In his latest book, Un fauteuil sur la scène (Gresset), Amin Maalouf looks back over four centuries of French history, painting the picture of the eighteen figures who, from 1634, occupied the 29th chair of the Académie française. He looks back on Ernest Renan who, while perfectly reasonably believing that a nation is a daily plebiscite, was very wary of “universal suffrage which, in his view, gave too much power to the uneducated popular masses, 'devoid of any ideal', he said and...