MeetKnown for her environmental commitments, her investigations and her outspokenness, the journalist has been, since the beginning of June, at the head of the publishing house, owned by the Hachette group, of which Vincent Bolloré is gradually taking control. An appointment whose very political circumstances led to a wave of departures at Fayard.
This Monday, July 4, on the terrace of the Select, a brasserie on Boulevard Montparnasse, she barely takes the time to sit down and plants her two brown eyes, hostile, like machine guns. Isabelle Saporta understood very well what we came for: a boss in the heart of a storm of which only the small medium of publishing and the media has the secret. We don’t need to start the conversation, she’s already in overdrive. “It’s “Koh-Lanta”. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I hadn’t anticipated it would be so complicated…”
Just named patroness of Fayard, on June 13, Isabelle Saporta, 46, has to face the resounding departure of several of her star authors, who accuse her no more or less of having sacrificed the independence of the house, property of the Hachette group, in favor of an allegiance… to the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy. All this while the billionaire Vincent Bolloré, helped by his friend Sarkozy, is in the process of redrawing, following Vivendi’s takeover bid for Lagardère, the landscape of French publishing by merging the two major rival groups: Hachette (Grasset, Stock, Fayard…) and Editis (Julliard, Belfond, Plon, La Découverte…).
Where the soap opera does not lack salt is that Isabelle Saporta had so far never appeared on the list of declared Sarkozists. A sincere ecologist for some, left-wing Poujadist for others, Saporta, Yannick Jadot’s companion in the city, became known for her books on environmental investigations, her rants on TV sets and by a brief foray into politics, during the last municipal elections in Paris, where she campaigned, first with Gaspard Gantzer, then alongside Cédric Villani, before planting them both.
The Jérôme Lavrilleux spring
To understand why, this Monday, July 4, the eyes of Isabelle Saporta are throwing flames, you have to go back a big year. As of March 17, 2021, exactly. That day, The chained Duck publishes a paper that will make Nicolas Sarkozy mad with rage. According to the satirical weekly, Fayard paid Jérôme Lavrilleux, the former deputy director of his 2012 presidential campaign and his main accuser in the Bygmalion affair, for having secretly collaborated on the book. Hatredby Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, journalists at World. This revelation arouses real unease in Isabelle Saporta, appointed a year earlier literary director by her friend Sophie de Closets, CEO of the house.
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