Lawyer and writer François Sureau, born in 1957, a staunch defender of public liberties and a detractor of state authoritarianism, was received at the French Academy on Thursday, March 3rd. He will occupy the 24th seat of the French Academy, which has housed prestigious figures in the history of France, from Colbert to Jean-François Revel, to La Fontaine, Marivaux, Poincaré and many others.
François Sureau, 64, enarque, lawyer, writer, reserve colonel of the Foreign Legion, was elected to this seat left vacant by the death of Max Gallo (1932-2017), to whom he will pay a vibrant tribute at the same time as he will crush the retreat of the freedoms which are so dear to him.
A strong extract from his vibrant speech:
“Meaning disappears from the institutions that our history has bequeathed to us (…) No, I do not believe that this disciple of Voltaire and Hugo would be happy with the state we are in, each appealing to the government, to the prosecutors, to information societies to prohibit opinions that hurt them (…); where government and Parliament together claim, as if France had not exceeded the legal minority, to banish from it all hatred, forgetting that there are just hatreds and that the Republic was founded on the hatred of tyrants. Freedom is to be revolted, hurt, at least surprised, by contrary opinions. No one would like to live in a country where institutions that are generally failing in their essential functions, that of representation like those of action, would revenge themselves by telling us what to think, how to speak, when to be silent. Gallo had sensed it. And since he clearly saw that we were ultimately responsible for it, and not the only rulers, he believed that patriotism, the flame of which he had proposed to rekindle, would save us from such a decline by making us somehow kind to ourselves. »