L'Académie Française and decay

Anita Elash had an excellent article earlier this week in the Globe and Mail on the Académie Française and its struggle to remain the center of French cultural life. My point of view that what is ailing that old and conservative French institution is that it has never accepted that French culture is never stagnant, but continuously evolves and that French is not solely the language of the French. The point is that l’Académie Française is plagued today by its inability to accept that French culture isn’t solely French and to take advantage of its internationalization instead of resisting by being afraid of the world and of change. Aimé Césaire, one of the best French poets, died yesterday in Martinique away from the Métropole and the glories that it usually gives enthusiastically to the masters of French literature. The fact that Césaire was considered solely as le “nègre fundamental” and that his work was considered to be first black French, because of its négriture, shows that the Académie doesn’t know how to defend French because in a futile and chauvinistic attempt to preserve French language and culture, it is helping them to die. Sugary excerpt:

With an average age of 79 among members, seven of the Immortals - as members of the Académie are called - have died in the past 18 months. The remaining members have rejected as unworthy a string of potential candidates to replace the departed ones. Even after Mr. Dabadie's election, six of the 40 seats are still empty, the most since the Second World War.

And critics say that in its hard-line quest to define precisely what is and is not proper French, the academy has made itself irrelevant.

"[It] is fading away like an era," philosopher and poet Michel Deguy wrote in the daily newspaper Libération. "It is asphyxiated, rarefied, empty."

Even members of the literary elite, who have traditionally formed the academy's ranks, seem to agree. Novelists Milan Kundera, Patrick Modiano and Philippe Sollers have all refused invitations to join. Mr. Sollers has dismissed membership as something "reserved only for the mediocre; those who will leave no trace behind."

[…] The academy still goes by the same rules established in 1635. Its members wear traditional gold-braided uniforms and feather-plumed hats and carry an ornate sword when they meet in the domed conference hall in the centre of Paris where they have always met.

Its main work - producing an official French dictionary - has moved at a snail's pace. The latest edition was started in 1935, but there are so few volunteers to do the editing that the committee is still working on the letter "r."

When it does issue lists of words it deems inappropriate, most French people, including editors of French dictionaries, dismiss them as hopelessly out of date. Earlier this year, it named more than 500 mostly English words it wants to see banished from the French language, including "e-mail," "blog," "supermodel," and "Wi-Fi."