Page 2 December 23, 2021 EL SEGUNDO HERALD
Travel
The Thing about French
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
One edifice you’ll almost never hear mentioned
by travelers (although it gives great
photo op from the rear along Rue Mazarine) is
the domed and resplendent Institut de France.
This is odd, because this particular Left Bank
bastion goes farther to explaining France, the
French, and indeed the Parisians than any other
pile of ancient stones in town.
The Institut (in its Académie française) was
founded in 1635 and has been run by some of
the greatest thinkers in Western history—from
Richelieu and Voltaire to Victor Hugo and
Raymond Poincaré, to Léopold Sédar Senghor.
And the organization’s primary function from
the beginning has been the preservation of the
French language.
Elegance and beer—who knew?
Think about that for a second. No other
country boasts an official body responsible for
the stability and purity of the words and
syntax in which its citizens communicate.
We Anglophones go to the opposite extreme.
When a President as clumsy as Warren Harding
invents a word like “normalcy,” politicians
leap on board and insert it into every speech
for the next hundred years. We communicate
on the fly and entrust the precision of our
language to unintelligible rock stars and the
manglings of millennial cell phone users. To
even suggest a desire for clarity or consistency
gets the complainer labeled as some form of
cultural supremacist—or worse.
But not in France. In France, no word enters
the French language unless a committee of
See Travel, page 10