[Tex/LaTex] Switching first paragraph indentation rules with babel

Question

I am aware that many questions have already appeared here regarding the indentation of the first paragraph, but I did not find any on this precise problem.

I am writing a document with some portions in French and others in English. My understanding of typographic rules is that in English the first paragraph of a chapter should not be indented, but it should be in French.

Now this is usually well taken care of by babel, which changes the rule accordingly depending on whether I load french or english. But when I load both, it uses the rules of the second one throughout the whole document, even in the parts where I input

\selectlanguage{french} or \begin{otherlanguage}{french} Lorem Ipsum  \end{otherlanguage}.

Of course I could correct it by hand, but it is slightly disappointing. Is there someway to tell babel to apply the correct indentation settings when I switch the language ?

Answer 1

The documentation to frenchb makes clear that it's intentional. Some settings change with the language, and some are consistent in the document depending on the document language (p. 2).

Page 4 says it has been different, and that there is a setting that "should no longer be used" that emulates this. It does work though, if your main language is French:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[american,french]{babel}
\frenchbsetup{GlobalLayoutFrench=false}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\begin{otherlanguage}{american}
\section{In English}
\blindtext
\end{otherlanguage}

\section{En fran\c{c}ais}
\blindtext

\end{document}

The alternative package frenchle changes this from language to language apparently, so this gives similar output:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{frenchle}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\begin{english}
\section{In English}
\blindtext
\end{english}

\section{En fran\c{c}ais}
\blindtext

\end{document}