A conservative revolution in publishing

Abstract This essay by Pierre Bourdieu was originally published in 1999 as “Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition” in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126–127: 2–28. The translation appears by kind permission of Jerôme Bourdieu. This work is based on bibliographical research and statistics gathered from archives and publishing houses by Paul Dirkx; on thirty-eight extensive (and sometimes repeated) interviews with publishers and series editors in every sector of the field as well as with translators, critics, administrative agents, press attachés, and foreign rights managers carried out by Pierre Bourdieu, Rosine Christin, Paul Dirkx, Saliha Felahi, Claire Givry, Isabelle Kalinowski. Statistical data were prepared and overseen by Rosine Christin. Interviews and transcriptions were financed by the research institute France-Loisirs de la lecture. This work is based on bibliographical research and statistics gathered from archives and publishing houses by Paul Dirkx; on thirty-eight extensive (and sometimes repeated) interviews with publishers and series editors in every sector of the field as well as with translators, critics, administrative agents, press attachés, and foreign rights managers carried out by Pierre Bourdieu, Rosine Christin, Paul Dirkx, Saliha Felahi, Claire Givry, Isabelle Kalinowski. Statistical data were prepared and overseen by Rosine Christin. Interviews and transcriptions were financed by the research institute France-Loisirs de la lecture. Notes This work is based on bibliographical research and statistics gathered from archives and publishing houses by Paul Dirkx; on thirty-eight extensive (and sometimes repeated) interviews with publishers and series editors in every sector of the field as well as with translators, critics, administrative agents, press attachés, and foreign rights managers carried out by Pierre Bourdieu, Rosine Christin, Paul Dirkx, Saliha Felahi, Claire Givry, Isabelle Kalinowski. Statistical data were prepared and overseen by Rosine Christin. Interviews and transcriptions were financed by the research institute France-Loisirs de la lecture. 1Joachim Unseld analyzed Kafka's quasi-divine figure of the editor whose “verdicts” can mean fame or oblivion for the author whose trust he or she holds. Joachim Unseld. 1994. Franz Kafka: A writer's life. Trans. Paul F. Dvorak. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. 2See Anne Simonin and Pascal Fouché. 1999. Comment on a refusé certains de mes livres. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126–127: 103–15. 3To evaluate the symbolic capital attached to the name of a particular house and consequently to all of its members and authors, we will base ourselves on a number of factors contributing to the house's reputation as belonging to the “nobility” of the profession: its antiquity (associated in every social order with nobility) along with the quantity and the quality of its editorial resources, which are measured by its number of consecrated, “classic” authors, and specifically its number of Nobel Prize laureates. 4Michel Deguy. 1988. Le Comité, Confessions d'un lecteur de grande maison. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. 5Michel Deguy, op. cit., 31. See also op. cit., 64 all translations from French sources, unless otherwise attributed, are my own, R.F.. 6Michel Deguy, op. cit., 111. 7Alexis Liebaert. 1998. Les Parrains de l’édition. L’Événement du jeudi, March 19. 8It is not lost on Michel Deguy (op. cit., 26) that his eviction from the “Committee” attests to the true function of this body. As a reserved and esoteric author eschewing media attention, Deguy could not contribute his share of the profits associated with the possession of a specific type of social capital. 9Jean Lahougue in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue. 1998. Écriverons et liserons en vingt lettres. Seysel: Champ Vallon, 28. 10Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op. cit., 8, 32, 56. 11Jean-Marie Laclavetine in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op.cit., 32 (“Literary theory's most productive years roughly 1955–1975 were the poorest for the production of novels.”). 12Jean Lahougue in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op. cit., 22. 13Michel Deguy, op. cit., 31. 14Michel Deguy, op. cit., 17–18. 15This said, we should be careful not to overestimate the practical effects of the type of knowledge that scientific research provides, for it too can coexist with an intractable naivety. 16See Pierre Bourdieu. 1996. The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Trans. Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 17On this subject, and on other types of obstacles preventing the analysis of editorial strategies, see Paul Dirkx. 1999. Les obstacles à la recherche sur les stratégies éditoriales. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126–127: 70–74. 18The sample is very similar, in terms of the major variables, to the entire profession as reflected by the statistics of the INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques). Despite domination by the two major groups, the publishing sector – with its many barely independent medium- and small-sized companies, many of them family run – has grown considerably since the 1960s (the growth rate, 6.3% for 1996, exceeds the industrial average, investment in this sector being rather weak), and sales figures continue to grow. 19The Annex contains a detailed account of the choices made for each of these groups. Livre-Hebdo's supplement to number 216 (30 September 1996) lists a total of 1,002 francophone publishing houses, with their foundation dates, executives, total workforce, distributors, specialties and the number of titles published per annum. The catalogue of the Salon du livre (tome 1, 1997, 39–626) demonstrates a similar state of affairs. The information provided by these two documents was completed and sometimes corrected with reference to available internet databases or by direct enquiry to the publishers themselves. We consulted the annual publications and statistics of the Société Nationale de l’Édition (SNE), and the chamber of commerce provided us with structural and biographical information. There is also the Documentation française, which suggested a number of helpful sources, specifically Janine Cardona and Chantal Lacroix. 