“We have fun; it’s not stuffy. We have discussions, not arguments. I’ve never had to resort to the sword,” says playwright René de Obaldia, occupant of fauteuil 22 since 1999, who will turn 100 in October. “It is a pleasure to go there because people have a way of speaking to each other with such politeness. It is completely out of today’s time,” says art historian Pierre Rosenberg, the former director of the Louvre, and fauteuil 23 since 1995. “We are not here to stop change,” says author Sir Michael Edwards, the only British immortal (fauteuil 31 since 2013), “but to push language in the way of greatest eloquence, resourcefulness, and beauty; to steer it in the direction of the best French possible.”

Gabriel de Broglie, Michel Zink, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Xavier Darcos, and Jean-Louis Ferrary in ceremonial habits verts before the Institut’s 2018 awards ceremony. Photograph by Jonathan Becker. Académie members and guests in the Institut’s library. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Controversy can erupt along the way. Occasionally the Académie issues public edicts, injunctions, and alarms, many of which are intended to suppress some pernicious foreign word, particularly an Anglicism, from gaining traction in French discourse; in its place the members proffer a more desirable French equivalent. Some of their efforts take root—courriel is widely used instead of “e-mail”—but many others, such as prêt hypothécaire à risque élevé in place of “subprime mortgage,” just never catch on.

And then there’s inclusive writing, a tough ask for a language where gender is a central feature. French nouns are either masculine or feminine, dictating their adjectives, and the masculine always trumps the feminine: if one male nurse appeared in a group of 99 female nurses, they would all be called infirmiers, not infirmières. The French high commission for gender equality recently condemned this practice as “a form of sexual tyranny.” But to the immortals, changing the grammatical rules would produce a worse offense: a clumsy, inelegant, and ultimately less beautiful language. In October 2017, according to The Telegraph, they issued a stern declaration that just said non. Gender inclusivity “leads to a fragmented language, disparate in its expression, creating confusion that borders on being unreadable. . . . Faced with the ‘inclusive’ aberration, the French language is in mortal danger, for which our nation is accountable to future generations.”

Many feminists were outraged by the stand; other French speakers, too, have come to view the Académie as elitist and old-fashioned. Journalist François Busnel blasted the organization, likening it to “a fat, blind, suicidal whale stubbornly determined to beach itself on a rocky coast with everyone watching.”

But the Académie still has friends in high places. In March, President Emmanuel Macron rocked the house with a rousing speech, the first address ever given there by a sitting French president. “Grammar, vocabulary, etymology, and . . . literature are the breeding ground where our lives take root,” he said. A few months earlier, in the courtyard of Les Invalides, which contains Napoleon’s tomb, Macron and his wife, Brigitte, flanked by former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, presided over the grand state funeral of Jean d’Ormesson, a beloved author who had died at age 92, after a 44-year tenure in the Académie. “We’re here, different by age, background, jobs, [and] political opinions, but united over what [constitutes] the essence of France: the love of literature,” said Macron, before he placed a pencil on d’Ormesson’s tricolor-draped coffin.

In the past few years the Académie has been furiously devoted to filling its empty seats. After the election of the medievalist Michel Zink in December 2017, this year it tapped novelist Patrick Grainville and philologist Barbara Cassin to join. The selection of the latter was particularly notable, as she is considered a leftist, even a radical by some—and, oh yes, she’s a woman, raising the Académie’s current female population to five. At the time of the first female appointment, Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1980, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing—who became an immortal in 2003 and remains one today at 92—sent her a telegraph in which he offered his “deferential congratulations upon your brilliant election, which consecrates the eminent place of women in French literature.” Later, in her acceptance address, Yourcenar said, “One cannot say that in French society, so impregnated with feminine influences, the Académie has been a notable misogynist. It simply conformed to the custom that willingly places a woman on a pedestal but did not permit itself to officially offer her a chair.”

Hand-embroidered needlework on Michel Zink’s habit vert. The medievalist joined the Académie last year. Photograph by Jonathan Becker. Longtime Academician René de Obaldia, who turns 100 this month, at home in Paris. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Less forward-looking was the election held on June 21, when the membership gathered to choose a successor to the late novelist Michel Déon. Among the several candidates, the front-runners were Bruno Racine, 66, an esteemed civil servant who had most recently been the director of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Frédéric Mitterrand, 71, a polymath writer-filmmaker and former French minister of culture. A nephew of the late president Mitterrand, Frédéric is also openly gay.