Even in a country that has made a pastime of its declamatory public letters, this one seems to stand out. It’s not every day that a list of signatories includes such unlikely comrades as Virginie Despentes—the punk feminist author of King Kong Theory, the Vernon Subutex series and, most recently, Dear Dick Head—and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the dean of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or what’s left of it. Despentes and Lévy were among the more than 130 writers who on April 16 announced that they were breaking ties with Grasset, a 119-year-old publishing house known for its sober yellow covers and its deep back catalog of classic literature and prestige contemporary titles. Their mass departure has sent tremors across France’s literary and publishing world, which finds itself increasingly under the thumb of the hard-right media mogul Vincent Bolloré, owner of the vast Hachette group, of which Grasset is a flagship subsidiary. “We don’t want our ideas or our work to become his property,” reads the writers’ press release. “Today, we have one thing in common: we refuse to be held hostage by an ideological war aimed at imposing authoritarianism throughout culture and the media.” By the end of April their ranks had swelled to over two hundred.

After amassing his fortune in the 1990s and 2000s, notably in African shipping and logistics, Bolloré made a concerted shift in his assets to press and entertainment holdings. Since the mid 2010s he has constructed perhaps France’s largest media conglomerate, with positions in television, radio, advertising, film production, print media, and publishing. The magnate formally passed the reins of his business empire on to his children in 2022—the same year that the conglomerate Vivendi, of which Bolloré is the top investor, was closing in on the acquisition of the Lagardère group, the legacy holding company that included Hachette. Yet the seventy-four-year-old is still viewed as having final control. He is known to keep a particularly close watch over his media and publishing properties.

There’s nothing new to horizontal and vertical integration like this, especially in the media sector. But in Bolloré’s case, such business tactics have become force multipliers for a virulently right-wing agenda. His network is France’s dominant cultural pole for far-right ideas on immigration and national identity: within the country, Bolloré is best known as the owner of CNews, an around-the-clock television channel akin to Fox News that holds significant sway over the national news cycle.

With Bolloré’s takeover of Lagardère, the magnate added the Europe 1 radio station and print publications like the influential weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and society tabloid Paris Match (sold in 2024 to Bernard Arnault’s LVMH) to the CNews ecosystem. But Hachette was the real prize. The largest French publishing group in annual revenue, Hachette is among the sector’s leading global conglomerates thanks to its ownership of US and UK publishing groups like Little, Brown and Hodder & Stoughton. In 2025 the group took in more than 3 billion euros in annual revenue, owing largely to its international presence. Its closest competitor in the French market, Éditis, which was previously part of Bolloré’s empire, brought in shy of 800 million, according to a September tally by the industry magazine Livres Hebdo.

Bolloré has long made a point of having his men in charge at his outlets, so it was probably only a matter of time before he came into conflict with Grasset’s longtime editor, Olivier Nora. The son of a prominent Parisian literary family, Nora had developed a reputation as a generous and nonsectarian editor, with Grasset commissioning work from popular writers like Gaël Faye, Laurent Binet, and Sorj Chalandon. One immediate point of friction, according to the weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, appears to have been Nora’s opposition to rushing out a forthcoming book by Boualem Sansal, who was until recently an author with one of Grasset’s main competitors, Gallimard. An Algerian novelist who was imprisoned in his home country for nearly a year starting in November 2024, Sansal is known for his fierce criticism of Islam and his dystopias on the trajectory of postcolonial Algeria, which have made him a darling on the French right. Nora was also reportedly opposed to Grasset publishing a travelogue by Nicolas Diat, himself a book editor long associated with right-wing authors, such as the conservative cardinal Robert Sarah.

On April 14 Hachette executives sacked Nora. This, for many of the imprint’s writers, proved to be the last straw. “The author-editor relationship is at the core of publishing, which is something that Vincent Bolloré’s team just doesn’t seem to understand,” Vanessa Springora, one of the letter’s signatories, told the magazine Le Nouvel Obs in its April 23 issue. “All the ideas that I stand for, and which are present in my two books, are being fought by Vincent Bolloré across his media holdings.”

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On April 19 Bolloré sought to brush aside the growing scandal in an op-ed for Le Journal du Dimanche, which is currently evolving into a house paper of the new right under the editorial stewardship of Geoffroy Lejeune. Dismissing the writers in revolt as a “small caste that thinks it’s better than everyone else,” he justified Nora’s firing by pointing to Grasset’s poor financial record, even if it remains, according to Le Monde, Hachette’s highest-earning French subsidiary among its general literature imprints. Bolloré even cited Nora’s one-million-euro salary, a particularly cheap put-down coming from the owner of France’s eleventh-largest family fortune. “Don’t be scared,” he concluded. “Since childhood…I have had a deep love for literature, and I am committed to helping [Grasset’s] authors reach a wide audience. As for the attacks regarding my ‘ideology,’ let me say it once again: I am a Christian Democrat, and Hachette’s leadership will continue to publish all authors who wish to be published.”

