A conservative revolution in French publishing

Pierre Bourdieu

Translated by Mieranda Vlot and Anthony Pym

Version 3. April 2017.

This translation was completed by Mieranda Vlot in 2005 and then revised by Anthony
Pym, with assistance from Sandra Poupaud. It was proposed for publication in the
journal Translation Studies (Routledge) but one of the co-editors at the time would not
accept it with the critical preface (it was a great delight to see a postmodern theorist
remind us of the proper role of the translator). An excellent translation by Ryan Fraser
was then published in the journal.

This version includes the four graphs that were published, in color, in the French
original. The titles of the graphs have not been translated because we never understood
exactly what the axes represent, and Bourdieus text does not offer such understanding.
The text implicitly says, trust me, its sociology

One translators preface

The French original of this text was first published in Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales 126-127 (March 1999), pp. 3-28, under the title Une revolution conservatrice
dans ldition. Our translation into English has been carried out to address the needs of
graduate students and researchers working in the field of Translation Studies, who are
increasingly aware of the need to integrate sociological perspectives into their work. To
suit the needs of this particular readership, the syntax in the translation is considerably
simpler than that of the original. We have cut many sentences into two, three or
sometimes four; we have remove most clefts; we have replaced many dummy
conditionals (If it is true that) with straight affirmations; in short, we have removed
many of the features that make the French text remarkably abstruse, even within the
corpus of Bourdieus writings (according to one French reviewer, this particular text is
scarcely comprehensible and decidedly unpleasant). So if you think the English is
hard, try the French.
In so doing, we have removed a set of formal features that were perhaps not
entirely gratuitous in their original context. When launching this assault on the literary
institutions of his day, Bourdieu took care to show that he too knew how to write. He
was no merely descriptive sociologist; his work had every right to enter high humanist
culture, indeed the Olympus of literary universals that he opposes to the merely
commercial concern of the larger publishers. In sacrificing much of the style (syntax,
though not terminology), we rob the text of part of its defensive arsenal.
We have thus obscured the extent to which Bourdieus text is part of its own
object. With some irony, the sociologist excludes publishers of social sciences from
his field of investigation, even though his own publisher, the traditionally Catholic Le
Seuil, is still very much included. Similar irony might be found in the way Bourdieus
text moves from the apparatus of apparently solid sociology, statistics and all, to final
overt backing of the most navely idealist notion of literature possible, allied with that of
all the innocent small publishers whom he occasionally appears to consider pathetically

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lost. Bourdieu positions himself aloof from the world of best-sellers, ridiculed as being
Americanized, as not revealing anything about social relations, and as being for women.
Yet women return in a second role, as the semi-heroic owners of the small publishing
houses closest to the sociologists own ideals.
This would seem a very French defense of literature as an exception culturelle,
an area not subject to the normal rules of commerce and certainly not open to free
international trade. Almost despite the sociology, Bourdieu takes root within the literary
field he seeks to analyze.
We have chosen this text because it is one of the very few sociological studies of
the literary field that explicitly analyzes the role of translations. We would not,
however, suggest that the study meets all the standards of solid sociology. First, on the
empirical level, the survey was carried out in 1996 on only 61 publishers (56 in the
graphs), without any serious attempt being made to justify the selection of this
particular sample (we do not know how many publishers there are in France, but 279 of
them are members of the professional association, the BIEF). One might nevertheless
hope that the area sampling is good enough to indicate what is going on. Second, with
respect to the methodology, one is surprised to see the extent to which Bourdieu
remained structuralist, as if the objectively mapped positions locked all subjects into
ineluctable modes of behavior. There is much bravura in the repeated claims that once
you grasp the structure, you understand the rest. Unfortunately the structure is not
extended here to include any self-doubts within the position of the sociologist. Third,
the historical location of the study puts it prior to any serious consideration of the role
of technology, especially the Internet, in minoritizing the production and reception of
literature. Perhaps the conclusions need not be so pessimistic. Finally, the study fixes its
object as literary publishing in France yet discovers at many points that the structures
involved are international, mostly written off as American. Bourdieu makes no
attempt to pursue this international aspect. He merely cites the claims of his informants,
remarkably either for or against something called the American model, and he finally
appears to endorse the blunt opinion that Americans are only interested in themselves.
The fact that, to our knowledge, this text has not been previously translated into
English might indeed indicate a certain closure of our language. Yet we do remain
interested in Bourdieu.

Anthony Pym

Publishers have the extraordinary power to assure public-ation; they give an author and
a text public existence. This particular kind of creativity usually involves a
consecration, a transfer of symbolic capital (like a preface, written by another author).
It can be even more significant than the authors own creativity, and also more highly
consecrated, most notably through the publishers catalogue or stable of authors
(themselves consecrated to one degree or another).

Knowledge and misrecognition

A selection process distinguishes the publishable from the unpublishable, be it for a

particular publisher or for a group of publishers. In order to understand this process, we
must study the institutional mechanism (reading committees, readers, series editors,
etc.) that each publishing house has for sorting out the manuscripts proposed. More

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precisely, we must apprehend the objective relations between the various agents who
contribute to the decision to publish. These agents include not only the publishers
themselves and those close to them, but also the specific commissions and committees,
the series editors, the professional readers, the administrative staff, the influential
advisers who can act as unofficial series editors, and perhaps the translators, who may
be responsible for the publication of foreign authors.
The logic of the publishing field generates a certain literary belief, informing
interactions that are more or less magical or enchanted. The agents forget that their
interactions are determined by the structure of the publishing field as a whole. This
structure determines the size and form of the unit responsible for the decision to publish.
The structure goes from the single decision maker (at least in appearance) of the small
publishing houses to the field of differentiated authorities found in the large publishing
houses. The structure also defines the relative weights of the various evaluation criteria
that incline agents to favor the literary side or the commercial side. In terms of the
old dilemma dear to Flaubert, they may opt either for art or for fmoney. Each publishing
house occupies, at a given moment, a position in the publishing field. This position
depends on the distribution of rare resources (economic, symbolic, technical, etc.) and
the power those resources confer on the field. This structural position informs the way
those responsible take further positions in the field, developing strategies for the
publication of French or foreign books. The position defines the system of constraints
and objectives imposed on the agents, and thus their margin for maneuver, which is
often very narrow and concerns no more than the confrontations and struggles between
the players of the publishing game. The most significant changes in the policies of
publishers can thus be related to changes in the position that they occupy in the field.
Such changes may include movement toward the dominant positions, accompanied by a
tendency to manage skills rather than embark on any search for things new. The
changes might also make symbolic capital available to authors who are much more
commercial than those who, back in the initial heroic age, once helped to accumulate
the publishers capital.
The apparent independence of visible places of decision is an illusion; it
masks the restrictions imposed by the field. The selection of texts offered to the
choice of the editors in charge is itself the product of a selection determined by the
diacritical logic of the field. In fact, the authors are directed, when proposing their
manuscripts, by a more of less fair representation of the various publishing houses, or at
least those that are related to schools of thought (for example, the Nouveau roman) or
to great names of the present or past. This representation guides the behavior of all the
actors, including the publishers themselves and the critics. It particularly concerns the
label given by book covers (Gallimards all-white covers, for instance). Yet it is also
developed by the series editors and all the intermediaries who, in their exchanges and
advice (You should send your manuscript to such-and-such...), favor the fit, often
exalted as discovered, between a publisher and an author. Attached to each position in
the publishing field is a system of constraints and aims, all defined at least negatively.
These are often doubled by the agents dispositions (themselves adjusted to the position
in most cases). The resulting system is designed to redirect its occupants towards a class
of positions.
To get a better sense of the difference between the structural vision of the game
and even the most lucid visions held by the players within, we turn to the invaluable
testimony of Michel Deguy, who talks about the experience he had with the holy of
holies of the French literary world, the Committee at Gallimard. This experience was
one of enchantment followed by disenchantment. It turned on the full truth of a game