1996. Statistiques de la culture. Chiffres clés. Paris: La Documentation Française, 59–70. 21Joseph Jurt, Martin Ebel and Ursula Erzgräber. 1989. Französischsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur 1918–1986/87. Eine bibliographische Bestandsaufnahme der Originaltexte und der deutschen Übersetzungen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 22We present here only a preliminary and provisional MCA developed initially with Salah Bouhedja and then more systematically, and with more precise data encoding, with Brigitte Le Roux and Henry Rouanet. The complete results of this second phase of research will be published at a later date, along with an explanation of our methodology: Pierre Bourdieu, Brigitte Le Roux and Henry Rouanet, L’Édition littéraire en France, une mise en oeuvre raisonnée de l'analyse géométrique des données (work in progress). 23ADDAD (Association pour le développement et la diffusion de l'analyse des données), 151 boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013 Paris. 24See Jean-Marc Bernard, Robert Baldy and Henry Rouanet. 1988. The language for interrogating data LID. In Data analysis and informatics, ed. Edwin Diday, 461–68. Amsterdam: Elsevier/North Holland. 25On the methodology of Euclidean classification, see Brigitte le Roux and Henry Rouanet. 1993. Analyse des données multidimensionnelles. Paris: Dunod, 120. In English, see Brigitte le Roux and Henry Rouanet. 2004. Geometric data analysis: From correspondence analysis to structured data analysis, ed. Patrick Suppes. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 26Contrary to our custom in quoting extracts from interviews, we could not give detailed characteristics of our interviewees for fear of disclosing their identities. 27Alexis Liebaert, loc. cit. 28Following the lists that formed the basis of the Jurt index and that stop in 1987, we were able to determine that most of the symbolic capital for these houses was accumulated before the Second World War. Therefore, if we took into account only those famous authors first published after 1945, the capital of the leading houses would be more comparable to that of the smaller, more recent houses, but would not garner the same esteem and respect from the avant-garde critics and connoisseurs. 29On the editor as a type of art dealer, see Pierre Bourdieu. 1996. Flaubert, analyst of Flaubert: A reading of sentimental education. In The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Trans. Susan Emanuel, 3–43. Stanford: Stanford University Press. * Translator's note: English in source. *English in source. Presumably, Fixot has switched to English to invest his position with a pragmatic or commercial connotation. 30Bernard Fixot markets his bestsellers internationally: La Reine des bandits apparently sold 600,000 copies in Japan; Jamais sans ma fille 3.4 million copies within five years of its first publication including all editions. To generate buzz around his books, which remain largely unknown or ignored by literary critics, he has developed strategies to compensate for a complete absence of the type of symbolic and social capital possessed by a number of larger houses, strategies that require only money to implement: targeted advertising (pre-publication, for example in a women's magazine), massive advertising campaigns on Europe 1, an invitation to Jean-Pierre Foucault's Sacrée Soirée. 31To verify the correlation between the space of positions and that of position-takings, we reviewed 537 texts from 510 authors translated into French between July 1995 and July 1996 and published by the houses of our sample, and established the following variables for each of the titles: genre (novel, short story, narrative or tale), source and target publisher, source language (for Anglophone texts, we distinguished between “English” and “American”), the translator's name, the author's name and gender, the source text's original publication date and that of the French translation (1995 or 1996), critics’ evaluations, prizes won, the number of pages, the total number of foreign authors published by the house in question, the number of authors of the same nationality and language. The research required to carry this project through proved much too large, and in the end it had to be abandoned. 32Michel Deguy, op. cit., 18: “With the exception of Éditions de Minuit, which has remained faithful to its clandestine beginnings”. 33Anne Carrière is the daughter of Robert Laffont and was for a time director of press services for Laffont. 38The move to “publish young” is also apparent in the marketing campaigns of booksellers and the press. See Anne Simonin. 1998. L’Édition littéraire. In L’Édition française depuis 1945, ed. Pascal Fouché, 54–55. Paris: Le Cercle de la Librairie. 39A maneuver that is not lost on the well-informed, like this small-time provincial editor: “I don't have any sort of network. I don't publish journalists who are going to go off and write articles afterwards”. 