Books: Immortal Election

To young French writers and a large share of the general population, an election to the French Academy has no more relation to literature or life than the changing of the Guard at London’s Whitehall. But Academicians themselves, of whom Academician Anatole France said that their literary ineptitude was exceeded only by their skill in intrigue, take it with deadly seriousness. Votes are traded, sponsors courted, wires pulled, ceaseless lobbies conducted in social and political circles, usually evoking more public amusement than concern.

But last fortnight, when the French Academy elected its latest “immortal,” the usual storm in a teacup overflowed into the saucer. Successful candidate was 70-year-old, deaf, withered Charles Maurras, expert on Provengal dialect, author of innumerable, little-read novels, poems, philosophical and political studies. Maurras’ election precipitated a scandal, not because he was a worse writer than several other “immortals,” but because his election marks the most stinging slap in the face that the Republic has yet taken from French Royalists. Royalists dominate the Academy, but Maurras’ Royalism is in a class by itself—it goes back further and is more venomous than that of all the others combined. In the Royalist newspaper, Action Française, which he founded in 1898, his savage diatribes against the Republic (which he calls “the whore”) have even embarrassed some fellow Royalists.

But what scandalized Frenchmen remember best is Maurras’ campaign in 1936 against Premier Leon Blum, whom he addresses by the horrible French epithets of “the dog-camel” and—worse— “the female camel.” This was called the “kitchen knife campaign” because Maurras incited his readers, if they had no other weapons, to go after Leon Blum and 140 left Deputies with kitchen knives. When, acting on his advice. Royalists seriously wounded Blum and his wife, Maurras was sentenced to a year in prison. Republican officials permitted him, however, to outfit his cell as a library, and Maurras continued to turn out an ever more venomous two-column daily tirade against the Government. Marking the anniversary of his imprisonment, fellow Royalists presented him with a “civic crown” of beaten gold.