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that, like literary production, is based on believing. The objective analysis of structures,
backed by statistics, cannot be imposed on those who are inclined to recognize all the
visible supports of literary faith, especially the mythical attributes of a great publishing
house like Gallimard. The mythical Committee of Gallimard has special attributes like
its oval office and various temporal incarnations: familiar first names (Gaston, Claude,
Antoine) and intimate forms of address, reserved for those who are closely involved in
the subtly hierarchical interactions that the participants themselves call the court.
Those highly select members are the victims of a symbolic violence that they
themselves endure with a kind of rapture. They will only see that violence later, in
retrospect, on the other side of a crisis of some kind. Their belief in literature will last
until the final disillusion that, as in fairytales, suddenly breaks the spell. In the
meantime, their habitual belief inclines them to misrecognize thesocial domination that
the belief itself makes possible: The Committee members are disappointed because the
actual meeting does not bear any resemblance to what it should be, or what it would be
if its origin and symbolic pregnancy were within its network. An abyss suddenly opens
up between what was seen from a distance and the reality known close-up or, more
exactly, between the disillusioned experience of ordinary reality and the fetishist
passions of the illusio, attached to trifles like the inimitable and unforgettable inflections
of the voices of Jean Paulhan or Raymond Queneau, or the scarcely explicable
mysteries of the toast, a plain drink in any trivial place, which closes the meetings of
the Committee with the empowered prestige and mysteries of a literary Last Supper.
This is a double truth sometimes experienced in flashes, in the quasi-schizophrenic
unfolding of those who know and do not want to know. The agents are unceasingly
separated from the truth of the institution by the screen of a constantly maintained
individual and collective denial.
One discovers that the Committee does not actually fulfill its official task of
selecting texts, since those decisions belong to the director and his secretariat. Indeed,
according to enlightened insiders, a book to be published should not pass through the
committee. That discovery somehow does not include perception of the true usefulness
of the Committee as a bank of social capital and symbolic capital. Through those
capitals, the publishing house can exert pressure on the academies and literary awards,
the radio, television and newspapers. Several of the committee members are known for
their networks of literary connections; two of them are quoted in an article devoted to
the thirty most powerful people in publishing, and roughly half of them are in charge of
literary reviews and programs on the radio or in newspapers:
Consider the case of the publisher Grasset. Yves Berger, the literary director, exerts great
influence on the award of literary prizes. Jean-Paul Enthoven, the publishing director, is on the
editorial board of the general news magazine Le Point. Manuel Carcassone, the associate literary
director, writes for Le Point and the newspaper Le Figaro. Bernard-Henri Lvy, who directs the
Figures series and the journal La Rgle du jeu as well as being a literary advisor, writes a
regular column in Le Point and is omnipresent in the media. Hector Bianciotti is a member of the
Acadmie franaise. Dominique Fernandez and Franoise Nourissier, appointed literary
consultants, write in Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur respectively and are on the
committees for numerous literary prizes including the Mdicis for Fernandez and the Goncourt
for Nourissier, who is also a critic with Le Figaro Magazine and Le Point.

On the strictly literary level, this double game plays with itself. It adopts a form
that authorizes the double truth of an experience where the mythical vision (or ideal)
coexists with everything that obviously contradicts it. For example, directors like Labro,
Gisbert, Deniau or Jardin set about replacing the true great authors who for more than a
century created the prestige of the Nouvelle Revue Franaise (which became Gallimard)

4
and who develop loyalty in its readership even today. To understand this form, read the
letters, particularly the first, that a member of the Committee, Jean-Marie Laclavetine, a
writer working as a reader-selector, addresses to Jean Lahougue, a writer who has been
refused (although he had previously been published). They reveal the unspoken
expectancy, constitutive of the dogma or, worse, the literary doxa of the large
publishing house, that directs the acceptance or refusal: the solid composition of the
stories of the last century, the consistency of the principal characters, the fluidity
and the simplicity of the narration, the solitary act of creation escaping from the
determinations of the immediate situation determinations previously labelled as
socio-economic-historical, life made accessible, readable, palpable for the reader,
etc. These accumulated points justify the refusal of theory, associated with the
terrorism of the 1960s (as the publishers say in the interviews). They are not only
commercial. Or the refusals might be based on the critical reviews, not always
consciously conservative, that are used to justify one of the most extraordinary literary
restorations: a return to orthodoxy, like a right (orthe) belief (doxa) that is also of the
right.
In this article we shall describe the antagonism between the established
companies and the small new publishers who, in order to impose themselves, must
return to the same artistic belief and the strictest religion of art. The new publishers thus
help to maintain, in themselves and in others, the necessary illusion that the entire field
obeys the unwritten laws of pure and perfectly selfless art, that the illusory logic of the
market is not yet all-powerful in French publishing and that there are still, even at
Gallimard, people that suffer (Michel Deguys term) when they see what has
happened to Frances number one literary factory.
This most lucid of observers nevertheless misses the structural changes within
the familiar microcosm, which he at once exalts and privately hates. Deguy ends up
blaming people or poorly planned organisations (the secretariat in particular) for the
trends and evolutions that he cannot see. He knows well the people expected to be in
charge, but he cannot see that the changes are strictly speaking subjectless, occurring
independently of the people who occupy positions. As is always the case in the ordinary
experience of the ordinary world, the truth of the structure is glimpsed in flashes
without radical change in the pragmatic detection of the causes and reasons:

Perhaps the strategy is fatal, not for Gallimard or anybody in particular, but for the historical
period, or for whoever directs a publishing house from an original grandeur to a mutant image of
itself [...] and then to the monotony of the jammed traffic of journalistic influences [...], the
sliding of values [...] to the economic-cultural. [...] Perhaps the change was due to no great
decision to adapt publishing to an age that requires large print runs [...] and the downgrading,
then the pulping, of essays or poems.

Why does the structural explanation thus outlined ultimately play hardly any role? It is
not seen as explaining action, nor the comprehension of anyones behavior. Perhaps this
is because no one really looks for it in itself; no one methodically pushes to the end with
all the means of investigation available (such is the very definition of scientific
intention, very logically excluded from literary practice). The structural explanation is
thus unable to provide a systematic vision of the game conceived and constructed as
such. Research, on the other hand, can do this, enabling us to thwart the appearance of
fatality and to overcome the apparent fatalism.

5
The structure of the publishing field

There is a further form of fatalism that consists in attributing everything that happens in
the publishing world to broad economic forces (globalization), or to the manifestation
of these forces within the publishing world (giving two large groups and so on). In
order to avoid this, we must approach the publishing field as a relatively autonomous
social space. This means that it is able to retranslate in terms of its own logic all the
external forces, especially economic and political forces. To analyze the determinants of
these strategies, one must identify, among the companies with a nominal existence
(certified at least by the presence of a name on a cover, like Fayard, Laffont, etc.), those
that have sufficient autonomy to be the place of a proper publishing policy. In our
research, this selection was difficult due to the fact that the publishers are linked by a
whole network of complex relations: financial (through more or less important capital
shares), commercial (through distribution), and family. Another difficulty is the extreme
closure of this professional environment, which is highly concerned with protecting
itself from intrusion and interrogation. French publishers are little inclined to provide
strategic information, especially sales figures or the social profiles of the directors.
The population we have studied comprises 61 publishers of French or translated
literature who published between July 1995 and July 1996. Of these, 56 were active
elements and 5 were supplementary elements in our analysis of the multiple
correspondences. We did not seek to undertake an exhaustive census of French
publishers, or even of the publishers of literature, nor an analysis of a representative
sample of this population. Our aim was to extract the structure of the literary publishing
field. We thus excluded publishers of social sciences, although we are well aware that
the majority of the publishers of literature carry works of social science in their
catalogues. We also excluded publishers specializing in paperbacks (re-editions), art
books, practical books, dictionaries or encyclopedias and schoolbooks, as well as the
book clubs (France-Loisirs, Le Grand Livre du mois). Similarly excluded were the
publishers too small to affirm their existence in this field by exerting real effects (and
for which it is extremely difficult to collect the data necessary for statistical analysis).
The degree to which publishers can make their own decisions is difficult to
measure, particularly when the publisher is a subsidiary of a group. The degree of
independence can also vary in the course of time. This is why each subsidiary company
was examined in detail in order to identify those that have real editorial independence.
Since the reference year (1996), important financial operations have upset the
publishing world (the most important being the absorption of Havas by the Compagnie
gnrale des eaux in 1998) and a certain number of modifications have been made in
certain publishing units (for example, the creation of Hachette Littratures in 1997, the
absorption of LOlivier by Le Seuil, and multiple purchases of majority or minority
share holdings). The difficulty is increased by the fact that, the bigger and more
compartmentalized a publisher is, the more its institutional decision-making tends to
gain in extension and (apparent) complexity. A big publisher may thus function like a
subfield for clashes between agents of different weight (financial, commercial, literary),
each of which depends on the position of the decision-making apparatus within the
overall publishing field (and which can vary in the course of time according to changes
in this position and the type of work under discussion).
The selected publishing units are most often in independent companies or subsidiary companies
with their own capital. They may be public or private limited liability companies (for the small
or average units), or general partnerships, like Latts, limited partnerships, like Le Seuil,
workshop-bookshops, like Corti. Complexe and Zo are French-speaking foreign companies

6
distributing widely in France, and Noir sur Blanc is a Swiss company represented in France by a
bookshop and a small private limited liability company. Five units were processed separately in
the multiple-correspondence analysis: Harlequin (popular literature in translation), Jai lu (which
in 1995-1996 primarily published paperbacks but also played a contemporary role with some
novels in first edition), Presses de la Cit (a label of Groupe de la Cit that, after disappearing
temporarily, reappeared the following year within Presses-Solar-Belfond), Payot and Fixot.
Nouvelles ditions Robert Laffont, of which Bernard Fixot became the general manager in 1993,
appears in the analysis as both a legal and a financial group resulting from the merger of Fixot
and Laffont, as well as in the form of the Laffont brand, which was also separated and treated as
an active element. The Fixot label, which publishes only essays, was kept as an additional
element. Similarly, Rivages-Payot, resulting from the purchase of Rivages by Payot-France, was
treated as a group, the two companies being closely linked at the level of the distribution of
publishing assignments, capital and turnover. The brand Rivages was treated as an active
element and Payot was an additional element. The collections (LArpenteur for example) were
not isolated from the publishing unit.

