"What uniform will she wear?": Panic at the Académie Française when Marguerite Yourcenar is elected
Marguerite Yourcenar aboard the liner "Mermoz", in the Caribbean Sea, March 8, 1980. MICHELINE PELLETIER / GAMMA-RAPHO
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Story For three and a half centuries, the Académie Française remained a circle of men. Until March 6, 1980, when the novelist of "Memoirs of Hadrian" defied the opposition of many adversaries.
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"Single-sex" meetings didn't always scandalize the writers of "Le Figaro." A number of them were held every Thursday in a temple of national identity created by Richelieu in 1635, for nearly three and a half centuries. And it wasn't until March 6, 1980, that we finally heard on France-Inter: "Another hell of a wall of the stronger sex has just fallen. The Académie Française, the bastion of bastions for men, will finally welcome a woman. A historic first. It is the writer Marguerite Yourcenar, 77 years old, who will enter the immortal ranks."
Yourcenar under the Dome. The matter seems self-evident when one has read her "Memoirs of Hadrian" (1951) and her "Oeuvre au noir" (1968), whose masterful classicism made French literature shine throughout the world. And then this lady never had the bad taste to proclaim herself a revolutionary or a feminist, for example. Jean d'Ormesson is betting on it before the election: failing to attract Gracq, Aron, or Aragon to su…
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