original form existed four or five years earlier. About the
year 1629 certain literary friends in Paris agreed to meet
informally each week at the house of Valentin Courart, the
king's secretary. The conversation turned mostly on literary
topics; and when one of the number had finished some literary
work, he read it to the rest, and they gave their opinions upon
it. The fame of these meetings, though the members were
bound to secrecy, reached the ears of Cardinal Richelieu,
who promised his protection and offered to incorporate the
society by letters patent. Nearly all the members would have
preferred the charms of privacy, but, considering the risk
they would run in incurring the cardinal's displeasure, and
that by the letter of the law all meetings of any sort were
prohibited, they expressed their gratitude for the high honour
the cardinal thought fit to confer on them, proceeded at once
to organize their body, settle their laws and constitution,
appoint officers and choose a name. Letters patent were
granted by the king on the 29th of January 1635. The officers
consisted of a director and a chancellor, chosen by lot, and
a permanent secretary, chosen by vote. They elected also a
publisher, not a member of the body. The director presided
at the meetings, being considered as primus inter pares.
The chancellor kept the seals and sealed all the official
documents of the academy. The cardinal was ex officio
protector. The meetings were held weekly as before.
The object for which the academy was founded, as set forth
in its statutes, was the purification of the French language.
``The principal function of the academy shall be to labour with
all care and diligence to give certain rules to our language,
and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the
arts and sciences'' (Art. 24). They proposed ``to cleanse
the language from the impurities it has contracted in the
mouths of the common people, from the jargon of the lawyers,
from the misusages of ignorant courtiers, and the abuses of
the pulpit'' (Letter of Academy to Cardinal Richelieu) .
The number of members was fixed at forty. The original
members formed a nucleus of eight, and it was not till 1639
that the full number was completed. Their first undertaking
consisted of essays written by the members in rotation. To
judge by the titles and specimens which have come down to
us, these possessed no special originality or merit, but
resembled the epideixeis of the Greek rhetoricians.
Next, at the instance of Cardinal Richelieu, they undertook a
criticism of Corneille's Cid, the most popular work of the
day. It was a rule of the academy that no work could be
criticized except at the author's request, and fear of
incurring the cardinal's displeasure wrung from Corneille
an unwilling consent. The critique of the academy was
re-written several times before it met with the cardinal's
approbation. After six months of elaboration, it was published
under the title, Sentiments de l'academie francaise sur le
Cid. This judgment did not satisfy Corneille, as a saying
attributed to him on the occasion shows. ``Horatius,'' he
said, referring to his last play, ``was condemned by the
Duumviri, but he was absolved by the people.'' But the crowning
labour of the academy, begun in 1639, was a dictionary of
the French language. By the twenty-sixth article of their
statutes, they were pledged to compose a dictionary, a
grammar, a treatise on rhetoric and one on poetry. Jean
Chapelain, one of the original members and leading spirits of
the academy, pointed out that the dictionary would naturally
be the first of these works to be undertaken, and drew up
a plan of the work, which was to a great extent carried
out. A catalogue was to be made of all the most approved
authors, prose and verse: these were to be distributed among
the members, and all approved words and phrases were to be
marked for incorporation in the dictionary. For this they
resolved themselves into two committees, which sat on other
than the regular days. C. F. de Vaugelas was appointed editor
in chief. To remunerate him for his labours, he received
from the cardinal a pension of 2000 francs. The first
edition of this dictionary appeared in 1694, the sixth and
last in 1835, since when complements have been added.
This old Academie francaise perished with the other
prerevolutionary academies in 1793, and it has little
but the name in common with the present academy, a
section of the Institute. That Jean Baptiste Suard,
the first perpetual secretary of the new, had been a
member of the old academy, is the one connecting link.
The chronicles of the Institute down to the end of 1895
have been given in full by the count de Franqueville in Le
premier siecle de l'Institut de France, and from it we
extract a few leading facts and dates. Before the Revolution
there were in existence the following institutions--(1)
the Academie de poesie et de musique, founded by
Charles IX. in 1570 at the instigation of Baif, which
counted among its members Ronsard and most of the Pleiade;
(2) the Academie des inscriptions et medailles, founded
in 1701; (3) the Academie des inscriptions et belles
lettres; (4) the old Academie des sciences; (5) the
Academie de peinture et de sculpture, a school as
well as an academy; (6) the Academie d'architecture.