The construction of the relevant characteristics

Sixteen variables, divided into five groups, were used to portray the space occupied by the
publishers.

Legal and financial status

The legal status variable has three values: public limited liability company (SA [n=24]), private
limited liability company (SARL [n=23]), and others (limited partnership, general partnership,
foreign company, etc. [n=9]).
The size of the company is an index combining capital stock, turnover and to a lesser extent the
number of directors. It divides the population into five categories, going from largest to smallest:
n = 14 ; n = 12 ; n = 12 ; n = 8 ; n = 6. The index could not be compiled for 4 companies because
of a lack of information.
Added to these two variables is the number of salaried staff (5 categories): from 1 to 3 salaried
staff (15); from 4 to 9 (14); from 10 to 40 (11); from 40 to 100 (6); from 100 to 400 (5). These
data could not be obtained for 5 companies.

Financial or commercial dependence with other publishers

The dependence variable concerns the acquisitions of other publishers in the capital of the
publisher. It has two values: there is a publisher among the shareholders (20); there is no
publisher among the shareholders (36).
A further variable concerned the presence of distributors in the publishers capital. This gave
seven categories: Harmonia Mundi (11); CDE (5); Le Seuil (11); Hachette (9); Interforum-Dil
(7); Others: Ulysse + Belles Lettres (11); Flammarion-Gallimard (2).

Market share
We were unable to measure commercial success from the average print-runs, since those figures
were not made available to us. We nevertheless tried to build an approximate index of
commercial success from the best-seller lists (from Lexpress and Livres-Hebdo). We noted the
rank occupied by the publisher in each list published during the reference year. The publisher in
first place receives 15 points, in second place, 14 points, and so on. To build the index, the
average of the two lists was taken. Five values were thus distinguished: 0 mentions (28); 1 to 11
(8); 14 to 100 (8); 100 to 300 (6); more than 400 (6). The companies commercial force can also
be grasped through their ability to obtain a national literary award for their authors. The variable
has published a prize-winner was built from six awards commonly considered the most
important (Goncourt, Femina, Mdicis, Interalli, Grand Prix du Roman de lAcadmie franaise
and Renaudot). There were two values: yes (13) and no (43). This variable was supplemented by
a complementary variable: has published an award jury member, with two values: yes (12) and
no (44).
The ability to obtain government assistance can also help reinforce the commercial strength of a
publisher. We thus built an index starting from the lists of the French literary publishers who,
from 1993 to 1996, benefited from a translation grant from the Ministry of Culture, and the list
of the French literary publishers who, from 1990 to 1997, were awarded translation grants from

7
 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The two lists gave the numbers of subsidized titles. From these
figures we created the variable government assistance in five categories (referring to the
thousands of francs involved): 0 (25); from 0.5 to 4 (16): from 4 to 8 (6); from 8 to 20 (5); more
than 30 (4).

Symbolic capital
The publishers symbolic capital can be evaluated using various indices: seniority, geographical
location, the prestige of the publishers list of published works (accumulated symbolic capital)
and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The variable date of foundation comprised four different time periods: 1708-1945 (19); 1946-
1975 (11); 1976-1989 (17); 1990-1995 (9).
The accumulated symbolic capital can be measured from an index based on the list of
contemporary French authors provided by Jurt, in which the authors are classified according to
the number of times where they are quoted in a corpus of 28 textbooks of literary history,
dictionaries or literary panoramas published after the Second World War. As a first step, we
collected the first 80 authors (those quoted the most often) then assigned a point to each
publisher by text published. The Jurt Index variable was then put into three categories: 3 (44),
100 to 350 (7) and more than 350 (5).
The Nobel Prize variable was built from the number of works the publisher produced by
French Nobel Prize winners since 1930, with two values: yes (10), no (46).
The geographical location of the publishers main office gave the following values: in the 5th, 6th
or 7th arrondissement in Paris (29), other arrondissements on the left bank of Paris (4), on the
right bank (9), in the provinces (9), or abroad (5).

Importance of foreign literature

We built a variable representing the percentage of translated titles compared to the total number
of published titles: from 1 to 5% (17), from 5 to 10% (12), from 10 to 25% (16) and more than
25% (19). The information could not be obtained for two publishers.
The variable published a foreign Nobel Prize, which concerns more financial capital than
symbolic capital, has two values: yes (14), no (42).
The dominant language translated reveals the position of the publisher in the sector. We built a
variable comprising the different languages in the sample of publishers. There are ten language
groups G 1 to G 10) from the 50 publishers providing the information. Based on statistics of
linguistic and geographical affinities, we drew up a table (entitled Is a language published?)
with six values: English and rare languages (5), English alone (9), English and European and
others (16), English and European (7), no English and others (9), no foreign languages (8), and
failure to reply (2).

Figure 1 shows the various publishers distributed, on the horizontal axis, from
largest and oldest to smallest and most recent. The largest are able to accumulate
financial and symbolic capital and can thus dominate the market, as demonstrated by
their position on the best-seller lists. They do this in various ways, including the
influence they exert on the national literary awards and the press. The smaller publishers
like Chambon, Climats or Zo have limited economic resources and very little
institutionally acknowledged symbolic capital. They practically never reach the best-
seller lists. Intermediate positions are occupied by publishers with access to dominant
positions like prize juries or national awards.
Ascendant hierarchical classification shows a first class of seven publishers: Le
Seuil, Gallimard, Flammarion, Grasset, Minuit, Albin Michel and Laffont. These
publishers are set apart from the others by their status as public limited liability
companies (except for Le Seuil), their foundation prior to 1946, staff numbers higher
than 100 (except for Grasset [n = 70] and Minuit [n = 11], high size index (equal to 5,
except for Grasset and Minuit), percentages of translated titles lower than 10; large
numbers of grants received for translations (except for Albin Michel [17], Flammarion
[26] and Laffont [15]), symbolic capital (higher than 350 for 5 of them, 0 for Albin

8
Michel and equal to 127 for Laffont), the fact that they have published at least one
French Nobel Prize winner, with exception of Laffont and Le Seuil, at least one foreign
Nobel Prize winner, and one winner of a national prize (Femina, Goncourt, etc.), as well
as a jury member of the one of these prizes, a high index of commercial success
(presence in the best-seller list) (all higher than 400, except Flammarion [200] and
Minuit [60]), the absence of other publishers among their shareholders (except for
Grasset and Laffont), the presence of translations from English and Western European
languages (except for Minuit), and their location in Paris, with of them in the 5th, 6th or
7th arrondissements.
There is then a group mainly comprising small private limited liability
companies, created after 1946, with reduced salaried staff (less than 10), with little
symbolic capital and limited commercial success. These include (in black) some very
small publishing houses (n=19): ge dhomme, Chambon, Champvallon, Climats,
Complexe, Des Femmes, Hamy, Nadeau, Noir sur Blanc, Ombre, Picquier, Jean-Michel
Place, Prsence africaine, Salvy, Le temps quil fait, Verdier, Virag, Zo and Zulma.
These are private limited liability companies located in the French provinces or abroad.
They are not on the best-seller list. As such, they do not win prizes and their publishing
strategies are marked particularly by their use of translations: half of them (n=9) do not
translate from English and none of them translates only from English. This group of
very small publishers are complemented by a class mostly made up of Parisian
publishers [in gray, blue and green] founded after 1946, with a salaried staff of more
than 10, of average importance, half private limited liability companies, and almost all
of them publishing translations from English.
These small innovative publishers play a very limited role in the overall
publishing game. They nevertheless provide the game with its basic justification and
spiritual point of honor. They thus become one of its principles of transformation.
Poor and powerless, the smaller publishers are somehow condemned to respect the
official standards professed and proclaimed by all. As the manager of a small publishing
house in the south of France put it, We cannot make an impact; we do not have the
means to do so. We are virtuous by obligation. She thereby exemplifies the general
view and the strategies of all the small publishers condemned to literary virtue. To
survive in a publishing environment that she hates, she tries to find authors who agree
with what she expects of literature. She is wary of readers reports, preferring to go
over a maximum number of manuscripts herself, always refusing to see the authors
before having read their texts, and declaring herself extremely punctilious about the
translations, etc. Referring to what to her seems the definition of her trade, she defines
her work negatively: I do not feel like a real publisher. She explains further: [My
contacts] are not people who have power. I do not publish work from journalists who
are going to write articles afterwards.
These small publishers are most often located outside Paris, mostly directed by
womenwho often have an extremely good knowledge of literature, and lack
institutional mechanisms (reading committees) for evaluating and selecting texts. Bear
in mind that such mechanisms are also places for accumulating social capital, sets of
useful connections for promoting authors and books. The small publishers are thus
absent (or excluded) from all the games of the leading publishing business. Those
games include the race for literary prizes, the use of publicity, the art of cultivating
social contacts and journalist accomplices (the small publishers usually do not have
press agents), and competition for the big international best-sellers. They publish fewer
English-language authors than the others, even though their catalogues often include a
particularly large percentage (more than a quarter) of translations. On the other hand,

