INTERVIEW
The publishing industry is calling for help. In a column published in Le Monde , 625 publishers, authors and booksellers ask President Emmanuel Macron to act to save the industry, very hard hit by the health crisis linked to the coronavirus. Yann Queffélec, author and Goncourt prize 1985 interviewed by Europe 1, is one of those who are calling for an ambitious recovery plan with aid of several hundred million euros.
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"Literature, passed over in silence"
"There are people who discovered the book, and the good book, thanks to containment," says Yann Queffelec. "So it is astonishing that, in its plan to revive culture, literature has been passed over in silence", he deplores, referring to the measures announced by Emmanuel Macron to revive the culture sector. "Literature is any professional universe that is at the service of books and that sees itself broken down by the behavior of the State, currently."
Indeed, after a scathing tribune signed by a collective of artists, including Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sy, or even Jean Dujardin, the Head of State had invited, in early May, a dozen of them to a videoconference, before to announce measures for culture, and thus repair this oversight. Compensation fund for the cinema and series, extension of the unemployment rights of the intermittent of the spectacle ... Emmanuel Macron announced a whole battery of measures, but nothing concerning the book trades.
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Recover the country economically, but also culturally
"We need money! We must support the bookstore, publishers, writers, media libraries, libraries", lists the author of Les Noces barbares. "We must support the culture of this country, support the very idea that we have of the French people through its literature," he continues. "It is not enough to straighten the country economically, it must also straighten it on a cultural level, in terms of its dignity through culture, because literature is also the joy of living which is essential to to come up".
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