40On the paradox of mass production becoming an instrument of snobbery, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant. 1998. On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1: 41–58. 34“Generational” solidarity has helped found an international literary commerce rooted in the alleged unity of all practices of all youth in all countries: “There is more similarity between French, English, Italian or Spanish authors of the same generation than between French authors publishing today and those who began writing before the 1970s. Moreover, these young writers have grown up reading foreign novels … In all of these countries, as in France, it has become clear that literature can speak of things like football and rock and roll …. Journalists who talk about books in newspapers, on television or on the radio belong to this new generation of 25–35 year olds, like the readers and booksellers”. Olivier Cohen, cited in C. Ferrand. 1998. Olivier Cohen au pied du mur. Livres-Hebdo 279 (February 6): 56–57. 35C. Ferrand. La nouvelle génération. Livres-Hebdo 282 (March 20, 1998): 60–63. 36Michel Deguy evokes “the inept cliché circulating among the new journalists ‘that it is pointless to look for writers in France’ – and by this they mean, presumably, other writers than the one currently speaking – while the British moors, the American asphalt and the Patagonian pampa are positively teeming with writers of Nobel-Prize caliber” (Michel Deguy, op. cit., 113). And later on he evokes the new clichés and biases of literary journalism: “1. American literary history segmented into decades, the almost nymphomaniac interest in retro and worn-out fashions (the early eighties, or late seventies); 2. The novel, and the foreign novel at that, is most worthy of attention; 3. Intellectuals are to be mistrusted” (Michel Deguy, op cit., 187). *English in source. 37Bernard Fixot offers just one example of this surprising discourse: “When we came into this profession, my associate Antoine Audouard and I, we were rather reticent about the French novel: this obsession with introspection when the only important thing is to tell a good story! So we decided to publish stories about the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people and discovered that in our day and age, reality is often stranger than fiction.” Bernard Fixot, Madame Figaro (January 4, 1993). The “self-evidences” of Jean-Marie Laclavetine return to mind. *English in source. 41Jean-Yves Mollier and Patricia Sorel. 1999. L'histoire de l’édition, du livre et de la lecture en France aux 19ième -20ième siècles. Approche bibliographique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126–127: 39–59. 42Pierre Bourdieu. 2003. The production of belief: Contribution to an economy of symbolic goods. In The city cultures reader, second edition, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall and Iain Borden, 103–9. New York: Routledge. 43Jean-Marie Bouvaist. 1993. Crise et mutation de l’édition française. Paris: ministère de la Culture, 8–9. *English in source. 44On this subject, see Peter Calvocoressi and Ann Bristov. 1980. Freedom to publish: A report on obstacles to freedom in publishing prepared for the Congress of the International Publishers Association. Stockholm: International Publishers Association/Almquist & Wiksell International. *English in source. 45See Jean-Marie Bouvaist, op. cit., 8–9. Philippe Schuwer is likely justified in blaming the famous publishing “crisis” on the brutal importation, since 1970, of “rationalization” techniques such as management control with its projected operation accounts, the digitizing of management costs, etc. Philippe Schuwer. 1999. Nouvelles pratiques et stratégies editoriales. In Pascal Fouché, op. cit., 425–59. 46Reflecting these changes is the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has transformed the way it structures its advertising space. The largest and most central spaces are offered to Germany and Anglophone countries. All other literatures, especially those of smaller countries, are relegated to the margins. See Gustavo Sorá. 1998. Francfort: la foire d'empoigne. Liber 34: 2–3. The editor of a small French publisher observes: “It's becoming more and more commercial …. They put up huge photos that were once of great writers but are now of ministers or international bestsellers …. In the beginning, it was row upon scintillating row of smaller, politically minded publishers … That has disappeared completely and has been replaced by houses specializing in spiritualism, cult writing: when it comes to things like that, the shelves are full”. And another: “When we go to the Salon du livre in Barcelona or Madrid, it's sad. The more they integrate, the larger they become, the more that literature falls by the wayside”. *English in source. 47See Maurice Nadeau. 1990. Grâces leur soient rendues. Mémoires littéraires. Paris: Albin Michel, especially the chapter on John Hawkes, 438–442. *English in source. *English in source. *English in source. *English in source. *English in source. 48Apart from bestsellers, Albin Michel publishes classical and modern, autonomous authors as well. Canadian author Jane Urquhart (launched by Nadeau), for example, can be found in their “Grandes Traductions” series, along with Elias Canetti, Victor Erofeev, Mia Couto and John McGahern. *English in source. *English in source. *English in source. 49Pierre Belfond. 1994. Les Pendus de Victor Hugo. Scènes de la vie d'un éditeur. Paris: Fayard, 19. *English in source. 50Pierre Bourdieu. 1992. Deux impérialismes de l'universel. In L'Amérique des Français, ed. Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop, 149–55. Paris: François Bourin.