9
and in this they are unmistakably virtuous, or make virtue a necessity, they use their
talents and courage to discoverer little-known authors who work in rare languages
(Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Hungarian, etc.), which are less expensive to
purchase but more interesting as literature. (We note, in parentheses, that the smaller
publishers can depend on the smaller booksellers who occupy a corresponding position
in the structure of the bookselling field: We depend almost more on the booksellers
than on the critics, said someone at Corti. The small bookstores defend the small
publishers and avant-garde authors with a devotion close to priesthood. Their network
of representatives provides a very commercially effective counterweight to the
commercial power and the advertising assets of the large publishing houses.)

An analysis of the publishing field should ideally take into account all the agents who, although
they do not have any official status, play roles as taste makers. These agents intervene in the
field through their power to consecrate and influence the circulation of books. They include
influential critics often attached to publishers (one of the recent traditions of the field is to
entrust critics with some authority for the management of a series or a role in the publishing
institutions, like the reading committees). These agents also comprise the personalities who are
highly influential in the social context, like those mentioned in a recent article in Magazine
littraire, a publication that, owned by Grasset, is particularly well positioned to describe the
networks of authority where Grasset is a centerpiece. We find a range of these agents at the right
hand of publishers like Yves Berger, Claude Cherki, Claude Durand, Olivier Cohen, Jean-Claude
Fasquelle, Francis Esmnard, Charles-Henri Flammarion, Bernard Fixot, Antoine Gallimard,
Jerome Lindon, Olivier Orban or Jean-Marc Roberts. They include taste-makers empowered by
appearances on television, as is the case of Guillaume Durand or Bernard Pivot. There are those
who move between journalism and publishing, like Jean-Paul Enthoven, in charge of publishing
at Grasset (as well as being adviser to the board of Le Point and director of the Biblio-Essais
series at Livre de Poche), or Franz-Olivier Gisbert (director of two newspapers, Le Figaro and
Le Figaro Magazine, biographer of Franois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, novelist and, for the
past year, presenter of a literary program), or Bernard-Henri Lvy (loyal to Jean-Claude
Fasquelle, CEO of Grasset and director of various magazines like Le Magazine littraire), or
Pierre Nora (in charge of a collection at Gallimard and director of Dbat), Angelo Rinaldi and,
last but by no means least, Phillipe Sollers (celebrity of the publishing world).

In short, there is a confrontation between the small and the large publishers. This
is most clearly seen in total volumes of capital. The large older companies, whose
paradigm is Gallimard, accumulate capital of all kinds (economic, commercial and
symbolic). The small recent companies are in the initial phase of accumulation and have
almost no capital of any kind, even if they gain a certain amount of symbolic capital
from the way they are seen as discoverers by avant-garde critics and writers,
enlightened booksellers and informed readers. This incipient symbolic capital is almost
impossible to identify through the available sociological indicators. It accumulates very
slowly, building up the publishers long-term symbolic value or fonds, much of which
an accountant would quantify as goodwill, the publishers true wealth. This fonds
particularly depends on the long-published writers, associated with signs of specific
consecration like the Nobel Prize or status as a classic, gained through recognition in
the universities. This can only occur after a process of conversion is carried out by the
writers themselves and their entourage of discoverers. As such, the process requires
considerable time.
The second axis (Figures 1 and 2) positions the publishing houses according to
the structure of their capital, i.e. according to relative weights of the financial and
symbolic capital due to their activity in the present or recent past (as opposed to the
capital accumulated over the years). On this second axis, the publishers are distributed
according to the degree and the form of their dependence on other publishers, with
respect to both share holdings and book distribution. The independent publishers, large

10
or small, are thus separated from the subsidiary companies of large groups that depend
on other authorities or on organizations for the distribution of their publications. We
find that the old mid-sized publishing houses, generally dependent, have economic
capital that far exceeds their current symbolic capital (even if they have vestiges of a
great past). Resolutely oriented toward more or less exclusively commercial ends, they
contrast on the one hand with the large publishers consecrated in all respects, and on the
other with the small powerless publishers. Among them, the eagle-eyed discoverers
are only able to make out those that, in the long term, will move toward literature with
strong symbolic capitalassociated, more or less quickly, with the commercial capital
that the symbolic capital ends up providing, in particular when the education system
enters the gameand those happy enough to grow larger economically, through
strategies that are more or less openly commercial.
These publishers are mostly subsidiary companies of large groups (they often
have a publisher among their shareholders). They are still well positioned from the
economic capital point of view. However, the weakness of their symbolic capital means
that their capital structure is asymmetrical (as opposed to the companies located at the
two ends of the first axis, which are homogeneous from the point of view of the two
types of capital). The distribution into four groups reveals a class made up of Actes Sud,
Belfond, Calmann-Lvy, De Fallois, Denol, Fayard, Latts, Plon, POL, Rivages, and
Stock. These are essentially subsidiary companies with the status of public limited
liability companies founded before 1990, with 10 to 100 salaried staff, of average size
and with considerable success with best-sellers. This class corresponds closely enough
to the group of companies located at the bottom of the diagram. Encumbered with a
prestigious past, they are, as an expert put it, the soft belly of the publishing field.
They may have, as another expert said, beautiful remainders. For example, Plon has
its Terre humaine and Feux croiss collections, offering assortments of old
prestigious foreign literature. Yet these publishers produce either literature without
originality or commercial literature that only allodoxia could see as innovative.
On the third axis, at one end we find mainly the publishers who publish no or
very few translations (mostly from small rare languages) and at the other are those that,
more subject to the constraints of the market, translate a great deal (especially from
English), producing commercial literature with more or less guaranteed success (Figures
3 and 4).

Occupying and taking positions

The publishers institutional decision-making mechanisms seem to have only limited

independence from the structural constraints exerted by the field. One might suspect
that the publishing strategies (the taking of positions) result from the positions actually
occupied in the field. Publishing houses that occupy positions close to each other do
indeed have rather similar policies (with regard to translations for example). They may
even tend toward genuine solidarity, at least at the dominated end of the field.
Nonetheless, these constraints are mediated by the dispositions of the various agents.
The constraints orient the agents perceptions of opportunities in the field as a whole
and in their position in particular; they guide their representations of the possibilities
open to them and of their room to maneuver within the structure of objective
probabilities.
We would have liked to include the distinctive properties of the human
publishers themselves among the system of explanatory factors. These would take in

