Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique
national academy for the French language in Belgium
The Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique (French pronunciation: [akademi ʁwajal də lɑ̃ɡ e d(ə) liteʁatyʁ fʁɑ̃sɛːz də bɛlʒik]; 'Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium') or ARLLFB is a Belgian institution which brings together personalities who, through their works, writings, lectures or speeches, have contributed most eminently to the illustration of the French language, either by studying its origins and its evolution, or by publishing works of imagination or criticism. It includes both Belgian and foreign members.
The Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium, also named the "Destréenne", was founded in 1920 by King Albert I of Belgium, at the suggestion of Jules Destrée, minister in charge of Science and Arts. It should not be confused with the Royal Academy of Belgium, the "Teresian", founded in 1772 by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.
Founding principles
There are three founding principles:
It will bring together imaginative writers, novelists, playwrights, poets and philologists, in a broad sense, specialists of ancient texts, grammarians, linguists and historians of literature. Principle justified in the following terms: "The total meaning of a language is revealed only in terms of its constant transformation."
The second: the academy should elect foreign members not only from France, but also from Canada, French-speaking Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, from all countries where the French language is "spoken, honored, cultivated, and which are like the intellectual provinces of French civilization".
Third: the academy should include female members: "women of letters gave too many unquestionable proofs of talent to think of removing them from a literary society".
History and composition
The initial nucleus of the academy named ten writers: Henri Carton de Wiart, Georges Eekhoud, Iwan Gilkin, Albert Giraud, Hubert Krains, Maurice Maeterlinck, Albert Mockel, fr:Fernand Séverin, Paul Spaak, fr:Gustave Vanzype. And for the philological section, its first four members were representatives of the Liège school of philology: fr:Maurice Wilmotte, fr:Auguste Doutrepont, Jules Feller and Jean Haust.
The autonomy of the academy is assured by the recommendation that the elections take place by co-optation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2166029. VIAF identifies the subject as 148573891. The Library of Congress control number is n83129050. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1920 and 1772.
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This entry incorporates text from “Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.