The Anglosphere Needs a French Academy

Considering Les Immortels as a Model for a Secular Cultural Elite

I. The Vacuum in Anglo Culture

Abdication, not censorship, is what killed our standards.

The Anglosphere no longer remembers who speaks for it. Its writers do not believe they have the right to guard the language. Its editors are trained to apologize. Its critics, if they still exist, have been taught to undermine rather than preserve. And so the culture decays—not from censorship or repression, but from the absence of those who once gave it shape.

We have no cultural functionaries. No recognized guardians of form. No stewards of taste. Our institutions still print books and produce films, but they no longer curate. They distribute. They no longer weigh. They promote. Every new release enters the world not as an addition to a living canon, but as a piece of content meant to serve the feed.

What we lack is not talent. It is continuity. Our culture has become episodic, frantic, unmoored. Its memory fails. Its sense of inheritance collapses. And the people tasked with anchoring it—our teachers, our publishers, our critics—have been stripped of the tools to do so. Or worse, taught to distrust the very notion of tools. Form is now seen as a cage. Restraint as elitism. Tradition as oppression.

Yet without tradition, there is no guidance. Without form, no clarity. Without judgment, no excellence. We are not suffering from too much control. We are suffering from total abdication.

France, by contrast, never relinquished the idea that culture must be guarded. It chose to remember what the Anglosphere forgot: that beauty requires defenders.

II. The French Exception

French culture survives because it remembers to protect itself.

France remains a living rebuke to the cultural amnesia of the Anglosphere. Where we erased the idea of authority in the arts, they institutionalized it. Where we dissolved our standards in the name of access, they built structures to preserve theirs. The Anglosphere dreams of disruption. France dreams of refinement. And at the center of that dream stands L’Académie Française.

Founded in the seventeenth century and never dismantled, the Academy embodies a national commitment to continuity. It is not decorative. It is not symbolic. It functions. It revises dictionaries. It debates usage. It defends grammar with the force and solemnity of constitutional law. And it does so not for profit, but for permanence.

It is an aristocracy of intellect. Forty seats, fixed in number, filled by election. Their members are called Immortels—not in praise of their egos, but as a reflection of the office they hold. They are not transient commentators. They are permanent stewards. They do not chase trends. They outlast them.

This is not a relic of monarchy. It is the spine of French cultural life. A secular priesthood for the protection of language itself. It speaks to the French belief that heritage is not something one expresses, but something one carries—and carries with care.

The Anglosphere, allergic to hierarchy and terrified of judgment, cannot imagine such a body. But its absence is felt everywhere. In every degraded phrase, every meaningless award, every forgotten book. Where France resisted decline, we rebranded it as progress.

III. The Birth of the Academy

Civilization needs scaffolding, and the French built theirs early.

L’Académie Française was not born out of nostalgia. It was born out of foresight. Cardinal Richelieu, architect of the centralized French state, understood that power alone could not preserve civilization. Language, if left unguarded, would fragment. Taste, if left undisciplined, would decay. So he founded the Academy in 1635—not to invent a culture, but to shield the one that already existed from erosion.

The founding principle was simple: language matters. It is not a neutral vessel. It carries with it the soul of a people—their rhythms, their ideas, their memory. And without structure, it degrades. Richelieu knew what the modern mind has forgotten: that a nation is not bound by blood alone, but by the words it shares, the standards it upholds, the forms it refuses to abandon.

From the beginning, the Academy was exclusive. Not by wealth, nor by birth, but by contribution. Writers, philosophers, historians—those who had given shape to the language were called to guard it. They would not act as bureaucrats, nor as moralists. Their task was not political. It was custodial.

They were not appointed by kings, nor elected by crowds. They were chosen by each other, a closed body charged with watching over the open nation. In their ranks stood names like Voltaire, Hugo, Valéry, Claudel. Not activists. Not influencers. Craftsmen. Architects of language.

The Anglosphere once had similar instincts. Oxford defined usage. Journals curated discourse. Publishers carried lineage. But we dismantled those scaffolds—and we are still falling.

IV. The Immortals Defined

Forty chairs, filled by merit, not momentum.