11
objective characteristics such as social origin, educational capital and social trajectory,
as well as less objective features like ethical dispositions and specific literary,
commercial and technical competencies. This is all information that, as many observers
realize, is protected by a barrier of particularly formidable secrecy. Documentary
analysis and ethnographic investigation nevertheless show a rough correspondence
between the characteristics of the publishers as people and the features of their
publishing houses. The logic behind this correspondence is simple. The small houses
are more likely to be run by publishers who are younger and female, of relatively high
social origin, endowed with good knowledge of literature, and highly dedicated to their
work, both intellectually and emotionally. The large publishing houses are more likely
to be in the hands of heirs or technicians, either trained on the job or legitimated by the
occasional academic degree. The new publishing houses are more likely to have been
established by those currently running them, thus occupying positions created in their
own image. In the case of the established publishers, on the other hand, the position will
most often produce its occupant, either by way of inheritance (there are many heirs in
the professionsons, daughters, nephews or nieces) or by inviting in carefully selected
outsiders. Either way, the publishing house tends to have a director in its image.
A further principle of differentiation is the specific competence that is the
condition for success or failure in the profession. A book is an object with both
economic and symbolic sides; it is at the same time product and signification.
Publishers are thus double characters who should know how to reconcile art and
money, the love of literature and the quest for profit. Their strategies must be located
somewhere between realistic or cynical submittal to commercial considerations, and
heroic or foolish indifference to financial needs. The competence of the publisherand
of all those who are involved with books, in any roleis made up of two antagonistic
parts plus the ability to harmonious those parts. On the one hand, they have the literary
abilities of a person who can read, on the other, the technical-commercial abilities of a
person who can count. The ideal publisher would be both an inspired speculator,
placing bets at the highest risk, and a stringent accountant, parsimoniously counting the
results. In reality, publishers lean toward one pole or another, in accordance with their
position in the structure of the field and the trajectory that has led them there. They are a
little like art dealers, working in the anti-commercial commerce of pure art. They
attempt a successful combination of feelings as sociologically incompatible as water
and fire: the pure love of art and the mercenary love of money. All the forms of double
conscience and double personality are put into action, by one side or the other, or by
one and the same side but at different times. The strategies run from apparent financial
madness, used as an alibi for the most mercantile policy, through to submittal to the
needs of the market and the mercenary morals of the pure publisher, always inclined
to legitimize financial engagements by evoking the future literary audacity that they are
supposed to make possible.
In one sense, it is at the outset, in the necessarily heroic beginnings, that the
choice is easiest, because there are not many choices to make. As we have seen one
publisher claim, you are virtuous by obligation. This is clearly seen in translations of
foreign works. According to a literary agent,

The books that are cheap for the general public to buy are very expensive for
publishers to buy [when it comes to the translation rights] because the whole
world reads them, because they are world successes. On the other hand, there are
good novels or very good authors who, potentially, do not have high projected
sales but are high quality. Those books are often taken on by small publishers

12
 who accept them because of their quality. [] The financial, economic,
commercial side of the thing is not the first element considered. [] Even if
they wanted toI believe this is not their initial desire, but even if they
wanted to, they would not have enough money to acquire the rights to John
Grisham, Stephen King or people like that; they are not in that race because they
do not have the means to enter it. Therefore, often, they fall back on quality
books.

As the publisher says, even if they wanted to, they could not. In any event, they do not
want to, because they would not be in the position that they occupy, and where they
have been put, if they did not have the resources necessary to occupy it, the virtues
necessary to accept the needs of the position. The same observer notes that it is often
women [Viviane Hamy, Jolle Losfield or Jacqueline Chambon] who have this kind of
publishing house, who are the true publishers.
Things are also relatively simple at the other end of the spectrum, for the purely
and simply commercial publishers. Todays symbol of this position would be Bernard
Fixot, CEO of Nouvelles ditions Robert Laffont-Fixot-Seghers, a subsidiary of Groupe
de la Cit. He is not at all ashamed of his trade as a publisher, as he puts it (using the
English term), and he needs no words to declare the economic truth of his occupation.
His origins lie miles away from culture and literature. He reached the top of a group of
companies by rising up through all the levels in the more commercial side (he was a
storekeeper at Gallimard, salesman at Hachette, sales representative at Garnier, sales
manager at Gallimard, before founding his own company). He is poorly integrated into
the publishing world (he left the 6th arrondissement for the right bank of the Seine, a
business area), and other publishers look down on him or treat him like a reject. He is
inclined to a kind of literary populism, crossbred with anti-intellectualism. He seeks to
address (with a certain sincerity) the largest public possible; his management techniques
are those he would employ in any business whatsoever, using all available means to
obtain maximum benefits (marketing, publicity, low price, etc.). He is nevertheless
obliged to make some concessions to the values of the publishing world. He confesses
interest in the less commercial company Julliard, annexed in 1995, particularly its
Pavillons series, and in then creating, to cover the costs, two new series (Bleu noir
and Rideau rouge). He has produced numerous commercial scoops such as the
publication of shocking testimonials (stories of abduction, rape, incest, transsexuals,
etc.), as well as airport novels and pulp fiction able to bring in large profits both by
direct sale and through the selling of rights abroad. He takes part in the race for the big
international best-sellers.
This first-generation publisher, formed on the job, a salesman without soul,
has a perfect command of the commercial aspect of the publishing company. He has
every right to see himself as a professional. Yet he cannot help but appear cut off from
the important literary dimension of this particular kind of publishing. From the point of
view of an old school literary agent, he is definitely one of
[] those amateurs. There is a group of publishers, owners of companies, that I would say,
without being too malicious, are almost illiterate. They are publishers who cannot read, which is
our basic stock in trade, it seems to me. On the other hand, they can count [...]. I struggle to see
publishing passing to the hands of people who [...]do not really like books, who could just as
well have been owners of a pharmaceutical company.

13
The extreme limit is reached when, in this system that comes from the United States,
the publishing houses are often in the hands of groups that have nothing to do with
publishing, i.e. banks, oil companies, electricity companies.
Much the same is said of the heirs. Because of the development of their
publishing house and of the publishing field as a whole, they find themselves engaged
in strategies very close to those of the late-comers entirely devoid of literary
education. In fact, although the risks are infinitely less for a large publisher than for a
small one, the commercial decisions are now imposed by financial technicians,
marketing specialists and accountants. This happens even within the old publishing
houses like Gallimard, which are obliged to enter the race for money. As we were told,
With its best-sellers, Gallimardhow to say it?has benefited well from its status as
the Queen Victoria of French publishing. They were the first, the largest, the most
internationally known for a very long time. [...] To be able, today, to follow the
movement, to always be in the leading group, [...] they also need to publish things that
sell well and so it has turned into something ridiculously popular.
One might try to explain the style of a publishing house in terms of the
disposition or habitus of the publisher and the constraints found in the position of the
company as shown in its catalogue. This involves modelling, as one would do for a
person, a writer or artist for example, the formula generating the available choices.
Thus, Gallimard has a declining noble behavior pattern that nevertheless seeks to
maintain its position by making the adaptations and adjustments necessary in order to
compete in the race for international best-sellers. It uses clever strategies involving a
moderate modernization that enables it, like many dominant players, to reap the benefits
of one choice and of its opposite at the same time. This is associated with boldness and
occasional alibis in the form of discoveries drawn from small language fields, along
with fashionable management of the existing catalogue. The double game runs through
all the paperback collections, for adults or young people, as well as the new editions,
accompanied by periodical rejuvenation generally limited to a new front cover.
The best index of the correspondence between the structure of the positions and
the structure of the strategies (position-takings) is undoubtedly the fact that an increase
in the literary capital of a publishing house almost inevitably goes hand-in-hand with
greater priority being accorded to commercial aims and criteria. The people in charge
can do little more than delay destiny by slowing down the movement toward the
commercial pole. The strategies of a publisher like Minuit, avant-garde but in the
process of consecration, stand out clearly when one places them within the context of
the entire publishing field. A form of resistance based on ascetic aristocratism has
allowed Minuit to pull through, in the absence of initial success and despite later
success. That resistance allows it to be seen as free of the compromises of the
publishing economy. It stands out against the strategies of the small avant-garde
publishing houses that have recently entered the field, but also against the strategies of
well established large publishers. For example, it has little to do with Gallimard, the
large old publishing house that, long canonized, now canonizes academic authors
perpetuating the most traditional literary forms, or young authors spontaneously
conforming to old models or so uninformed of literary changes that they attach an idea
of avant-gardism to the old publishing house. The same consecration is given to several
of the early discoveries (notably Samuel Beckett and Claude Simon in the case of
Gallimard) and to the group of authors constituting the nouveau roman. This is done as
much through the use of the same front cover as through the symbolic promotion led by
Alain Robbe-Grillet,which can only reinforce the symbolic capital of the publisher
itself. It also increases Gallimards power of attraction over the most educated fraction

14
of the public (as the sales curves demonstrate). Consecration also attracts potential new
authors, who can thus continue the pattern and, thanks to the dispositions of this
particular public, obtain relative success. Once full collective recognition is obtained,
some of the new authors can benefit from the indulgence of the publishing house, which
paradoxically falls victim to its desire to escape from social aging. These authors are
consecrated even when they are not completely representative of the publishers original
orientation or when, more subtly, they produce attenuated or muted alternatives to the
original ruptures (and are sometimes crowned, for this reason, with the more trivial
national awards). One wonders whether this once small publishing house, now at the
peak of consecration, will be able to persevere with its combination of extreme audacity
and extreme reserve. This combination has so far enabled it to remain in the class of
small companies as far as the economic indicators are concerned (a very limited number
of salaried staff, an ostentatious exclusion of marketing and publicity, a relatively low
number of titles published, a refusal of translations and of the race for foreign best-
sellers), at the same time as it belongs to the category of the largest publishers according
to all the other indicators, and even, little by little, in the successful sales figures that
consecration ensures for even its riskiest bets.