The object of the Convention in 1795 was to rebuild all the
institutions that the Revolution had shattered and to combine
them in an organic whole; in the words of the preamble:--``
Il y a pour toute la Republique un Institut national charge
de recueiller les deconvertes, de perfectionner les arts
et les sciences.'' As Renan has remarked, the Institute
embodied two ideas, one disputable, the other of undisputed
truth--that science and art are a state concern, and that
there is a solidarity between all branches of knowledge and
human activities. The Institute was at first composed of
184 members resident in Paris and an equal number living
in other parts of France, with 24 foreign members, divided
into three classes, (1) physical and mathematical science,
(2) moral and political science, (3) literature and the fine
arts. It held its first sitting on the 4th of April
1796. Napoleon as first consul suppressed the second class,
as subversive of government, and reconstituted the other
classes as follows: (1) as before, (2) French language and
literature, (3) ancient history and literature, (4) fine
arts. The class of moral and political science was restored
on the proposal of M. Guizot in 1832, and the present
Institute consists of the five classes named above. Each
class or academy has its own special jurisdiction and work,
with special funds; but there is a general fund and a common
library, which, with other common affairs, are managed by a
committee of the Institute---two chosen from each academy,
with the secretaries. Each member of the Institute receives
an annual allowance of 1200 francs, and the secretaries
of the different academies have a salary of 6000 francs.
The class of the Institute which deals with the language and
literature takes precedence, and is known as the Academie
francaise. There was at first no perpetual secretary, each
secretary of sections presiding in turn. Shortly afterwards
J. B. Suard was elected to the post, and ever since the history
of the academy has been determined by the reigns of its
successive perpetual secretaries. The secretary, to borrow
an epigram of Sainte-Beuve, both reigns and governs.
There have been in order: Suard (13 years), Francois Juste
Raynouard (9 years), Louis Simon Auger, Francois Andrieux,
Arnault, Villemain (34 years), Henri Joseph Patin, Charles
Camille Doucet (19 years), Gaston Boissier. Under Raynouard
the academy ran a tilt against the abbe Delille and his
followers. Under Auger it did battle with romanticism, ``a
new literary schism.'' Auger did not live to see the election
of Lamartine in 1829, and it needed ten more years for Victor
Hugo after many vain assaults to enter by the breach. The
academy is professedly non-political. It accepted and even
welcomed in succession the empire, the restoration and the
reign of Louis Phillppe, and it tolerated the republic of
1848; but to the second empire it offered a passive resistance,
and no politician of the second empire, whatever his gifts as
an orator or a writer, obtained an armchair. The one seeming
exception, Emile Ollivier, confirms the rule. He was elected
on the eve of the Franco-German war, but his discours de
reception, a eulogy of the emperor, was deferred and never
delivered. The Institute appears in the annual budget for a
grant of about 700,000 fr. It has also large vested funds in
property, including the magnificent estate and library of
Chantilly bequeathed to it by the duc d'Aumale. It awards
various prizes, of which the most considerable are the Montyon
prizes, each of 20,000 fr., one for the poor Frenchman who
has performed the most virtuous action during the year,
and one for the French author who has published the book
of most service to morality. The conditions are liberally
interpreted; the first prize is divided among a number of
the deserving poor, and the second has been assigned for
lexicons to Moliere, Corneille and Madame de Sevigne.
One alteration in the methods of the French Academy has
to be chronicled: in 1869 it became the custom to discuss
the claims of the candidates at a preliminary meeting of
the members. In 1880, on the instance of the philosopher
Caro, supported by A. Dumas fils, and by the aged
Desire Nisard, it was decided to abandon this method.
A point of considerable interest is the degree in which,
since its foundation, the French Academy has or has not
represented the best literary life of France. It appears
from an examination of the lists of members that a surprising
number of authors of the highest excellence have, from
one cause or another, escaped the honour of academic
``immortality.'' When the academy was founded in 1634, the
moment was not a very brilliant one in French letters.
Among the forty original members we find only ten who are
remembered in literary history; of these four may reasonably
be considered famous still--Balzac, Chapelain, Racan and
Voiture. In that generation Scarron was never one of the
forty, nor do the names of Descartes, Malebranche or Pascal
occur; Descartes lived in Holland, Scarron was paralytic,
Pascal was best known as a mathematician--(his Lettres
provinciales was published anonymously)---and when his fame
was rising he retired to Port Royal, where he lived the
life of a recluse. The duc de la Rochefoucauld declined the
honour from a proud modesty, and Rotrou died too soon to be
elected. The one astounding omission of the 17th century,
however, is the name of Moliere, who was excluded by his
profession as an actor.1 On the other hand, the French Academy
was never more thoroughly representative of letters than
when Boileau, Corneille, La Fontaine, Racine, and Quinault
were all members. Of the great theologians of that and the
subsequent age, the Academy contained Bossuet, Flechier,
Fenelon, and Massillon, but not Bourdaloue. La Bruyere
and Fontenelle were among the forty, but not Saint-Simon,
whose claims as a man of letters were unknown to his
contemporaries. Early in the 18th century almost every
literary personage of eminence found his place naturally in the
Academy. The only exceptions of importance were Vauvenargues,
who died too early for the honour, and two men of genius but
of dubious social position, Le Sage and the abbe Prevost
