Richelieu Stressed Diligence to Keep Language Pure : French Academy Produces 1st Dictionary Since 1935

With great pride, the French Academy, charged with guarding the French language for the last 351 years, has published Volume 1 of its first dictionary in more than half a century.

Maurice Druon, 68, the novelist who is secretary of the academy, described the publication as “a real occasion” and told a Friday news conference, “I don’t think there is another academy in the world that applies itself so thoroughly to guarding a language.”

Using an image from economics, Druon said the academicians--40 celebrated writers--look on the usage of words much as bankers look on good money and bad money. “We are there to see that the bad money does not drive out the good,” he said.

12-Volume Work

The new dictionary’s first volume, of 116 pages, covers words beginning with the letter A and a few that begin with B. Druon estimated that it will take 12 years before the 12th and final volume appears. Once completed, the dictionary will comprise 45,000 words, about 10,000 more than the last edition.

The academy’s dictionary is regarded as the official dictionary of the language. All commercial French dictionaries derive from it, and teachers and writers accept its rules on usage as gospel.

No institution like the academy exists in either Britain or the United States for the English language, and many scholars believe that the French Academy’s official dictionary has prevented the French language from changing as much as the English language in the last 3 1/2 centuries.

The new dictionary is the ninth edition produced by the academy since it was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII.

“The principal function of the academy,” Richelieu said, “will be to work with all possible care and diligence to give definite rules to our language and render it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with arts and sciences.”

The academy produced its first edition in 1694 and averaged an edition every 35 years after that. But the work of the academy is obviously slowing. Its last edition, the eighth, came in 1935, after 57 years of work.

Druon, with a smile, acknowledged that people often smile and joke at the languid pace of the academy. “But that is nothing new,” he went on. “It has been said for 350 years.”

The academy’s members include such well-known writers as Henri Troyat, Marguerite Yourcenar, Julien Green, Eugene Ionesco, Claude Levi-Strauss and Leopold Senghor. Some of the best-known names in French literary history were members, including La Fontaine, Voltaire, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand and Paul Valery. Other well-known writers, among them Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola and Marcel Proust, were never admitted.

Druon said that a committee of 10 members of the academy works continually on defining words. The committee’s definitions are then submitted to the full academy for approval by majority vote. “There are never any abstentions,” Druon said.

The novelist said the committee follows three simple rules: It admits technical words into the dictionary only when they have come into common usage; it admits foreign words only when no suitable French word can be found, and it keeps out neologisms--new words that are created out of ignorance or forgetfulness to take the place of usable old words.

On the question of foreign words, Druon offered a few examples, disclosing that the academy has accepted the American word hold-up and the Japanese word kamikaze because there are no French substitutes, but has rejected the American marketing because the idea behind it can be expressed in French.

The academy sees no need to rush its work. Druon, who also wrote the preface to the new edition of the dictionary, said: “Some expressions born in the last rain disappear with the next drought. . . . It is necessary to wait to recognize those that continue to have daily use.”

But he said the task has been formidable in the last half-century because so many words have been created as a result of new discoveries in science and new concepts in other fields.

“Mankind has never had in so short a time so many new things to name,” he said. Some of the new words: acrylique, adrenaline, aeration, amphetamine, anti-communiste.

Druon said that the academy sets the standards for use of the language but that educators and the press must make sure that the standards are maintained.

Asked how the academy hopes to influence the press to do this, Druon, looking around the room crowded with journalists and replied: “But you are here, ladies and gentlemen of the press. You are here.”