A Brit among guards of French language

PARIS -- The newest official guardian of the French language has spoken: English, he says, is jumping the barricades and threatening the language of Molière.

He should know. He's British -- the first from his nation to become one of the 40 esteemed "immortals" of the Académie Française, the institution that has watched over the language since 1635.

Is he a fox in the hen house, as one might think given the history of mutual disdain between England and France? "No," Michael Edwards assures. "Nor am I the Trojan Horse. I don't want to stir things up." But he just might.

Edwards, a Cambridge educated poet, writer and translator married to a French woman, says that while he became a French citizen a decade ago, his British identity is "essential."

"I don't stop being British. No," he said in an interview in his office at the august Collège de France, where he holds a chair in the Study of Literary Creation in the English Language. For example, he wonders why there are no French words to express certain concepts. One can descend in French, "descendre," but one cannot "ascendre," or ascend, as Edwards has to his illustrious seat.

The British scholar, who will be 75 later this month, was voted into the Académie Française in February -- on his third try, with his first candidacy in 2008. -- AP