From 1958 until 1973 he served as its Secretary in Perpetuity, a position which he used to become one of France's most ardent defenders of the native language.
Maurice-Charles-Louis-Genevoix was born on an island in the River Loire at Decize (Nièvre). He was the son of Gabriel Genevoix, a notary's clerk, and his wife, Camille Balichon Genevoix. He spent his childhood in the town of Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, which would become an important literary background for his fictional work. Some of his childhood experiences are reflected in his masterly and mellow volume of memoirs, Trente Mille Jours (Thirty Thousand Days, 1980). He first attended the local school, then transferred to the lycée of Orléans in 1901; he later studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux in order to prepare for the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was accepted in 1912. A superior student, Genevoix was first in his class (1914) and seemed destined to become one of France's most renowned academicians--the scholarly treatise he wrote on Guy de Maupassant for the Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures attests to his promise--but World War I ended his university life.
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