This year's award of the Goncourt Prize to Brigitte Giraud for "Vivre vite" was not the result of a decision-making process, but rather a minimal compromise after a merciless dispute.
What was already suspected when the announcement was made is even clearer in retrospect: the Académie Goncourt, the ten-strong jury that meets on the first Tuesday of every month in the "Drouant" restaurant, is hopelessly divided.
According to "Le Monde" there are two camps against each other: jury president Decoin, vice-president Françoise Chandernagor, secretary Philippe Claudel, Paule Constant and treasurer Camille Laurens on the one hand, Pierre Assouline, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Pascal Bruckner, Patrick Rambaud and Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt on the other hand.
The former are the officials for the academy posts, the others partly pretenders to these;
Assouline would like to inherit Decoin, but he prefers Claudel.
The dispute smoldering against this background is at least a year old.
The 2021 selection was overshadowed by a conflict of interest: Laurens' partner François Noudelmann was a candidate.
It was decided to let him in the race - until Laurens dismantled a competitor and "France Inter" sensed a scandal.
Rarely has there been so much noise, but Goncourt is used to noise and madness, starting with the award of the prize to Marcel Proust in 1919, who owed it to jury member Léon Daudet, an anti-Semitic monarchist.
After the Laurens scandal, the academy changed its rules, authors close to the jury are now excluded.
Is half the jury anti-Semitic?
This fall, a trip by the Académie to the Beirut Books Fair was a source of conflict.
On October 8, the Lebanese Minister of Culture, Mohammed Mortada, railed against "the poison of Zionism": "Propaganda in favor of Zionist literature" should not be given a forum.
Mortada, who is close to the Shia Amal movement and Hezbollah, did not say who he was targeting.
Half of the Académie canceled the trip, but four of the "officials" went to Beirut and announced this year's finalists there.
They did not officially criticize the anti-Semitic minister, which also earned them criticism from independent observers.
The preliminary highlight was the fight for the prize: Giraud faced Giuliano da Empoli, whose novel The Magician in the Kremlin describes Putin's rise to power.
A personal and a political book competed: an antagonism which, after the maximum possible number of fourteen voting rounds, was decided by Decoin in favor of the “small autobiography”, as Schmitt teased.
He also spoke of a "wall" between the camps, Philippe Claudel of "turbulence".
At the next meal on December 6th, the latter could influence the trajectories of words and plates.