To be elected to the Academy is to enter a lineage. Each of the forty seats is numbered and named. When an Immortal dies, his chair does not vanish. It awaits a successor—one who is not chosen for fashion or favor, but for having shaped the French language in a lasting way. The selection is made by the body itself. It is slow, deliberative, and public. No campaign, no trending topic, no prize circuit. Only the quiet gravity of merit.

These forty are drawn from the ranks of writers, philosophers, poets, historians, scientists—those who have left a mark not on the market, but on the mind. They are not there to reflect the times. They are there to reflect the language, its history, its potential, and its precision. Their work is not creative in the popular sense. It is conservational, rectifying, curating, pruning. Like gardeners of a sacred grove, they know that growth must be shaped or it becomes wild and meaningless.

They wear green uniforms embroidered with golden olive branches. They carry ceremonial swords engraved with personal symbols. To modern Anglo sensibilities, it may appear theatrical. But beneath the spectacle lies something powerful: continuity. A reminder that to speak well is not a casual act. It is a vocation, and it demands reverence.

Compare this to the Anglosphere, where no such figure exists. Our public intellectuals are celebrities. Our language guardians are mocked. Our thinkers are freelancers, unmoored from duty or tradition. Without Immortals, we chase the ephemeral.

V. Function: Protection, Not Innovation

The Academy exists to protect, not to please.

The Academy does not concern itself with novelty. Its task is older, quieter, and far more vital: to protect. It protects the integrity of the French language, not as an artifact, but as a living structure. It refines its contours, clarifies its usage, and decides what belongs. This is not censorship. It is stewardship.

Its most visible labor is the dictionary. Not a collection of popular slang, but a considered record of meaning. Compiled with rigor, debated line by line, and published across decades, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française embodies the Academy’s pace and its purpose. Where the Anglosphere updates its lexicons yearly in response to the internet’s whims, the Immortals resist haste. They recognize that words form minds, and that minds form nations.

The Academy does not seek to shape public opinion. It shapes the tools by which opinion is expressed. It defends clarity against confusion, gravity against triviality, dignity against decay. Its conservatism is not political—it is metaphysical. It believes that language must carry weight, or nothing else will.

This is the function the Anglosphere has lost. Innovation became the default. Destruction was mistaken for progress. And so our dictionaries, our classrooms, our newspapers—all followed the same path: downward. We no longer ask what words mean. We ask whether they offend. We no longer ask whether a sentence is well-formed. We ask whether it trends.

The Academy answers none of these questions. It answers older ones. And that is why it remains essential.

VI. The Canon as a Living Organism

A canon without caretakers becomes compost.

The canon is not a fossil. It is not a static display of dead voices frozen in amber. It is a living organism, one that breathes across generations—so long as someone remembers to feed it. The Academy understands this. It does not enshrine the past for its own sake. It does not guard a museum. It curates an inheritance.

To the Immortals, a book is not merely a product. It is an addition to the architecture of the language. And not every structure belongs. They do not confuse popularity with permanence. They know that some works clarify thought, deepen feeling, or stretch the language into new forms of elegance—and that others muddy, flatten, or rot the tongue. The canon is shaped by these judgments. It is maintained by them. And without such judgments, it disintegrates.

In the Anglosphere, that disintegration is visible everywhere. Once, there were institutions—universities, publishing houses, newspapers—that curated taste. They formed an ecosystem of criticism and elevation. Today, they disclaim that responsibility. The market decides. Or worse, the mob. Canon is now treated as tyranny. Selection is treated as exclusion. The result is chaos disguised as freedom.

But the truth remains. A culture without a canon is a culture without memory. And a canon without caretakers will soon die of neglect. The French, in their stubbornness, have refused to let theirs die. The Academy is their answer to forgetfulness.

The Anglosphere has no such answer. And so we forget.

VII. What the Anglosphere Lost

Critics became consumers with better vocabulary.

We once had our own guardians. They were not Immortals, but they served a similar function. The dons of Oxford and Cambridge. The editors at Faber & Faber. The critics at the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. They did not operate under a royal charter, but they exercised authority. They judged. They upheld standards. They formed the backbone of cultural continuity.

That spine has snapped.

The old publishing houses now chase celebrity. The great reviews have become lifestyle pages. The universities produce more ideology than wisdom. Each institution that once shaped the canon now dissolves it. Their role has been reversed. They no longer filter. They amplify. They no longer ask whether something is good—they ask whether it is new, diverse, or disruptive.

