A conservative Catholic billionaire and media owner is facing an independent bookshop rebellion in France over his influence in the publishing world.
Dozens of independent booksellers are trying to counter the growing influence of Vincent Bolloré, whose vast cultural empire includes television, radio, the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, and also, since 2023, the biggest book publishing and distribution conglomerate in France, Hachette Livre.
“Books matter,” said Thibaut Willems, owner of Le Pied à Terre independent bookshop in Paris’s 18th arrondissement and one of the booksellers taking a stand by limiting their orders of Hachette Livre books and placing them on lower shelves.
Bolloré is best known in France for his group’s ownership of CNews, the most-watched news channel on TV, which figures on the left have attacked for giving a platform to reactionary voices they say have aided the rise of the far right. He was once described by the former education minister Pap Ndiaye as “very close to the most radical far right”. Bolloré, in a senate hearing in 2022, denied political or ideological interventionism, saying his interest in acquiring media was purely financial and his cultural empire was about promoting French soft power. He said his group was so vast, it contained all views.
But some independent booksellers say it is dangerous for democracy for one conglomerate to have such a huge influence on cultural output. Hachette Livre, which was part of the Lagardère group bought by Bolloré’s Vivendi in 2023, is the No 1 publisher and book distributor in France. It owns scores of publishing houses, producing the bestselling Asterix comic books, literary fiction, thrillers, political titles, Manga comics and school textbooks. The group also owns the Relay bookstores at French train stations. Hachette has more than 200 publishing imprints worldwide. It is the second biggest publishing conglomerate in the UK, where it owns Hodder & Stoughton, and is the third biggest in the US.
As well as the moves by some booksellers, protest groups on the left have started a “bookmark rebellion”, where individuals hide bookmarks inside paperbacks in large commercial stores with messages such as “boycott Hachette”, detailing the scale of the Bolloré empire.
These bookmarks have regularly been placed inside the memoirs of the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, published in France by a Hachette imprint, and of Jordan Bardella, the young president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, whose Ce que je cherche (What I’m Looking For) has sold more than 150,000 copies, with the might of Bolloré’s publicity machine behind it.
Willems acknowledged it was hard to rebel against a group that controlled such a large part of distribution. “We’d like to be able to stage a boycott,” he said. But this was impossible because of Hachette imprints’ vast back- catalogue, which includes key authors such as the punk feminist Virginie Despentes and writers including Lola Lafon. “A boycott would be damaging for customers who want to read those writers. So we do what we can,” he said.
This meant not ordering certain new books, or taking fewer copies and placing them away from prime positions on tables. Willems will also limit events for Hachette books, with one recent exception for a local novelist friend of the bookshop.
Willems said customers had been interested to learn about Bolloré’s presence in publishing. “But it’s hard for people these days. They’re wary of what food to buy, what clothes to buy and now it’s what books they buy. It becomes exhausting.”
In Lyon, Martin Beddeleem, from the independent bookshop La Virevolte, said: “In the book world, we’ve been worried for some time about the concentration of ownership that runs from book editing to publishing and distribution.” In the current polarised political landscape in France, he felt that books could become “a weapon”.
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Beddeleem said that stopping buying books from a giant such as Hachette was impossible and would “kill our bookshop”, so instead small steps included not ordering Hachette’s children’s comic strip albums or social science books and choosing other publishers. “A tiny bookshop like ours doing this won’t cause much pain [to Hachette], but at least it feels significant for us,” he said. The bookshop will host a public debate on the issue in June.
Benoît Grange, from the climate protest collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre, part of the bookmark protest, said: “This is about informing readers. Around 700,000 bookmarks have been printed. People keep asking us for more so they can slide them into books in shops. It’s ongoing.”
The French Nobel-winning novelist Annie Ernaux said at the time of the Hachette takeover that she would refuse to be published by the group.
This week, the representative body for staff at Hachette Livre, expressed concerns over what it called an editorial line close to the far right in Bolloré’s other print and TV media.
Jean-Yves Mollier, a historian of French publishing and professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, said Bolloré’s expansion had added “an enormous publishing conglomerate” to a media empire. Mollier likened this to the expansion of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch into book publishing in the US. “I think for freedom of expression, pluralism and democracy it can represent a risk,” he said.
Hachette Livre was approached for comment.
