Can Anyone Save the Mél?

The Maison des écrivains et de la littérature, popularly known as the “Mél,” has long been a beloved fixture of Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement. This cultural institution has played a pedagogic role since its founding in March 1986, helping foster literacy and love for reading among students, providing resources for writers and scholars, and sponsoring authors’ residencies in France and abroad, among other activities. At present, its most famous member is Annie Ernaux, who won a Nobel Prize in 2022 for her elegant novels.

But the budget cuts and closing of institutions that have made such waves over on this side of the pond now have a curious analogue in France. The Mél’s funds are dwindling and some question how long it can keep its doors open. By some estimates, allocations to the Mél now stand at 350,000 euros per year, a mere shadow of what the institution used to receive. A report in Libération puts the current figure even lower: 200,000 euros compared to 700,000 just a dozen years ago.

No nation can boast of having a richer and more varied literature than France, and many residents of that country are not shy about promoting its works. With pride in their cultural achievements comes a zest for teaching, promoting, and sharing books and ideas widely.

Therefore, they have done so often in the past when they felt their liberties were on the line, Parisians have taken to the streets in an effort to call attention to the plight of this cultural treasure. On March 20, strikers made quite a scene on the Place de la Bastille, according to Libération. They showed no sympathy for culture minister Rachida Dati’s plans to save 50 million euros that the government would otherwise have spent in 2025.

While some of us agree that fiscal probity in principle is a good and necessary thing, the situation in France is complex. In order to understand the developments that have brought people out into the streets of Paris, hoping to save the Mél from closing down forever, Book and Film Globe interviewed Sylvie Gouttebaron, the organization’s director.

The Mél has had a similar mission to that of the Centre nationale du livre (CNL), in the view of Gouttebaron. But Dati, in her efforts to pare down the state budget, has chosen the CNL to be the vehicle of whatever literary edification the government of France is still willing to help foster, she said. The Mél has expanded its functions steadily over the years, yet some in the government would be content to see the opposite happen: to watch the Mél fade into irrelevance and ultimately disappear altogether, Gouttebaron said.

“Unhappily, the minister demands that associations ‘find their economic model,’” added Gouttebaron, who takes this formulation to be code for urging institutions to look for funding elsewhere. It is particularly ironic that this should be the official stance at a moment in France’s public life when the government has declared literature to be a great national cause and fostering a taste for reading among the young is particularly urgent, she stated.

The Mél and its allies have directed their appeals to President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister François Bayrou, along with the minister of culture, but have so far met with silence, said Gouttebaron.

No doubt the protestors calling for the restoration of funds for the Mél need all the allies they can get in this darkest of hours. Nonetheless, given their stated belief in the promotion of literature and intellectual freedom, they are vulnerable to a pretty serious criticism. One of the entities to have taken up the Mél’s cause and helped orchestrate protests on its behalf is the French Communist Party (PCF), which, though it may have left Stalinism far in the rear-view mirror, still shares a name and pedigree with people and organizations in other parts of the world that have done their damndest to choke off the free circulation of books and ideas and squelch efforts to foster an independent literary culture at odds with the diktats of the state. It seems questionable that the protestors would welcome a party historically associated with the forces of censorship and repression in a cause devoted to the freedom to write, speak, and think with absolute freedom.

Nonetheless, efforts to save the Mél deserve sympathy and support. Unfortunately, supporters concur, efforts to champion the Mél have so far largely fallen on deaf ears at the highest official levels. Why this lack of engagement?

In the view of Alexandra Destais, a French doctoral candidate in literature, the Mél and other institutions are only the latest victims of a gathering trend she identifies as “the democratization of culture by the lowest.” This tendency thwarts efforts to promote and celebrate a “living literature” that could help inspire younger generations and keep them on their feet intellectually and culturally, she continued.

“Students need the force of example, of emulation, and of models, as I have witnessed in the course of teaching literature,” Destais commented. Unfortunately, many young people these days don’t read and would have a hard time making sense of a once-canonical work such as Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, she observed. Destais urged others to ask themselves whether society at large should accept this state of affairs or work to salvage the rapport with literature and what she called la figure du lettré, an exemplar of the learned citizen.

It’s hard to disagree. Going back in time might mean returning to the literary greatness of the past, yet it could just as easily mean a regression to a  preliterate state, instead of the ideal of enlightenment and cultivation with which France, for many, is still synonymous. Of all countries in the world, that would be a tragedy most of all for France.

Speaking of Maupassant, one might recall here one of the most famous scenes in all French literature. The protagonist of the 1887 tale “Le Horla,” who suffers the assaults of an invisible, malevolent spirit—or perhaps a highly virulent form of cultural and intellectual atrophy—walks on a long path between two tall rows of nearly identical trees. Growing disoriented, he falls to the ground. When he picks himself up, dazed, he comes to the realization, looking up and down the long path between the rows of trees, that he cannot figure out which way he came from and which way he was going.

At this moment in their history, the people of France must ask: are we going forward or backward?

“It’s time to wake up, in order to forge free and intelligent beings, not servile future agents of a thoughtless system,” said Destais. “If France can still shine brightly in the world, it will be thanks, largely, to her literature.”