Not it really isn't. I think every european country has a similar institution. At least, italians (Accademia della Crusca) and germans (Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung) do. I think, that's because european countries are fusions of smaller regions and kingdoms which had their own language each, and at some point in time it was necessary to have a unique language for the economic development of the country. But for the authoritarian aspect, you do not have any kind of punishment for not following the prescription of the Académie, you can speak french in whatever way you like as long as the people in front of you understand you. I don't get where you get your strong feelings against the Académie from.

The relevant entity for German is [1]. Apparently created after or during the struggle for an official reform of the language in the 90 and early 2000.

[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_für_deutsche_Rechtschrei...

having standards is always useful. think of it as w3c for french speaking people

No. It would be authoritarian it was done as in Russia. Like bolsheviks came and declared a few letters from an alphabet deprecated and also they rewrote grammar. A few decades later they released a bugfix for their new grammar.

In France seems they have no authority to change anything. They cannot order to a school teachers to teach new grammar, or to writers to stop using some letters or words.

Spain has the "Real Academia Española", guardian of the Spanish language in the world. They seems very related to this guardian of French,they don't accept gender questions and they do an authoritarian imposition of their ideas.