Meeting of 11 November 1875

Annual Public Session of the Académie française
Thursday 11 November 1875.

Report by the Permanent Secretary of the Académie, M. Henri Patin, on the 1875 competitions.

Gentlemen,

We cannot, without very painful regrets being renewed within us, inaugurate today the triennial prize founded by M. Guizot to encourage and reward fine works of criticism, whether on the great periods of French literature or on the lives and works of its great writers. […] The Académie’s choice, however, after mature consideration, has settled on the work, considerable in every respect, which a learned professor at the École des chartes, M. Léon Gautier, has devoted specifically to the Chanson de Roland. […] M. Léon Gautier has given us what we were entitled to expect of him. To him we owe – after other editors no doubt, and other interpreters, whom it would be unjust not to take fully into account, as he does himself – a text of the Chanson de Roland skilfully reconstructed according to the rigorous methods and with the learned resources of modern criticism, translated as faithfully as it is elegantly, and finally annotated very fully in various forms. […]

The first award we are privileged to make of the prize instituted by M. Guizot happens, by a happy chance, to be an indirect tribute to the memory of its founder. This precious text, the subject of so many estimable works, and most recently of the one we believe we must reward – it was M. Guizot who, in 1833, during his first ministry, gave M. Francisque Michel the task of going to Oxford to copy it and publish it; it is to him that France and the learned world of Europe owe it. Had his life, as we wished, been long enough for him to preside himself over the first application of his generous provisions, we have no doubt that he would himself have proposed to our choice the able interpreter of the Chanson de Roland. Having judged M. Léon Gautier’s work for several years at the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, he always took a keen interest in it, and more recently he showed the esteem in which he held it when, in his last work, so unhappily interrupted, recalling the disaster of Roncevaux first according to history and then according to legend, and even quoting a few stanzas of the old poem, he borrowed the translation from M. Léon Gautier’s book. This noble Prix Guizot, which he is the first to have the honour of receiving, M. Léon Gautier is entitled to think he receives from M. Guizot himself […]