“Christian Democrat” is an odd moniker for a figure whose media holdings have become a mouthpiece for Great Replacement theory. The longtime far-right pamphleteer Éric Zemmour—who regularly inveighs against multiculturalism and immigration for supposedly driving France’s decline—spent several years as a pundit on CNews before launching an unsuccessful presidential bid in 2022, a campaign he largely spent surfing on the limelight provided by his former employer’s network. Since then Bolloré’s networks and publications seem to have shifted toward a less partisan but no less reactionary approach. Their strategic line today is to call for a “union” of right-wing forces—a euphemism for the idea that traditional conservatives should embrace Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). 

At Grasset, Nora was quickly replaced by Jean-Christophe Thiery, CEO of the broader Louis Hachette Group since 2024 and a longtime “Bolloré Boy”—the French press’s favorite term for the magnate’s business associates. The contrast between Nora and Thiery says a great deal about Bolloré’s vision. That Nora is a bona fide member of France’s literary aristocracy is not necessarily a virtue, but he at least has the experience of having spent just about the whole of his adult life in the industry. There’s no denying that in his tenure Grasset has remained a source for quality literature. Thiery, who got his start as a prefectural and finance-ministry technocrat after studying at the prestigious École nationale d’administration, has been a Bolloré subaltern since the early 2000s, when he lead the industrialist’s earliest forays into media; his CV is a laundry list of board seats, directorships, and corporate advisory posts.

His first task will be crisis management. Grasset faces a gaping hole in its roster, and the departing writers are reportedly considering a class-action lawsuit to reclaim ownership of their work, which would set up a range of intellectual-property disputes. They are likewise leading calls, seconded by writers signed to other houses like Emmanuel Carrère and Leïla Slimani, for legislative changes that might give published authors something resembling the legal protections afforded journalists, who can claim a consciousness clause to seek severance packages in the event of editorial disagreements with a media organization’s new ownership.

The recent fate of Fayard, another of Hachette’s leading French brands, serves as a warning of what could soon come for its sister subsidiary. Two years of instability at the top of the imprint cleared the way for the 2024 appointment of Lise Boëll, a longtime editor for conservative media types like Zemmour. (She was behind Zemmour’s Le Suicide Français, the smash 2014 bestseller that established him as a household name; Encounter is publishing an English translation this July.) Fayard’s hardening ideological bent under Boëll became unmistakable with its publishing successes of the last autumn and winter. From Jordan Bardella, the RN’s official president and a possible candidate in the 2027 elections, it released the campaign pamphlet-cum-memoire, Ce que veulent les Français (“What the French want”)—a follow-up to 2024’s Ce que je cherche (“What I’m searching for”). Another leading title was Philippe de Villiers’ Populicide, a jeremiad against the alleged subjugation of native French citizens by migration and Islam. Fayard likewise published Le journal d’un prisonnier, the prison diary of the conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy and a diatribe against the French justice system. Books like these are featured prominently in just about any French airport or train-station Relay—the leading chain of newsstand-convenience stores that Bolloré also secured in the Lagardère takeover.

Bolloré has argued, including in a 2024 parliamentary hearing, that his press and media offensive is an attempt to provide alternatives in a media field supposedly dominated by the left. He also makes a point of defending his acquisitions as a bid to guarantee a French “champion” in a sector undergoing global consolidation, as he claimed in the same hearing. Conservative pundits, for their part, can boast that the high sales figures for Fayard’s recent big-name titles reflect a growing demand for right-wing ideas. But those ideas are getting an important leg up. This winter’s crop of reactionary screeds were, unsurprisingly, warmly received by Bolloré’s media outlets. The late October release of Bardella’s pre-campaign tract occasioned a lengthy Q&A with LeJournal du Dimanche. The CNews anchor Pascal Praud effused on Europe 1 radio that he found Sarkozy’s prison testimonial “very moving.” The author of Populicide arguably gets the best treatment: every Friday evening de Villiers hosts a primetime talk show on CNews.

Even independent booksellers are feeling Bolloré’s squeeze. Between his company’s dominance as a distributor—Hachette Livre Distribution is France’s largest—and the publicity afforded through his press and TV outlets, Hachette has an outsized sway over the consumer trends that do much to determine which new releases bookstores are pressured to put on display. In an April 16 press release, France’s national bookstore union denounced Nora’s ouster, warning of a “grave and decisive new step in the subduing of the Hachette group.” What they’re up against is the force of market power.