The dynamic of the field and new production trends

The dynamic of this field cannot be understood in terms of the separate parallel
evolutions of individual publishing houses, which all run in the convenient form of the
biological metaphor: birth, youth, maturity and death. It finds its principle in the
structure of the field. The new start-ups create the movement. Thanks to their very
existence and the competition that ensues from their self-sacrifice (or self-exploitation),
the small publishers shake the literary order out of its immobility. The new publishers
return to the sources of literary faith, using ascetic denial (symbolized, for example, in
plain covers, without illustrations) of the entire commercial dimension of literary
production, which is a matter of publicity or marketing. These new players push the old
avant-garde publishers toward the past. Now consecrated or in the process of
consecration, the older players are identified as outdated, of lower status, temporarily or
definitively excluded from the game, or as traditional and thus outside the game, no
more than relics.
This is why, in the space-time of this field, the various synchronic positions
correspond to different moments in diachronic trajectories (which the spatial
representation artificially synchronizes). New entrants are still relatively unformed. It is
not easy to tell, on the basis of the objective evidence available, if they are doomed to
disappear quickly or if they will survive and be directed toward commercial success or
literary consecration. Literary consecration may be associated with commercial success
or not. One can nevertheless imagine a bright commercial future for a company like
Carrire that, held by the heiress of a large commercial publishing house, has published
the best-seller of all best-sellers, Paulo Coelho, translated from Brazilian Portuguese.
On the other hand, the future is likely to be difficult, at least temporarily, for discoverers
like Ibolya Virag.
As numerous disappearances attest each year, survival is promised only to those that, according
to the fundamental law of the field, can combine literary competence with economic realism.
Some very small publishers, apparently extremely specialized, subtly diversify strategies that
allow them control of a niche where competition is weak (as is the case of all the language areas
more or less neglected by the large publishers), thus escaping the limitations related to extreme
specialization. A publisher like Philippe Picquier, specialized in the languages of the Far East

15
 (Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese), thus tries to accompany the audacity of an exploratory
book with the publication of works and authors who bring him success without leaving his
speciality: the classics of Chinese and Japanese erotism, detective novels, Chinese and Japanese
classics, and books consecrated by film adaptations.

The future of small start-up companies and the present orientations of their
choices often leave observers (and critics) completely perplexed. This is not only
because of the uncertainties inherent in any risky strategy of discovery. It is also
because the book, as an object ambiguously both economic and symbolic, lends itself to
cultural allodoxiaa misunderstanding of the identity and symbolic status of a cultural
object, resulting in mistaking the fake or the imitation for the authentic. Writers
themselves are sometimes deceived by a publishers old image of (the Gallimard of
Georges Lambrichs and the Le Chemin collection for example), and thus succumb to
allodoxia. Also at risk are critics, often victims of hysteresis, and the publishers
themselves, who think they recognize the signs of a great avant-garde work that is no
more than an imitation.
This illusion is all the more probable today now that the players in the literary
game, notably the authors and publishers, are informed of the adventures of the avant-
gardes. The most cunning writers may give the illusion of challenging censures by
miming the transgressions of great heresiarchs of the past, presenting small erotic
sacrilege without consequence. Similarly, certain publishers know the field well enough
to play the double game, for themselves as much as for others, producing simulations or
images of avant-gardism. They are assured of finding the complicity, and consequently
the recognition, of publishers, critics and fans who are all the more inclined to allodoxia
since, trained in the tradition of modernity, they want to act like discoverers able to
avoid the errors of past conservatisms.
Certain new publishers may thus try to reconcile strategies that would be
irreconcilable in more autonomous state of the literary field,. These strategies can
include investment, necessarily long-term, in authors of long duration, alongside the
search for commercial success in very short-term literary productions. The strategies are
based on modernized marketing techniques, predicated on methodical exploitation of
allodoxia. They are undertaken in partnership with certain journalists who agree, in the
name of generational solidarity, to consider literary struggles according to the highly
uncertain category of generation, where age is not a sign of knowledge but a weapon
aimed at lowering the status of older writers. Those in charge of young publishing
houses (or the young branches of the old commercial publishers) seek to offer
young readers, developed and valued as such, young and trendy authors who
break with the esoteric exercises of the preceding generation. The comments
surrounding these upsetting new literary-commercial movements play an important
role in a publishing house like Jai lu, a subsidiary of Flammarion. Its literary director,
Marion Mazauric, has made efforts to gather together, for the new 20 to 30 year-old
public, mostly readers of paperbacks, a series of low-priced works by authors scattered
among various publishers (authors also promoted by Raphal Sorin, literary critic at
LExpress and editor at Flammarion, notably through the literary journal
Perpendiculaire): The operation has effects that are at the very least ambiguous
because, thirty years after May 1968, they use the same libertarian slogansthe young
rebels of our age are quite adept at dialectical marketing. This makes the catalogues
more fragile. Fashionable ides reues thus circulate from trendy writers to urbane
journalists and modernistic publishers, and may end up at Olivier or Fayard or Fixot, or
indeed ditions POL or Flammarion or Albin Michel. The young rebels celebrate the
return to the healthy traditions of stories (known in the new popular language as le story

16
telling, in English) and to real life (the novelists look at what surrounds them, says
one, and another notes that they open their books more widely to the reality of today).
This interest in the young French novelists (and in particularthis could not be
inventedfor the new school of novelists issuing from youth literature) naturally ties
in with interest in young American literature (the Americans, the English, tell
stories), which is supposed to bring, according to an old stereotype, all that French
literature (abstract, stuffy, formal and closed) is unable to offer, and in particular
rebellion, violence and sex. The promoters of this decisive philoneism syncretically
associate the youth of the authors with the youth of the public and even with the youth
(or rejuvenation) of the publishing personnel. They thus blur the border between literary
creation and promotional marketing; they see the immediate success of first novels or
novice authors as the most indisputable attestation of their instinct as discoverers of a
new species of literature (more modern, less doctrinaire, in a word younger, but also
less elitist). This literature is more accessible than the experimental writing of the
1960s. And it is decisively more in tune with the inseparably literary and commercial
interests of the junior literary managers, whose libertarian tones attempt to impose a
new deal on the publishing market.

LOlivier is undoubtedly the most typical publishing house of this modernism, which plays
youth against establishmentas did Julliard in the mid1950s, when it opposed the new arrivals,
young women like Franoise Sagan and Minou Drouet, to the ageing pontiffs at Gallimard.
LOlivier knows how to make the most of modern forms of public relations, now essential in the
publishing profession. About half its French authors are journalists; some are very influential in
newspapers or weekly magazines and prize juries. The fruits are seen in abundant media
coverage and the many awards (including two Femina prizes) given to its publications. Its
catalogue is almost exclusively made up of works that have been successful in the United States.
Its literary taste tends toward, in the words of one small avant-garde publisher, a literature that
speaks about the city, which is quite violent, quite brutal and also quite simple, and which is
supposed to make a young public excited, eager for forbidden pleasures.

For a large international literary agent, what makes these works young, or in
affinity with youth, is perhaps a certain simplicity in their literary form, in their
structure and their style:

More and more books, in England as well as in France, are written, I dont know if it is for a
young public, with a young kind of language, a type of language that is almost spoken. Often it is
very manufactured. Marie Darrieussecq in Truismes for example [...]. It is obviously a book that
has been worked on, but it is written in a kind of young style, modern, a language [...] that seems
simple and accessible to any reader [...]. For people who read little or not at all, and who did not
have the chance to study or have a literary education, this nevertheless seems like a book, a real
book, and for those that are a little more accustomed to reading, it is not something that is too
primitive or completely unacceptable.