And so the Anglosphere has lost its center. We cannot agree on what is good, because we have no shared foundation. Our language frays. Our reference points fragment. Our writers no longer speak to a tradition, but to a market. Our thinkers no longer cite each other, but compete for clicks. The past is not studied—it is deconstructed, dismembered, and cast aside.

The French chose institutional memory. We chose novelty. They built continuity. We built churn. Their culture bends slowly. Ours snaps. And in every broken sentence, every forgettable book, every degraded phrase, the loss is felt. Not as a scream, but as silence—where judgment once stood.

VIII. Without Functionaries, Only Trends Remain

We replaced the cathedral with a feed.

Culture does not survive on instinct. It must be guarded, not by force, but by form. And form requires functionaries—those who remember, who sift, who say no. The Anglosphere expelled them. We disbanded the keepers of language and replaced them with metrics. We traded judges for influencers. And in their absence, only trends remain.

The result is a culture governed by acceleration. Nothing is built to last. Books are written to vanish. Films are made to stream, not to speak. Every new release must flatter a narrative or disappear. Craft is optional. Sentiment is everything. The work that endures, the work that cuts through the fog, is rare. And when it appears, it is praised momentarily—before it is lost again in the next cycle.

We are told this is freedom. But it is a prison made of speed. In the absence of recognized standards, people look not to mentors but to mobs. Not to tradition, but to taste-makers. Language becomes a battleground, not of style, but of slogans. Words are hollowed out by overuse and redefined by power.

The French, for all their faults, never allowed this flattening. The Academy stands in quiet defiance of chaos. It refuses to rush. It refuses to follow. Its very existence says: culture is not a trend. It is a trust. Someone must hold the line.

The Anglosphere abandoned that post. And without such functionaries, the line no longer holds.

IX. What an Anglo Academy Might Be

A pan-Anglo Academy would honor clarity, not clout.

The Anglosphere cannot import the Academy wholesale. Its cultural temperament resists uniformity, recoils from formality, mistrusts titles and traditions not born from below. But if imitation is impossible, inspiration is not. We can build our own structure—distinct in method, but alike in purpose. A body not of rulers, but of stewards. A council not of gatekeepers, but of guardians.

Such an institution would not answer to the state. It must remain independent of political influence, immune to the currents of election cycles and ideological fads. Its authority would be cultural, not legislative—drawn from reputation, not force. Membership would not be bought, nor granted by popularity. It would be earned by labor: the shaping of language, the refinement of thought, the preservation of form.

It could be transnational. English is not bound to one flag. A pan-Anglo Academy might include members from Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and beyond—those who write with clarity, speak with reverence, and uphold a shared literary heritage. It would not impose rules on the public. It would impose standards on itself. It would speak with one voice, not to dictate taste, but to defend coherence.

Its existence alone would matter. It would signal that someone remembers. That someone is watching the words. That in an age of drift, there remains an anchor.

We do not lack talent. We lack institution. We lack structure. And until we build one, excellence will remain exiled—brilliant, but alone.

X. Remembering What Culture Is For

Let the Anglosphere remember what the French never forgot.

Culture is not entertainment. It is not content. It is not an endless series of performances thrown into the void to be liked, shared, and forgotten. Culture is memory. It is discipline. It is the slow transmission of form from one generation to the next. It tells us not only who we are, but how to speak with dignity, how to think with precision, how to live with depth.

The Anglosphere forgot this.

We confused freedom with formlessness. We called tradition a cage. We mocked anyone who dared to preserve. And so we lost the lineages that made us. The great English sentence—layered, deliberate, exact—has given way to fragments and affectations. Our novels meander. Our criticism flatters. Our poetry no longer sings. Without memory, form collapses. Without form, we cannot see.

The French did not forget. L’Académie Française stands as proof. It is not perfect. It is not infallible. But it serves. It reminds. It holds. It says to the nation: your language matters. Your history matters. Your words are worth guarding. And so are your standards.

We need the same. Not to copy the French, but to remember what they never stopped believing—that beauty is not automatic, and civilization is not self-sustaining. Someone must tend the flame.

Let there be Immortals in the Anglosphere. Let there be those who do not chase the moment but carry the weight of what must not be lost. Let there be form again. Let there be memory.

Let culture live.