Jean Cocteau assured that the academicians were immortal for the duration of their life and that after their death, they changed into armchairs. If the playwright is telling the truth, then we will always be consoled for the disappearance of his perpetual secretary. Because she will then sit for eternity in this palace and protector of the French language that she dreamed of from a very tender age. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s mission was indeed a vocation. Russian on her mother’s side, Georgian on her father’s side, the young Hélène, née Zourabichvili, prayed for a long time to replace a cumbersome and barbaric surname as she confided during her induction speech under the dome in 1990. The French language which she mastered very early on, thus conferred on her the identity to which she aspired.
Because let’s go, “gossips always drown in their spit”, as a Senegalese proverb says. Madame Carrère d’Encausse was not the immobilist and the purist that one describes, because she fought in the twilight of her days the feminization of titles and functions – which was willy-nilly heard within the Institution. It was not to change that she was resistant, but to demagogue speeches that wanted to align language with mores. On this subject Simone Veil would later have the most apt words: “language follows its time, without giving in to the excesses of fashion and ease, and, for example, without going into the trap of pretending to believe that the feminization of words is an accelerator of parity. Thus, when in 1999, “Madam Minister” resounded at the Palais Bourbon, a stone’s throw away, at the Quai de Conti, Madame Carrère d’Encausse, like Maurice Druon before him, asked to be called “the perpetual secretary”. This, although she was the first woman to hold this position.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was driven by this conviction: language is a common good. “We must make French live, enrich it, make its preservation the duty of all our lives,” she exclaimed in December of the new millennium. To do this, she did not hesitate to leave the reserve of the Institution and take positions. Defense of the teaching of ancient Greek, of the Francophonie, crusade against “Anglomania of language”, inclusive writing, spelling reform… Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was on all fronts. She didn’t hesitate either to wet the curlers of the old lady on the Quai de Conti when the Internet changed the habits of the French. She was there when part of the Company’s dictionary was put online in 2004 and it gave “a new youth to the children of Gutenberg”, as she then rejoiced. It was also there in February 2019 when the digital portal of the Academy’s thesaurus was launched and overcame the youngest and most popular of its kind, such as the Wiktionary or Le Larousse online, with its modernity.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse has never been part of a battle between the Ancients and the Moderns of language. She was one of his most vocal spokespersons, but never a herald of “it was better before”. She was a woman of her time.
