Elected in an armchair. "
Never will the expression have sounded so well under the Cupola.
By opening their doors to Mario Vargas Llosa yesterday, the academicians set a precedent, welcoming to the company a world-famous writer, successor to chair 18 of Michel Serres, who died in 2019;
a cosmopolitan and French-speaking author, certainly, but never having written in French.
We have to go back to the eventful election of the first woman to the Academy to find such an upheaval within the institution created by Richelieu.
It was in 1980, her name was Marguerite Yourcenar, then sponsored by a combative and polemicist Jean d'Ormesson, standing wind against the irreducible conservatives.
At that time, let us remember, several foreign writers were already sitting under the Cupola, notably Julien Green;
Léopold Sédar Senghor will be elected in 1983, at the age of 76;
the Argentinian Hector Bianciotti, in 1996. They all wrote in French.
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