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The fight for control of French publishing started long before Bolloré staged his corporate raid on Lagardère. As Jean-Yves Mollier argues in his 2022 book Brève histoire de la concentration dans le monde du livre (“A Short History of Concentration in the Publishing Industry”), monopoly anxiety is as old as the books industry itself.¹ Founded in 1826, Hachette quickly got off the ground thanks to a series of generous state textbook contracts. By the early twentieth century the multipronged publisher, bookseller and distributor wielded such power that it earned the nickname La Pieuvre verte (“the Green Octopus”), after the color of its imprints and the delivery trucks with which the firm shipped its output and competitors’ to bookstores, newsstands, and the company’s dense network of railway stalls.

In 1922 Hachette opened for trading on the Paris stock exchange. Yet for all its power, the company remained an exception in a publishing world still characterized by a diverse fauna of small-and midsize (and often family-owned) houses. Today much of the prestige of imprints like Grasset—bought by Hachette in 1954—or Gallimard, by now a conglomerate in its own right with a cascading list of subsidiaries, draws on their connection to this gentlemanly heritage: their back catalogs contain much of the national literature published since the early 1900s.

Bolloré’s weaponization of Hachette is also not the first time that the industry has been in perilous lockstep with rising political forces. During the Nazi occupation of France, the record of the major publishing houses was less than laudable. The “Messageries Hachette,” as the company’s distribution monopoly was then known, was even requisitioned by the provisional government in 1944 for accommodating the Germans, though Hachette, the parent firm, was able to reacquire a controlling stake in the following years. Grasset too almost capsized as a result of its wartime activities. In 1948 a French court ordered the full confiscation of the publisher’s assets on the grounds that it had profiteered off pro-Vichy and collaborationist texts, a sentence that was commuted to a fine later that year. And though the political far right was marginalized during the immediate postwar decades, editorial homes remained for causes like French Algeria.

France’s publishing landscape started to take its current form in the 1980s and 1990s. In L’édition sans éditeurs (1999), published in English a year later as The Business of Books, the publisher André Schiffrin recounts how, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a primarily artisanal industry became steadily subsumed by larger business groups in search of ever-expanding growth. Schiffrin—whose father founded the famed Pléiade collection, originally designed to provide affordable editions of classic texts—is best known in the United States for leading Pantheon Books from the early 1960s through the 1980s, a golden era during which the imprint published many of the defining midcentury works in European literature and philosophy. L’édition sans éditeurs was largely an obituary for Pantheon, which from the mid-1960s would follow its parent company Random House through various external owners, starting with the electronics conglomerate RCA. It was under the watch of S.I. Newhouse Jr., who bought Random House in 1980, that Schiffrin was forced out in 1990. Two years later he would found the New Press.

In Le contrôle de la parole, published in 2005, Schiffrin turned his attention back to his native country, which was following in the footsteps of the US. The prominent industrialist and arms manufacturer Jean-Luc Lagardère acquired Hachette in 1980, provoking early fears about the subordination of publishing to external capital. “French publishing is slowly but surely in the process of losing its financial and intellectual independence,” the journalist Jérôme Garcin lamented at the time. In the 1990s this process accelerated. The Compagnie générale des eaux, a water management and utilities firm, absorbed the communications giant Havas in 1998 and renamed itself Vivendi. Alongside stakes in publicity and marketing, Havas’ portfolio included Canal+, the country’s first premium television station, known for its often irreverent social satire. Through Havas, the new conglomerate also controlled the publishing holding that was then Hachette’s lead competitor, the Groupe de la Cité. Before long Vivendi had gone on an international buying spree and temporarily surpassed Hachette altogether.

This expansion ended in one of most dramatic corporate crackups of the era. By 2002 the first Vivendi offensive went belly-up under the aggressive leadership of the former investment banker Jean-Marie Messier, “the man who tried to buy the world,” according to the title of a 2003 biography. In a bid supported by major political figures, including then president Jacques Chirac, the Lagardère Group pushed to buy Vivendi’s overleveraged publishing arm and merge it with Hachette. That acquisition was at first blocked by European regulators, who responded to fears over monopoly power by issuing a ruling that limited Hachette to a selection of its competitor’s imprints and left Vivendi to spin off both its books division, rebranded as Éditis, and several subsidiaries.

