Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française: langue, littérature, société by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse et al. (review)

This volume of twenty-three articles claims, according to the back cover, to analyse ‘la naissance, l’histoire, l’architecture et le rôle incontournable du Dictionnaire de l’Académie, dans la formation du lexique de la langue française, dont il constitue un repère fondamental’. It unfortunately lacks an Introduction to contextualize further the purpose of the book, its structure, contents, and contributors. All articles relate to the Académie française and its dictionary, but no clear editorial approach can be discerned, and articles vary in length, scope, and quality. The collection is apparently the result of a conference of the same title: some articles remain very close to the original oral presentations (for instance, that of Gabriel de Broglie). The twenty-three contributions range from a narrow focus—for example, discussions of terms in particular domains (medical by Jean-Louis Boursin, economic by Celeste Boccuzzi, political by Carmen Saggiomo, sporting by Valerio Emanuele), or the treatment in its various editions of onomatopoeia (Danguolė Melnikienė), phraseology (Salah Mejri), or the cultural content of terms (Pierluigi Ligas, Mariadomenica Lo Nostro)—to broader overviews of the dictionary (Jean Pruvost) and its previous editions (Alain Rey, Giovanni Dotoli). Some contributions are more valuable than others. Rey, editor-in-chief of Dictionnaires Le Robert, provides a critical outline of developments in the ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française compared to earlier editions. He discusses the significant increase in the volume of terms and new methods of creating entries (including multiple meanings/usages of a term; noting the century a term was first used; classifying terms by domain; and referring to certain literary titles for the first time), but he criticizes the lack of literary quotations or examples in the dictionary. Among those articles examining particular domains, Saggiomo provides an engaging account of a number of political terms in the fifth and sixth editions of the dictionary, and Emanuele an interesting overview of sporting terms in the eighth and ninth editions. However, many articles lack a critical approach. The opening contribution, by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Permanent Secretary of the Académie française, outlines the aims of the Académie and of its dictionary. Yet certain claims, for example, that the Académie does not seek to police usage (p. 5) or to forbid usages other than those laid out as ‘correct’ (p. 8) do not hold up to close scrutiny, given that Carrère d’Encausse explicitly states that, where necessary, a normative comment, highlighted in bold, will signal that ‘tel emploi, fautif, est à proscrire’ (p. 9) or that a usage should be corrected ‘quand il est fautif ’ (p. 13). Dotoli contributes an overview of Charles Pinot Duclos’s shaping of the fourth edition of the dictionary, the influence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes on him, and the stance Duclos takes on reforming spelling, but he tends towards lauding the virtues of the dictionary uncritically and perhaps somewhat overstating its importance: as ‘l’un des plus grands succès métalexico- graphes de l’histoire de la langue française’ (p. 39). Overall, for anyone interested in the history of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française this volume contributes some interesting discussions about various facets of the dictionary in its various editions, but it is of uneven quality.