Maurice Druon finally ran out of immortality. That apparently
happens to us all, but what made his case special was that he was
officially an immortel, thanks to membership in the
Académie Française. Only 40 Frenchmen at a time can be
immortels, and since they do depart this life with
predictable regularity—about twice a year on average—France lets
them enjoy their immortality while still here.
Druon, who actively enjoyed his until age 90, was buried this
spring with full military honors and eulogized as a Lord of
Letters. A militant cultural conservative who fervently loved his
country and its traditions, he spent his life defending them both
in and out of the Academy. As a young cavalry officer who refused
to accept France’s abject capitulation to the Nazis, he joined de
Gaulle’s Free French headquarters in London in the early 1940s.
Besides broadcasting information clandestinely to the Resistance,
he also wrote the words to the Chant des Partisans, the
song that became the anthem of the French underground. Still
today it is second only to La Marseillaise in its
stirring patriotic power.
After the war Druon began a distinguished writing career that
produced more than 50 titles. In 1966 he was voted into the
Academy as its youngest member, thus becoming not only
provisionally immortal but also an official guardian of the
French language. His rigorous, unfashionable principles while
serving as minister of culture in the 1970s infuriated the
post-1968 left-wing artistic world, as when he told
subsidy-seeking theater directors they had to choose between
scorning the values of French society and accepting government
handouts.
At the Academy Druon assiduously followed the orders laid down by
Cardinal Richelieu when he created it in 1635: “To work with all
possible care and diligence to give strict rules to our language
and to make it pure, eloquent, and capable of dealing with the
arts and sciences.” As chief minister to King Louis XIII,
Richelieu had his own reasons for offering state protection to
the literary set: it helped put this unruly, often subversive lot
under government supervision. To keep them busy, he stipulated
that they compose a dictionary, along with works on grammar,
rhetoric, and poetics. Louis XIV later approved the move, even
setting them up in the former Louvre apartment of the queen
mother and helpfully donating 40 goose quills they could whittle
into pens in their spare time.
Language being a serious matter worthy of lengthy reflection, the
Academicians have never rushed the dictionary. They presented the
first edition to Louis XIV in 1694 after some 60 years of
scholarly labor. Their latest effort, the eighth edition, was
published in 1935. They are now pushing ahead with all deliberate
speed on the ninth, which after 74 years is already up to the
letter M. (By odious comparison, the new Oxford English
Dictionary in 20 volumes was completed in seven years.) If the
Academy’s productivity is low, its symbolism is high. As the
great ethnologist Claude Lévi- Strauss, himself an Academician,
once told me, “The dictionary is only the visible part of the
Academy’s function. As an honorary confraternity, it attests to
the attachment the French nation has for its language. Here an
individual is judged and classed by the care with which he
expresses himself. For Americans, on the other hand, language is
just an instrument to be used with total liberty.” I asked if
that was bad. “It does give its special savor to American
English,” he allowed. “There is this incredible creation of new
words and expressions all the time. But it’s a completely
different attitude from ours.”
Besides tinkering interminably with their dictionary,
Academicians keep busy with choosing new members according to
vague, never-defined criteria. No academic degrees are necessary,
nor is there any age limit. The only real requirements are French
nationality and the ability to write a letter declaring
candidacy. Then the candidate must visit each member for a
get-acquainted meeting. Many who would be obvious shoo-ins, like
the late André Malraux, decide not to try because they find the
process humiliating. Claude Lévi-Strauss disliked the visits
because he was so nervous he was always a half-hour early and had
to wait in the street. “But I understand why they’re necessary,”
he told me. “The Academy is like a club; members want to know if
you’re an homme de bonne compagnie.”
Once elected, the companionable new member pays a courtesy call
on the French president at the Élysée Palace, then gets down to
the real fun of ordering his (or her, a few token women now being
admitted) uniform and ceremonial épée. The elaborate uniform,
designed at Napoleon’s command and involving a swallowtail suit
embroidered with green olive leaves, takes up to six months to
make and costs several thousand dollars—including an
ostrichplumed cocked hat. The épée, usually a bejeweled work of
art marked with symbols from the bearer’s life and
accomplishments, is customarily paid for by the new member’s
friends. I once talked with one of the few tailors who make the
uniforms. “You should see their eyes light up the first time they
put the suit on,” he said. “They suddenly realize that they’re
really members of the Academy. Their faces change completely.”
HEADY STUFF INDEED. But in France such eminence lends itself to
mockery by the irreverent, or just plain jealous. Alphonse
Daudet, a 19th-century writer who never made the club, satirized
its members as “decrepit, broken…with leaden feet, weak legs,
eyes blinking like night animals.” But Gustave Flaubert, who
wasn’t elected either, frankly pinpointed the true attitude of
most Frenchmen: “Always denigrate it, but try to be a member.”
In fact, the list of greats shunned by the Academy reads like a
who’s who of French culture. René Descartes was persona non grata
because he went to live in Sweden. Blaise Pascal was “only” a
mathematician. Molière was an actor and ipso facto not a
gentleman. Emile Zola was rejected 24 times because of his harsh
literary realism and anti-Establishment position in the Dreyfus
Affair. Balzac’s stories were unkind to the bourgeoisie.
Baudelaire, Verlaine, Gérard de Nerval? Too bohemian for polite
company.
And still the candidates keep knocking at the door of the
handsome domed Institut de France, across the Seine from the
Louvre, where the Academy meets. “Only about 60 million Frenchmen
want in,” quips Jean Dutourd, the witty, wry author of the
classic The Taxis of the Marne and many other works, who
has been a member for decades. “Ecclesiastics, farmers,
secretaries of Communist Party cells, street cleaners, everybody.
It’s the triumph of snobbery, and snobbery is one of the most
powerful motivations in the human soul. Especially in France, the
land of vanity.”
Maurice Druon, a dapper, sophisticated man about town, was surely
not immune to the appeal of snobbery. But no one defended the
Academy’s traditional values as strongly as he. That involved
things like vainly trying to block the election of the former
president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on the valid grounds that the
man had no visible literary talent. He regularly used the
Academy’s bully pulpit to insist on proper French usage,
subjunctive mood and all, and to denounce the latest barbaric
linguistic fashions in advertising and journalism. And he was
well aware that the institution’s nebulous nature was as much a
strength as a weakness. “It’s a complete paradox,” he once said.
“It has moral authority, though no one can say exactly what we
exercise it over except vocabulary. This authority is evident,
but nobody knows its source.”
The French love nothing so much as the superfluous. No wonder the
Academy is their only institution to survive nearly 375 years of
monarchy, revolution, empire, humiliating military defeats, and
five constitutions.
