News

French pop song and screen writer Jean-Loup Dabadie made history this month when he became the first popular entertainer, or saltimbanque, ever named to France's oldest and grandest institution, the Académie Française.

He joins the ranks of France's most revered thinkers and literary stars as the Académie faces its worst crisis in decades. And the question of whether his election is the salve that will save the ailing body, or another sign that it is dying a slow, painful death is the subject of national debate.

Established in 1635 as the official guardian of the French language and culture, and the unofficial bane of young students struggling to perfect the French language, the Académie Française has lost both prestige and members at an alarming rate.

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."

"I have nothing against them," said Jean-Claude Carrière, another leading screenwriter who has refused an invitation to try for membership. "But I find the uniform very ugly and every time I went to one of their ceremonies, I was terribly bored."

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, the academy's Perpetual Secretary, or head, and one of only four female members, has made efforts in recent years to try to attract younger members and to increase the ranks of women, with little success. But Frédéric Vitoux, who at 64 is one of the youngest members of the academy, rejects the idea that the institution is in the midst of a crisis.

"We have a sort of accidental crisis because we have had so many deaths in a few months," he said.

But the problem may run much deeper than that. While France has changed at a lightning pace in the past few years, the academy has stubbornly clung to its old values.

"We are an evolved society so there are a lot of people who just don't care any more," said Marie-Christine Imbault, a writer with the literary magazine Livres Hebdo.

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."

Mr. Vitoux acknowledges the Académie Française needs new blood. He says Mr. Dabadie's election could help "renew" the institution by highlighting another French tradition - entertainment aimed at pleasing the biggest audience possible.

Mr. Dabadie, whose election has been greeted with newspaper headlines such as "The dandy and the old lady," is best known for writing the screenplay for one of France's most popular comedies in the 1970s, and for pop songs such as Michel Polnareff's smash hit On Ira Tous Au Paradis (We're all going to heaven).

Special to The Globe and Mail