Nearly 400 years later the 40 “Immortels” of the French Academy, clad in velvet robes and Napoleonic bicornes for their annual meetings, continue to strive to meet this noble if elusive goal. But in recent decades the academy has been less concerned with what to include in French than with what to exclude: namely, English.

Most of the debate today centers on dealing with English technology terms such as “hashtag” and “cloud computing.” But in fact the backlash against English encroachment into French started in the pre-computer age, when officials became alarmed over the country’s infatuation with “le jogging” and eating “les cheeseburgers” on “le week-end.” Realizing that the academy, which as an advisory body has no legal standing, wasn’t doing all that super a job with keeping out “the filth,” France formed a commission on terminology in 1970. That was followed five years later by the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language act, which introduced fines for the use of banned anglicisms, then in 1984 by the General Commission for the French Language, which in turn was followed by the 1994 Toubon Law, mandating the use of the French language in all official government publications, commercial contracts, and in advertisements, workplaces and public schools.

Yet despite these many laws and commissions (at least 20 that govern the French language) there’s still that vexing “hashtag” (or as the Ministry of Culture would have you call it — at least up until a couple of weeks ago — mot-dièse) problem. The ministry relies on specialized terminology commissions for finding French replacements for new words of foreign influence, and in theory the task is straightforward: take a foreign term such as “Wi-Fi” and come up with a French equivalent other than “le Wi-Fi.” Unfortunately, the tendency of the French to be verbose works greatly to their disadvantage, especially in the Twitter age. The recommended replacement for “Wi-Fi” (which the French so adorably pronounce “wee-fee”) was the mouthful “accès sans fil à l’Internet,” literally “access without wire to the Internet.” Which is why you see signs for “Wi-Fi” all over France.

I suspect that the French don’t realize that “Wi-Fi” doesn’t even make sense in English. The term exists only because someone in a manufacturer’s marketing department, having been given the assignment to come up with a word or phrase short enough for a sticker on a computer to describe a wireless network connection, was old enough to remember playing his Charlie Parker albums on his spiffy “Hi-Fi.” Yet it is precisely this past history of near-obsessive adherence to doctrine that makes Ms. Pellerin’s announcement so shocking.

It’s tempting to speculate that the 41-year-old Ms. Pellerin, orphaned as an infant in South Korea and raised in France, fluent in German and English, has a broader world view than her predecessors. As she pointed out in her address, a growing majority of the world’s francophones live outside of France. Still, you have to wonder if Ms. Pellerin ran a draft of her text by government officials before pulling her finger out of the dike. For, to (apocryphally) quote another Frenchwoman, Madame Pompadour, “Après moi, le déluge.”