The end of this episode also coincided with the unexpected death of Jean-Luc Lagardère in 2003, at which point control of the firm passed to his son Arnaud. Of poor standing in the French press, Arnaud Lagardère is often portrayed as squandering the vast family business he inherited. It was in these years that Bolloré also joined in the dance, becoming chairman of Vivendi’s board in 2014 and steadily increasing his stake in the company in the years that followed. In 2019 the group repurchased Éditis, and before long it would be Bolloré’s turn to mount the final assault on Hachette.

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In the age of the media mega-group, the prevailing logic is to fight scale with scale. In 2023 Rodolphe Saadé, owner of the French shipping company CMA CGM and an ally of President Emmanuel Macron, launched a new Sunday paper, La Tribune du Dimanche; the following year he acquired the BFMTV news network. Both moves are widely viewed as an attempt to counter Bolloré. Daniel Křetínský, a Czech oil and gas billionaire, has in recent years taken a keen interest in French press and media assets. His biggest coup to date was the 2023 takeover of Éditis, after Brussels forced Bolloré to swap ownership of his prior publishing holding for Lagardère’s Hachette. Though sparing in direct criticism of his competitor, Křetínský presented his purchase of France’s second-largest publishing group, once again reduced in size, as part of a long-term strategy to preserve, in Reuters’ paraphrase, “French cultural values.”

Things are more explicit slightly down the food chain. Groupe Madrigall, an anagram for the group’s leading brand, Gallimard, is one of France’s second-tier holdings, bringing in over 630 million euros in annual revenue. Antoine Gallimard, the family’s third generation at the head of the corporation, called the revolt at Grasset “an act of courage” in an April 16 op-ed for Le Monde. “This is not just about defending a book, but a catalog, a history, and a legacy,” he wrote. “As far as the industry goes, we have to say it loud and clear: we are not trophies. The political extremes, when they dictate management of a publishing house, are a threat to free publishing.”

The Bolloré scare even sells. Gallimard poached from Hachette the longtime Fayard and Stock writer Erik Orsenna, who in 2023 penned a novel about Bolloré, Histoire d’un ogre (“An Ogre’s Story”). Written in the voice of a Voltairian moral fable, the book has little in the way of literary value. The death of Jean-Luc Lagardère, the narrator muses, “marked the end of an era. And of France as we knew it. It was time to say farewell to panache.” With critics like that, it’s hard to argue that all of France’s cultural woes can be chalked up to Bolloré, or to deny Schiffrin’s implication that top-heavy publishing is itself partly responsible for insulating self-congratulatory, often mediocre work from serious challenge.

There is reason to hope that the threat from Bolloré will spur his critics in media and publishing to seek out alternatives. But there is also something too little and too late about this most recent outcry against the mogul, especially coming from precincts that have up to now accommodated themselves with concentrated media power and activist owners. For the French culture industry, Bolloré’s rise is one of the defining stories of the last decade, from the defanging of Canal+ to the rise of CNews. Where, during those years, were the likes of Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner, another “nouveau philosophe,” or Caroline Fourest, a younger acolyte who also signed the April 16 letter? “A Christian conservative, yes,” Lévy wrote of Bolloré in a 2021 Le Point op-ed, amid initial speculation over the fate of Hachette. “But an extremist, no: first of all because it is not in the temperament or the history of this Citizen Kane from Brittany.” (Bolloré was, in fact, born and raised in tony west Paris, but has sought to cultivate a more terroir persona, harkening back to family roots in Brittany. In 2024 La Lettrereported that a leading militant in Paris’s neo-Nazi scene had been hired to the security team at an island owned by Bolloré off Finistère.) Not only was this cohort slow to speak out against Bolloré’s growing influence, in recent years their stale critiques of left-wing totalitarianism have found an eerie echo in the chorus against “islamo-leftism” blurted out on Bolloré’s channels.

More promising alternatives are emerging from France’s combative independent publishing and bookselling scene, which has managed to preserve a wider field beyond the mastodons of the sector. This is partly thanks to regulatory policies that contain some of the worst abuses of scale. The wholesale-restricting “single price” law, for instance, adopted in 1981, has helped stem the domination of book sales by big-box stores, which destabilized the US industry even before the emergence of Amazon. (The threat in Schiffrin’s time was, quaintly, Walmart.) According to figures from France’s national bookseller’s union, nearly one in two books in the country are still purchased in an independent bookstore.