These commercial events are converted into literary events. The paradigm of
success here would be Michel Houellebecq, who achieved fame by being politically
incorrect in public debates. Even in their ambiguity, such events constitute one of the
most significant and most subtly masked demonstrations of a major transformation of
the publishing field. The events are staged by a new category of economic-literary
agents. Strongly aware of the former more independent state of the literary field, the
agents are able to mime avant-garde models, be it in a sincere or cynical way, even
though the field is now characterized by the pressure of economic constraints and the
attraction of the commercial pole.
Jean-Yves Mollier has shown that between 1880 and 1920 the French publishing
industry went from the model of the small family company to the large quasi-industrial

17
company. Yet those changes had neither the scope nor the brutality of the structural
disruptions caused, some twenty years ago, by the unwavering financial logic that
assaulted the publishers relatively protected world (others would say antiquated). Since
Jimmy Goldsmiths public takeover of Presses de la Cit in 1986 (resold a few months
later just like any other company listed on the stock exchange), the mergers and
takeovers followed one another. They have involved everything from pure and simple
repurchase to the acquisition of capital, not to mention all the controlling interests
associated with the participation in manufacturing or distribution. This has almost
always resulted in an abandonment of a strictly literary editorial policy and the adoption
of a purely commercial logic. For example, Actes Sud no longer has a true translation
policy, apart from a few series like Sindbad, which was previously a small publishing
house specializing in Arab literature. Actes Sud itself blends militant investment in a
Korean series and one-off commitments caused by conjunctural financing (such as four
Finnish writers published in quick succession in 1995 thanks to Finnish funding for the
translations). Or again, Losfeld and Salvy were taken over by Hachette, which keeps the
brand but excludes the founder and his editorial policy. One fears that the directors of
La Dcouverte, in spite of the promises made to them, might meet a similar fate.
Those in charge of the large groups all say they give considerable freedom to
their subsidiary companies. Bernard Fixot says he allows Julliard or the Pavillons
series to publish good books, without worrying too much about profits. Having learned
the lesson of Robert Laffont, his intellectual guide, he repeats that You have to know
how to lose money. However, the Pavillons series publishes no more than ten titles a
year, and Julliard twenty-five. As they yield to fundamental commercial pressures,
sacrificing experimental publishing in favor of the best-seller, the grand old publishers
have been converted to the laws of the market. True, they still find a place for the job of
the discoverer, thanks to the slightly perverse homage that the sales managers pay to the
official virtue of the trade. This happens in any traditional series or semi-independent
external unit: Le Promeneur at Gallimard, Fiction et Compagnie at Seuil, Seghers
at Laffont, Payot romans at Payot, Bibliothque amricaine at Mercure de France,
the Revue de littrature gnrale at POL, etc. Nevertheless, the merging of publishing
companies has been broadly accompanied by a reduction in the number and literary
independence of the decision makers. The financial policy-makers are generally in
charge of managing both long-cycle and short-cycle works, and they are not inclined to
support long-term investments in an avant-garde. The result, as Jean-Marie Bouvaist
notes, is the progressive triumph of relatively non-literary products that are widely
distributed, giving rise to a kind of commercial universal, diametrically opposed, both
in social genesis and literary quality, to the literary universal created, in the long run,
through international exchange.
Another sign of this development is the fact that the book trade itself accounts
for no more than about 25% of the sales turnover of the two largest groups. The new
distribution mechanisms have helped make the more commercial sector of the
profession dependent on the requirements of world trade. This means following the
model imposed on book production on the other side of the Atlantic: the integration of
most publishers into powerful oligopolistic groups with subsidiary companies directed
by managers who, originally from the media or financial world, are not highly qualified
in literary matters and impose the entertainment model upon publishing. The French
publishing field has undergone the imposition of this American model, albeit a little
later than other European countries. An increasing share of the policy-makers at the
various publishing houses do not belong to the publishing milieuxnot in terms of their
training, nor their professional interests.

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 To take only a few examples from the large groups, Jean-Luc Lagardre, CEO of Matra, a group
in which books only account for 13% of sales and that has Fayard, Latts, Stock, Harlequin, etc.
as subsidiary companies, has a degree in electrical engineering; Pierre Dauzier, CEO of Groupe
de la Cit, is a graduate of the ESSEC Business School; Serge Eyrolles, CEO of Eyrolles,
director of ditions dOrganisation, chairman of the French Publishers Association, has a degree
in public engineering and, after many visits to the United States, is completely won over to the
American model; Jean-Marie Messier, president of the Compagnie gnrale des eaux, which
owns 30% of Havas and applies an audiovisual and multimedia strategy, graduated from a
polytechnic.

The antagonistic functions of translation

Policies regarding foreign literature tend to extend what is observed in the strategies for
the publication of French writers. On the one hand we find the small publishers mostly
acting as discoverers, investing their cultural and linguistic skills in the search for avant-
garde works written in the rare languages of small countries. On the other, the large
commercial publishers, alerted by scouts on the lookout for all (commercially) useful
information, publish the international best-sellers, generally translated from English.
They purchse these titles at great cost, bidding for rights of first refusal and basing their
decisions on commercial reputation (sales figures) rather than on content. The large
companies thus see foreign literature as one of the most profitable avenues for financial
investment. At the same time, albeit for different economic reasons, the small publishers
see translations as one of the surest means of literary resistance against the invasion of
commercial literature, mainly from English.
At the more literary end we find imports of texts by authors not yet well-known,
with low-cost rights, originally from small countries with dominated or minority
literatures (or from the most experimental fraction of English-language literatures).
These imports allow money to be made with little economic investment. As noted by an
observer, the costs are much lower than those involved in compiling a catalogue of
equally known French authors. The risks are also lower, despite the unsure shifts
between national traditions. This is because a book usually becomes a candidate for
translation only when it has been successful in its own country.

The director of a small avant-garde publishing house founded in 1987 believes that to publish
foreign literature is to escape from the dangers of small publishing. Taking care not to follow
the English-language style too much, she invested in a series of young Catalan authors, along
with Austrians (such as Elfriede Jelinek) and Irish and Scottish writersas if, beyond the logics
of cost, there were some affinity between a small subversive publisher and writers from
linguistic minorities. Very conscious of that the high-risk choices are imposed by her position,
she notes that she is obliged to take on the books she wants very early in the game because if it
is already successful, the book is already too expensive [for her]. But she also notes she can
have quality authors like Elfriede Jelinek because they had been refused by the publishers in
Paris. One of her neighbors in the publishing space speaks about the same thing: I have to be
astute: I try to locate authors at the time they emerge, and in a country whose language I know
well. Because otherwise... I do not want to get involved with the Americans. [...] This is the
imposed rule: you are obliged to find things that are just in the process of being born, because it
is impossible buy well-known authors. The small publishers are thus used as pilot fish for the
more fortunate publishers, and they are constantly threatened with losing their discoveries (like
Maurice Nadeau and Jacqueline Chambon today).

When one refuses to treat translation as a simple commercial investment, one

also refuses the marketing strategies of the large publishing houses. Corti, for example,
considers the use of external scouts as surrender of principles: That does not concern
us at all. [...] I believe the people in the best position to know the good writers and the

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works that should be translated are the translators. [...] We use agencies when it comes
to buying the rights, but not otherwise. The initiative is often given to the translator.
However, publishers frequently have a close working relationship with the works and
authors of a national language or tradition. This is the case of Catalan for Jacqueline
Chambon, Brazilian for Anne-Marie Mtaili, Hungarian for Ibolya Virag, or Far-
Eastern languages for Picquier.
Jacqueline Chambon says the personal commitment of certain publishers is
much closer in nature to the discoverer than to the sales manager: I realized that
there was a very interesting literature [...], an independent Catalan literature, in the
Catalan language, in Catalonia. Notably with people like Josep Pla who, wrote a
magnificent text that is a little like his diary. It is a masterpiece, very beautiful... I
discovered there was Trabal, in the 1930s, and that if there were young authors now, it
is because of what happened before them [...]. There is a kind of Catalan humor which
is very very amusing, not at all mechanical like English humor. [...] Moreover, they are
the type of people I like in real life. They are not at all literary people, at least not in the
old tradition of the French homme de lettres. A French writer is supposed to belong to
an inner circle, he more or less aims for the Academy or for awards at the very least. He
is a personality. But he does not regard himself as an artist. For him, writing is almost a
trade. Whereas in countries like Germany, a writer is like a painter, he is an artist. And
it is similar for the Catalans. They are not at all hommes de lettres. Pamis, to earn his
keep, is a football journalist for the Spanish national newspaper El Pas. [...] I feel part
of that world. There is no inner esoteric network... The Catalans are involved in
television, radio. For example, they had a very very funny program, a kind of Guignols
on the radio [...]. I enjoy seeing these people; they have a kind of worldly intelligence.
This point of view finds find many equivalents in our interviews with other
publishers from the same familyand also among many booksellers. It gives an idea
of this very special way, widespread throughout the book trades (from the author to
the sub-editor), of living the things of literature, a type of total investment, self-
justifying, containing its own reward, quite apart from any external utility. Jacqueline
Chambon expresses in a nutshell the opposition between the world of literature and the
universe of scouts, of agents and money, of advance payments and preemptive offers.
She simply reminds us what should be an elementary requirement of the publishing
trade: to read in the first person: The readers reports leave me cold, because, for me,
what a book is about is irrelevant; what counts is the way it is written, and a readers
report alone cannot tell me that.
At the commercial pole the translator is often reduced to a simple adapter of a
foreign product (one speaks of mettre en traduction, putting the work through the
translation process). Translation is a pre-eminently financial investment that always
aims, openly or not, at the production of best-sellers. The director of a series of foreign
literature at a large publishing house identifies his best foreign bread-winners as great
womens novels, escape novels, especially those written in English. The more one
approaches this pole, the more the publishers produce lucrative translations, resorting to
the selection and purchasing processes of international speculation, massively
introduced by scouts or American literary agents. One informant says that, even in
France, the Americans are the masters. Some large publishers are very much oriented
towards the production of best-sellers in translation. Albin Michel, for example, from a
total of 35 authors and 36 translated titles published in 1995, had 8 best-sellers,
including two by Mary Higgins Clark, uncontested queen of the genre, often adapted to
film. These publishers account for a very significant part of the importation of English-
language literature (which represents nearly 65% of the total of the translations put out

