In the French publishing world, a summery dance of women publishers is underway: On Monday this week it was announced that Sophie de Closets will take over the management of Flammarion (part of the Gallimard Group).

And since June 13, Fayard, part of the Hachette publishing group belonging to the Lagardère group, has had a new publisher: Isabelle Saporta.

These two appointments are linked in an ugly way and allow exciting insights into the economic and political situation in the French publishing world.

Let's start with the Saporta case: the former journalist, born in 1976, came from the French elite school Sciences Po and has a doctorate in political science.

Prior to her appointment, she worked for Fayard, first as a freelancer and since 2021 as the literary program manager.

Politically – because politics is what this is about – Saporta is more to the left, she campaigned for the mathematician and former Macron supporter Cédric Villani in the 2020 Paris mayoral election.

Otherwise, she is considered to be close to the Greens: because of her journalistic bestseller “Das Schwarzbuch der Landwirtschaft” (2011, more than 100,000 copies sold) and not least because she is the partner of the prominent Green Yannick Jadot (presidential candidate 2022).

Book market fight with sharp knives

All of this unfolds its full flavor through the context of her appointment and the publishing-political constellation in which this took place.

The Saporta case shows: On the French book market, which is shaped by corporations that each turn over hundreds of millions of euros a year - alongside the market leader Hachette (a good thirty publishers, including Calmann Lévy, Grasset, Larousse, Stock), Gallimard and Editis should be mentioned – is currently being fought with particularly sharp knives.

The first punchline is that the oh-so-left Saporta owes much of its appointment to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Politically, the former president has recently attracted attention because of his lack of commitment: through his silence on Valérie Pécresse, the presidential candidate of his party Les Républicains - the

elder statesman

seems to care little about partisan discipline.

In terms of publishing, however, he has, as usual, clearly campaigned for the cause that he has always vehemently defended: his own.

Sarkozy has been a member of the Lagardère Group's supervisory board since February 2020;

Arnaud Lagardère, the unfortunate heir to an empire he is slowly crumbling, calls him his "brother".

In this double function, official and unofficial, Sarkozy interfered in the affairs of the Hachette publishing group.

The risk with the tell-all books

He was probably partly responsible for Sophie de Closets, Fayard's previous boss, throwing in the towel on March 24.

This is surprising, because De Closets seems - from Sarkozy's point of view - to have a politically much less problematic profile than Saporta.

The studied historian, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, stands for an educated, rather apolitical intellectual milieu.

She had publishing success, among other things, by having brought the translation rights for the Obama memoirs to the publishing house.

She worked in the house for eighteen years, reorientated it publishing and made it highly profitable.

But De Closets also had the honorable and risky idea of ​​publishing telly books that did Sarkozy, who was caught up in nearly a dozen affairs, no favors.

Crucially, she rewarded Jérôme Lavrilleux, deputy manager of Sarkozy's 2012 campaign: for an unwritten book, she says, for testimonies surrounding the Bygmalion affair (concerning campaign finance) that were picked up in two Fayard books, claims Sarkozy.

The angry ex-president had expressed his displeasure to half of Paris and honored the publisher with a call to confront “Madame de Closette”, as he deliberately mocked her.

She recorded this conversation.