This last had assigned for principal task with the academicians (of which a good number ensured its literary and political secretariat) to establish, through the realization of an official dictionary and a grammar, a model of French language comprehensible by all and able to answer its policy of unification and centralization of the kingdom. This new institution of State appeared initially to the writers and at the Parliament (which spent three years to record the constitutive instrument) as advertisement of an intolerable control of the publications: judgment on the form, one passes quickly to the judgment of the idea. Richelieu obliged the Academy thus to intervene in the quarrel of Cid of Pierre Corneille: the Feelings of the Academy on Cid (1638) imposed on the theater the respect traditional rules.  

The first edition of the Dictionary was presented to Louis XIV in 1694, followed by seven others in 1718,1740,1762,1798,1835,1878 and 1932-1935. In 1992, the first tome cheese of the ninth edition, followed in 2000 of the second appeared. The last volume should be completed in 2010.  

The French Academy counts, since 1639.40 members, who have since 1712 40 armchairs, offered by Louis XIV to establish a perfect equality between the writers, the ministers and the large lords (that Richelieu had imposed as of the first nominations). Dissolved in 1793 by Convention, the Academy was restored, in the form of the Class of literature and French language of the Institute of France, by Bonaparte, who gave to his members their “green dress”. It took again its title of French Academy in 1815. The first woman elected with the Academy was Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1980. The Academy is managed by a director and a chancellor elected for one limited duration (generally three months) and by a perpetual secretary, elected with life. It holds its solemn meetings under the cupola of the old college of the , quai Conti Four-Nations, in Paris. Each year, it decrees approximately eighty literary prizes, of which the Grand Prix of the Francophonie and the Grand Prix of the novel.

Vau, helped of François d' Orbay, adopts, as a whole which it raises of 1663 to 1668, the Italian model of the church inherited the Counter-Reformation: the building must as well with the art of Borromini as to that of Pierre de Cortone and is presented as a church of elliptic plan framed of two wings curved incorporating two superimposed commands which connect the vault to the side houses. The colossal pilasters of these houses are a prefiguration of the columns of the fore-part of the vault. The church is connected to the surrounding buildings by the semicircular place of form on which it is and with the palate of Louvre by a bridge, these two elements accentuate the theatrical aspect of the unit.  

The college of the Four-Nations is called today the palate of the Institute. It is affected at the Institute of France since 1806, and it is under the famous cupola of its vault that the academicians hold their meetings.