(Paris) The writer and academic Antoine Compagnon, one of the great specialists in French literature and the work of Marcel Proust, was elected to the French Academy on Thursday, the institution announced.
Posted at 12:58 p.m.
Mr. Compagnon, 71, obtained 14 votes, against 12 for the linguist Jean Pruvost, and one for Carolina Steiner, a repeat offender candidate.
The election is one of the tightest in recent years, with candidates difficult to decide between an academic unanimously recognized in the world of letters, and a lexicographer who wishes to bring a skill which the Academy sorely lacks according to its critics. .
“It closes a circle, it’s a conclusion to a career,” he told AFP.
“I hope to bring the competence of someone who has been a teacher for 47 years now, I believe, author of a certain number of books, involved in school in its various aspects, and originally a linguist, moved on to literature. What interests me is that younger generations can still read Proust’s long sentences. Because we can fear that I myself can no longer write text messages too much, ”he joked.
French native of Brussels in 1950, Mr. Compagnon is one of the great experts of Marcel Proust. He devoted an essay to the novelist, Proust between two centuries (1989), where he believes that “two shadows never leave” this writer, that of the playwright Jean Racine and the poet Charles Baudelaire.
He was a professor at the Collège de France for 15 years (2006-2021). His courses, which were packed, were always devoted to Proust, but also to Montaigne, Stendhal or Baudelaire.
The last two years of classes, on the theme “Ends of literature”, gave rise to his latest book, life behind you (2021), an essay on “twilights in literature, whether it be the end of the author, his work or a character”.
This son of a French soldier and a Belgian noblewoman first turned to scientific studies, Polytechnique and Ponts et chaussées, before branching off into literature, where he obtained a doctorate. He was one of the disciples of the linguist Roland Barthes.
The academic takes chair 35, previously occupied by surgeon and researcher Yves Pouliquen, who died in February 2020, but also by General Weygand, Marshal Joffre or zoologist Georges Cuvier.
The election of Mr. Compagnon makes it possible to rise to 35 immortal seats filled out of 40.
In an interview on the LCI television channel, the perpetual secretary of the Academy, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, slipped that she dreamed, for one of these vacant seats, of a candidacy from the novelist Michel Houellebecq.
“Not only would it look good, but it would be something I want with all my heart. I would like Michel Houellebecq to hear this call,” she said. Asked if she had talked about it with him, she replied: “Two or three years ago. But I do not despair “.
“Houellebecq, for me, is a bit like Victor Hugo: a total author […] He sees very well, I would say, the disaster we are walking into,” she added.
The writer had evoked this eventuality on the occasion of the publication of Submission in January 2015, where Mme Carrère d’Encausse had already expressed this desire to receive his candidacy. He then commented: “I think I could be useful on some words. I would have opinions. Yes, eventually, I could be a valid candidate”.