaking all records of popularity. What was it about? Four or five authors discussing their most recent books.  Parisians stopped giving or going to dinner parties on Friday evenings to stay home and 'watch Pivot.'  

[After 15 years and realizing he couldn't keep the pace of reading so many hours a day] he made sure that it [the show] went out with a bang.  Pivot's last broadcast of Apostrophes in June, 1990, was a sensational hymn to the glory of French and its most able practitioners.  What he did was to invite over 100 of the country's leading authors to come to the studio with a farewell present: a favorite word, and the reason why he loved that word.

Pivot once described the French language thus: 'Elle est la langue de beauté et de tolérance, et elle est charnelle.' ('The French language is a the tongue of beauty and of tolerance, and it is carnal.'  I promise you, it was a beautiful and sensual experience watching these authors, some of them ex-ministers of state like Alain Peyrefitte, speaking their word.  Slowly. Up the throat, through the mouth, lips forward, the word emerged into the room, and into the rooms of perhaps seven million viewers. 'Nuance, because it's sonorous and is the finesse of our language.' 'Tendresse...because it's both active and soft...' 'Silence...' 'Nostalgie...'