L’édition sans éditeurs, for example, was one of the first releases from La Fabrique, a scrappy publisher founded in 1998. Run out of a ground-floor office in an apartment building courtyard in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris, La Fabrique became a leader among a new generation of independent, often left-leaning publishers. It is best known for its tightly argued and polemical essays; Schiffrin’s trilogy on publishing and media—which concluded in 2010 with L’argent et les mots—shares space on the backlist with the philosopher Jacques Rancière and titles like the cult 2007 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, as well as translations from the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi and the Marxist environmentalist Andreas Malm. When I visited the Fabrique offices in 2023, as Bolloré’s takeover of Hachette was in full swing, it felt a bit like going back in time, to a different era of bookmaking. The story of the late Éric Hazan, La Fabrique’s founder and longtime director, is not too different from Schiffrin’s: in the 1980s Hazan took over his family’s imprint, Hazan Éditions, a publisher of art books. In 1992 he was ultimately forced to sell to Hachette, holding on to operational control for a few more years before leaving to set up La Fabrique.

But few would argue that the way out of France’s publishing crisis lies in a simple return to this sort of craft. Hazan’s successor Stella Magliani-Belkacem, who now codirects La Fabrique with Jean Morisot, had no illusions about the difficulties facing independent publishers. “We’re able to retain our presence with a 120-book-long catalogue and twelve releases a year and thanks almost entirely to independent booksellers and distributors,” she told me when I visited their offices in 2023, before Morisot added: “But there’s no point in denying that the economics are fragile. The reality in the business is slim margins and editors who barely pay themselves a salary. There’s also the passion and the satisfaction that comes in doing the work we do.”

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A more durable response will have to involve new antitrust legislation and stricter editorial independence rules. Major book publishing groups are not covered by a 1986 law designed to regulate ownership in media and telecommunications, itself frequently decried for its ineffectiveness at curtailing the reach of today’s barons. Each new parliament sees its lot of proposals for stricter rules and protections, but their adoption in the short term seems unlikely, as French politics continues to drift to the right.

Before the breakdown at Grasset, the immediate crisis in industry circles was the mounting evidence that a Covid-induced rebound in book sales was definitively over, auguring a return to secular decline. In the first quarter of 2026, book sales were down nationally by 6.5 percent compared to the same period in 2025. Large cities like Paris might continue to sustain new bookstores, but in the country as a whole the situation is markedly grimmer. The French are reading less and less, warned the Centre National du Livre in a study conducted with the polling firm IPSOS and published in April 2025; only 63 percent of respondents reported having read at least five books in the last year, down six points relative to 2023. Those figures all undercut the “great national cause” that Emmanuel Macron declared in favor of reading in 2021. Now they are only poised to drop further: the 2026 French state budget took an axe to sectoral subsidies, a particularly important lifeline for independent booksellers and publishers.

France’s president has shown about as little initiative in confronting Bolloré. As the magnate closed in on an acquisition of the Lagardère group, the prospect of the ailing media empire falling into hostile hands was reportedly cause for anxiety among the president’s inner circle. Sarkozy, then a member of Lagardère’s supervisory board and currently an independent member on its board of directors, even brokered a dinner between Bolloré and Macron in an attempt to ease tensions. But with few alternative offers on the table—Arnault’s LVMH was for a time considered to be in the running, alongside a smattering of foreign funds—Bolloré’s acquisition rapidly turned into a fait accompli. Since then, the response from Macron and his allies has been cautious and accommodating. These days they often churn out talking points not incompatible with the ideology of the media mogul’s empire, from denouncing the evergreen threat of Islamist “separatism” or France’s alleged “decivilization” by crime. Macron’s own meek reaction after the uproar at Grasset, on April 17, was to call for the protection of “editorial pluralism.” They have also been slow to resist parallel right-wing attacks on the country’s public media: this spring an official inquiry commission, under the auspices of a far-right MP, finalized its report on the “neutrality, financing and functioning” of public-service TV and radio.

Bolloré’s escalating control over the mediascape will stand as a fitting bookend to the Macron era, one year before presidential elections that could well see the far right win power. As a young advisor to President François Hollande, and economy minister between 2014 and 2016, Macron was on deck amid Bolloré’s initial seizure of power at Vivendi. The independent outlet Off Investigation has, in fact, reported that as early as 2013, over a lunch at the presidential palace also attended by Macron in his capacity as deputy chief of staff at the Elysée, Hollande made an overture to the billionaire, assuring him that the priority was continued French ownership of the telecommunications group. Though Bolloré was not yet known as the ideologue he is today, his ensuing purge of workers at the i-Télé news channel, since rebranded as CNews, provoked a national outcry at the time. Their late 2016 strike stands as the longest in the history of France’s private television sector. A decade later it has been followed by perhaps the largest writers’ walk-off in the country’s literary history, as a new Green Octopus extends its grip.