20
by the publishers we studied: 36.7% American and 26.5% English). As the foreign-
literature director of a large commercial publishing house explains, American authors
have an agent. Each morning the agent receives monstrous piles of manuscripts, and if
they are not things he has commissioned himself or do not seem to be immediately
extraordinary, they are instantly rejected as unsolicited. I mean that to get accepted
by an agent, a text must have extraordinary qualities. The financial force with which
the products are launched on the international market is such that the French agents are
often made to buy even against their own judgment.
The books themselves are built around universals with an existential-sentimental
common denominator, which are also used as themes for telenovelas and soap operas.
They are generally written by women, they have women as the target audience, and the
force of their commercial seduction is epitomized by the French cover of Jacqueline
Mitchards novel The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen as the first book in Oprah
Winfreys Book Club and published in French by Calmann-Lvy in 1998. The front
cover carries an irresistible recommendation by Mary Higgins Clark (herself a grand
master of the manufacture of international best-sellers): A superb story that touches the
heart: I loved it!. On the back cover we find the relentless argument of commercial
success justifying commercial success: 3,500,000 readers around the world.
The rights are higher, the competition more unbridled, for the supposedly good
investments. Specialized personnel are also more essential (one or more people in
charge of transfer and purchase of rights, scouts in several countries, etc.). In our
interviews, publishers stress the purchase of the titles rather than the problems of
translation or the potential demand of the French market. A literary director can try to
justify his choices as being forced by a democratic concern to respond to what he
expects are the expectancies of the French public. On the other hand, the small
publisher [...] will publish only what pleases him, without being concerned with what
others are looking for, although sometimes I decide to publish a book, even if I do not
agree with it, with its basis, its literary plan, etc., something that is not even my cup of
tea. I say: It is not my cup of tea, but I know it is the cup of tea of so-and-so in the
press, for example, or so-and-so in the public. I think a non-specialist publisher must
have sufficient eclecticism to go beyond their own tastes, their own choices. Because if
you want, there are two types of publisher: there is the militant publisher who defends a
certain idea of literaturehardly my case, of course, because one has many things to
defend, but there is also the generalist publisher who does not think solely of giving
pleasure to himself, but who also tries to give pleasure to others.
These same people, who repeat that the publishing house primarily imports (English-language) texts
already selected by one or more foreign publishers, speak about their purchases in terms of discovery,
passion or innovation. We also endeavour to discover new talents to add to this series [Spcial
Suspense at Albin Michel] which is a collection that Francis Esmnard [the current CEO] created twenty
years ago while launching the first Mary Higgins Clark that was a very big success, and especially by
innovating, then using this juggling act to have the illustrated cover under the white jacket, which is the
opposite of what is usually done. The same thing is said for the Grandes Traductions series, published
by the same publishing house: the person in charge speaks about the discovery of new talents in various
countries, etc. Another example, a literary director at Plon, talks about making discoveries while
meeting colleagues who have a passion at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The people in charge of foreign literature at the large publishing houses in

different countries form networks where everyone speaks English (as this same
literary director said). In these networks, they mutually give each other recognition and
render services by the near-magical sentence, Hi X, I have a book Y which is just
perfect for you. The decision-makers then systematically resort to their own networks

21
of reliable information (literary agents, scouts, foreign publishers, and sometimes
translators), who make it possible to reduce the risks. A person in charge of English-
language literature talks about the fierce competition between [French] publishers to
get the manuscripts first, and a person in charge of another large commercial
publishing house notes that the essential thing is to get the information early. The
search for raw information has little to do with the contents (and especially the form) of
the works concerned. It sounds more like industrial espionage, even for the
enlightened importers of presumably fashionable modern products, than the literary
prospecting of a discoverer: The main thing is to establish bonds with the American
agents and publishers so you are assured privileged information. To enter certain
markets, one even makes a pre-emptive offer, so that there is no bidding, and it is
increasingly common for the most profitable contracts to be signed even before the
original is published, or even read.
Pierre Belfond wrote in its memoirs how he bought, in 1988, the publication rights for Gone with
the Wind 2, the follow-up to the book described as a mythical best-seller. The auction
proceeded blindly, i.e. in the total absence of not only text or extracts, but also synopsis or
title, since not one page was written [the literary agent could only state that a) the novel
would be published in the United States by Warner Books; b) the writer was called Alexandra
Ripley; c) delivery of the final manuscript was planned for the end of 1989]. After having
offered $200,000, then $650,000 (according to his own statements, no publisher had ever
invested such a sum to acquire translation rights), he raised the bidding to a million and one
dollar. Pierre Belfond continues, The figures scared me. What if the book was bad? To reassure
myself, I repeated that the management staff of Warner Books would surround Alexandra Ripley
with a cloud of brilliant literary advisers. As long as the novel was not finished, it could be
polished, planed, worked upon. But these considerations did not make up for the missing
manuscript, which we would only know in eighteen months.

Questioned on the specificity of its Feux croiss series, compared to

Gallimards Du monde entier or Stocks Bibliothque cosmopolite, the person in
charge at Plon answers: Oh! I think we all do mostly the same thing. The literary
director at Albin Michel confirms this interchangeable point of view: Bah! If you
mention the Du monde entier series, yes, or the foreign-literature books at Seuil, etc., I
think there is no great difference in nature, if you will.

The moral of the story

What has been shown here, on the basis of considerable data collection and analysis,
could always be disqualified as false and trivial. No one analysis can dissipate the cloud
of media-friendly intellectual discourses on the return to the story or to figuration,
on the crisis of the French novel, or on the end of the avant-gardes. Such discourses
prevent the literary world from looking at itself without self-delusion. However, perhaps
sociology, which the high priests of art love to hate or belittle (because it destroys
illusory representations), is the best ally of all those who want to defend the rarest assets
of the literary and artistic fields against subordination to the production and marketing
of books for strictly commercial purposes. This is a key political and literary issue for
all those who live from literature (especially those among them who live for
literature), and indeed for all the others who seek access to literature.
The reduction in the number of French publishing companies has subordinated
the industry more and more strictly to commercial standards. Is this unstoppable and
irreversible? Is resistance to the commercial influence on the art trade no more than the
last-ditch struggle of a nationalist traditionalism? And yet, as long as there are people to

22
support the small publishers, as long as there are small publishers to publish young
unknown authors, booksellers to propose and promote the books of young writers
published by the small publishing houses, critics to discover and defend texts that are
different (all or almost all by women), the work without economic reward, created out
of love for art and for the love of art, will remain a realistic investment, assured of
receiving material and symbolic recognition.
The central bastion of resistance to market forces is today made up of small
publishers and based on a national tradition of inseparably literary and political avant-
gardism (also evident in the field of cinema). These publishers defend the authors and
experimental literature of all the countries whose politics and/or literature is dominated.
Paradoxically, they cannot count on government-based aid, which goes to the
publishing companies that are the oldest and richest in economic and symbolic capital.
The work of these small publishers is practical internationalism, opposed to the
arrogant closure of the nations assured of commercial domination and the survival of
global imperialism (the English do not buy anything, except what the Americans
produce. As for the Americans, they are only interested in themselves, says the literary
director of a large publishing house). In this field as elsewhere, some would want to
restrict the debate to a choice between resignation to the needs of the economy left to its
own law (the maximization of profit in the short run) and regressive confinement in the
defense of national traditions. Contrary to that reduction, one can affirm, without too
many ethical scruples or political concerns, that to defend the French tradition is not, in
this case, to yield to nationalism but to defend the conquests, intrinsically international
and internationalist, of the entire accumulated history of literature.
We have sought the explicit declaration of things that everyone suspects and no
one really knows. Could this break the harmony and complacency of good company, the
laziness and conformity of worldliness or fashion? Could it make literary-mercantile
bluffing more difficult? One might at least hope it will encourage all those who still
believe that art can and needs to be independent from money. We might perhaps help
them to reaffirm their allegiances, to assert themselves, and to better organize our
resistance.

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Figure 1. Distribition of properties on axes 1-3 (59 modalities activated)

24
Figure 2

25
Figure 3

26
Figure 4

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