L’Affaire Nora Pours Acid Into France’s Fissures

Michel Houellebecq, the notorious writer accused of having insulted Islam, is not the only figure in contemporary French letters to pay a price for refusing to censor himself. Now, a member of the nation’s publishing elite has made an abrupt career move after he sent his boss a message roughly equivalent to: let them eat cake.

According to a report in Livres Hebdo, the esteemed French publishing executive Olivier Nora has just launched his own imprint under the auspices of Editis, after losing his longtime position as head of Éditions Grasset, whose parent company is Hachette, a division of the Vivendi media empire. Starting next year, Olivier Nora Éditions will release 30 to 50 fiction and nonfiction titles into the world annually, including works in French and in translation. It’s a thumbed nose to his former employers and especially to its controlling shareholder, the billionaire media mogul Vincent Bolloré.

Like his firing earlier this year, Nora’s latest move got more fanfare in France than a comparable one might have earned elsewhere, which speaks to the continuing vitality of a publishing industry in a country where the temperature of public discourse runs high and Jordan Bardella, a Vivendi author and the leader of France’s populist right, finds himself in the midst of a new scandal. Bardella fervently denies claims that he made antisemitic comments, and has filed a libel lawsuit against the website Mediapart over the allegations.

L’Affaire Grassett

The ousting of Nora in the spring did not go over well with his authors. Hundreds of them made a public decision to end their relationship with Grasset, including Bernard Henri-Lévy, one of the most famous public intellectuals in France; Michka Assayas, a music journalist who has written about U2 frontman Bono; Virginie Despentes, an edgy, provocative novelist and filmmaker fixated on gender and sexuality; and scores of others in the world of French letters.

The spark that lit the conflagration was, reportedly, a spat between Nora and higher-ups at Hachette about the release date for the new book by Boualem Sansal, an Algerian writer sentenced to five years in prison, then pardoned, for his opposition to the regime in Algiers. Nora’s superiors felt he had asserted too much independence and let him go. In an open letter published in Le Monde, the first 130 authors to sever their ties with the publisher (the number quickly grew to 170, and counting), expressed indignation at the ousting of Nora, who, they noted, had published their work for 26 years.

The letter called Nora a unifying force for writers who might not agree on many things, citing his “moral elegance, approachability and engagement.” It went on to express the signatories’ outrage at Bolloré’s alleged assault on creative freedom, as well as their refusal to be “hostages in an ideological war seeking to impose authoritarianism everywhere in the culture and media.”

Bolloré was quick to address the charges. He claimed in an article that Nora acted in an antidemocratic manner by trying to dictate the release date of Sansal’s book and that Nora also got a huge salary hike that bore no relationship to Grasset’s disappointing recent financial performance. Bolloré called himself a Christian Democrat – quite unlike the right-wing media tycoon of his enemies’ caricature – and vowed that, contrary to the charges, Hachette is open to a multitude of viewpoints.

But the sources of the controversy run deeper than a disagreement over one book’s publication date, or perceptions of the outsized salary of a figure at the top of the Grasset hierarchy. They point to gnawing tensions in the French polity over the status of free speech – along with a decisive shift, in recent years, in how the nation’s literary and cultural elites view of the role of publishers, journals and other purveyors of news and ideas.

For some of the writers in question, the decision to part ways with Grasset had to do with more than the ouster of a publisher they admired. Novelist Colombe Schenk told the news agency Agence France-Presse that many were alarmed that Fayard, another imprint under the same corporate umbrella as Grasset, had given a platform to Bardella, current head of the right-wing, anti-immigration Rassemblement National (a direct descendent of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National) and a close associate of Marine Le Pen.

Fayard has published not one but two of Bardella’s books, helping spread his message about French cultural solidarity, and the threat posed by unchecked Third World immigration, to millions. It has helped make a household name out of a figure whose views people had not expected to encounter outside some of the darker corners of the internet or in the out-of-print novels of Jean Raspail, a writer preoccupied with demographic and cultural upheaval and what he saw an immediate, existential threat to the West.

Vive La Difference

Historically, many have loved France for the dynamism of its intellectual life and for its citizens’ tendency to speak their minds. But nowadays, clearly, many writers in France believe in something approximating the principle of “free speech as long as you agree with me,” and are uncomfortable with even indirect proximity to an imprint that airs other viewpoints. To leave your own publishing house because you don’t feel it is a good fit for your literary and artistic sensibility is one thing. But, if Schenk is right, authors have fled Grasset because they cannot countenance their own publisher being part of a corporation that includes even a separate imprint publishing books with a politically incorrect take on a burning issue at the core of France’s modern identity.

Any decent and rational person must condemn right-wing extremism and the reflexive mistrust of foreigners that goes with it. At the same time, Régis Debray, the best-known public intellectual alive in France today, has exposed intellectual calcification and narcissism within the ranks of the left-wing literary and cultural establishment of 2026.

The authors who abandoned Grasset are not comfortable with a publisher disseminating the wrong ideas, shaping the public’s understanding of important issues in a manner at odds with their own viewpoint. In their view, to advance a populist stance is to expel people from France in the most literal sense.

But, those who care about the future of intellectual freedom in France and the West might say to Nora, as he sets off on the new phase of his career as head of his own imprint: bonne chance!