Académie

Académie is a word with several different meanings in French cultural history. In the world of education it has designated since the time of Napoleon the 16 regional divisions (each with its recteur) of the Université de France. Between 1559 and 1685, however, there were académies protestantes, which were university-level establishments, and during the ancien régime, académie was the name given to schools in which noblemen learned the military and aristocratic arts.

In direct relation to literature, the term was used of groups of writers and scholars who met regularly not to teach, but to discuss matters of common concern, and in some cases to give prizes for literary works. Bodies of this kind existed under other names in the Middle Ages [see Puy, Jeux Floraux De Toulouse], but the word académie came into general use in the 16th c. There were many such institutions in Renaissance Italy and the Italian example was widely followed over the next two centuries in France.

Jean-Antoine de Baïf set up an Académie de Poésie et de Musique in 1570 with royal patronage; this was supplanted by the Académie du Palais, which, unlike many of its successors, included female members. Among the most important private 17th-c. academies were those of François de Sales, the Dupuy brothers, d'Aubignac, and Lamoignon—and it was from an unofficial grouping of this type that the Académie Française was born. This was the first of several academies set up by Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert as part of a policy of harnessing the arts and sciences to the greater prestige of throne and nation. Apart from the Académie Française, the most important were the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, all of which were regrouped under the Institut de France after the Revolution. Subsequently, Belgium acquired an Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises de Belgique in 1920 and French Canada an Académie Canadienne-Française in 1944.

From the 1640s onwards academies were also set up in many provincial centres in France. These tended to be modelled on the Paris academies, and brought together local notables in an arena of intellectual equality comparable to the salons. Their heyday was the 18th c., during which they came to interest themselves increasingly in scientific, economic, and political questions and propagated Enlightenment values. Their importance may be gauged from the fact that Rousseau wrote his two discours for the Académie de Dijon.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• F. A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (1947)
• D. Roche, Le Siècle des lumières en province (1973)