french president Emmanuel Macron will receive this Thursday the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosaas well as the French writer Antoine Compagnon. This is the next step for both elected members before being enthroned in the French Academy.
Vargas Llosa Y Compagnon will be received by Macron for a dinner at the Elysée Palace, seat of the Presidency of the Republic of France, together with the perpetual secretary of the Academy, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. This was reported by the presidential palace itself.
“The election to the French Academy (…) only becomes definitive after the approval of the President of the Republic, protector of the Academy, who declares it through a hearing to the newly elected”, explains the official website of the traditional French institution, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. “That visit of the newly elected is equivalent to approval,” adds the text.
Vargas LlosaReward Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, it was voted new “Immortal” (nickname of the members of the French Academy) last November 25. For its part, Antoine Compagnonwriter and literary critic, was elected on February 17.
Academy protocol is long and ceremonious. After this presidential approval next Thursday private reception must be arranged at the institution on the banks of the Seine Riverin an indefinite period.
Vargas Llosawhich will occupy the chair vacated by the deceased michel seres (2019), is the first academic who has not published anything directly in the French language.
The nomination of the Peruvian Nobel aroused controversy just a few days after the announcement. A group of French intellectuals published a joint opinion column in the French newspaper Libération in which they stated: “This decision presents serious ethical problems.”
The main argument to oppose the candidacy of Vargas Llosa It was, as they pointed out, the express support of the writer to politicians that the signatories of the column described as “extreme right”. Jose Antonio Kastwho lost the presidential election to Gabriel Boricwas called by the signatories “nostalgic defender of the military dictatorship of Pinochet”. At the same time, they denounced the support of the author of Conversation in the Cathedral to the Colombian president Ivan Duke, who “ended the peace agreements signed in 2016″. None of these supports, the signatories maintained, is compatible with a member of the French Academy.
For now, the repudiation of those who published his column in Libération has not lowered the candidacy of Vargas Llosawhich advances in the protocol steps towards its full membership in the Academy.
Following acceptance by the French President, the new members are “installed” during a closed-door ceremony, in which the candidate reads his speech and an academic “host” answers him. It is during this ceremony that the academic he receives a commemorative medal and is awarded a word from the dictionary.
Vargas Llosa, 86, is a writer closely linked to French culture since he in 1959 came to Pariswhere he worked for a few years as a journalist and translator.
The writer has devoted numerous essays and articles to French literature. highlights The temptation of the impossible (2004) about one of his literary obsessions, The Miserables of Victor Hugo. Barely two years later she puts out another essay, the perpetual orgy (2006) on Madame Bovary of Gustave Flaubert.
The last step to Vargas Llosa Y Compagnon will be the public reception. Traditionally, the new academic attends the event in a suit with green embroidered motifs, a cape and a sword. But it is a protocol that goes step by step, and the next one is this Thursday, at the Elysee.
With information from AFP.
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Macron will receive Vargas Llosa to make him an “immortal” of the French Academy