It’s a Parisian bookstore easy to recognize among those of the rue de Médicis, its front is fractured by a dozen impacts. Because of these fragments, few books are exposed: My route (Editions Chora), by far-right leader and President of the Italian Council Giorgia Meloni, London (Gallimard), the latest unpublished work by Céline, a work by Renaud Camus, the ideologist who popularized the theory of “great replacement”that there is a plan to replace Westerners with mass immigration…
Opened in 2018, La Nouvelle Librairie, which also became a publishing house a year later, asserts its identity and patriotism. It was attacked just before an Eric Zemmour signing session in 2018, then in 2019, on the eve of the coming of the former president of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Its manager, François Bousquet, likes spectacular signings and resounding outings. He was due to publish on November 8 Last writings before the massacrewhose author, Gabriel Matzneff, is under investigation for rape of a minor.
“Publishing Matzneff, who could no longer be published, is a matter of publishing honor. » François Bousquet, manager of La Nouvelle Librairie
The controversy started very quickly in the press and on social networks: on October 22, the feminist collective Les Grenades stuck posters on the bookstore to denounce the release of the book. In a press release issued Monday morning, the 24th, the editions indicate that they have backed down: “We find ourselves obliged to postpone indefinitely the publication of the Last Writings before the Massacre”, Due to ” death threats “ on staff.
In a neighborhood cafe, a few days earlier, François Bousquet, 54, thin glasses and pointed goatee, nevertheless used big words: “Publishing Matzneff, who could no longer be published, is a matter of publishing honor. He’s a great 86-year-old writer, dragged through the mud. » Former editor, in the 1990s, of L’Age d’Homme, which published a large number of dissidents from the East, Bousquet met Matzneff there and shared with him the same passion for Russia and Slavic literature.
Several months ago, the writer proposed to him, through mutual friends, the idea of the book, which brings together his chronicles published in Point from 2015 to 2019. Over ten pages, Gabriel Matzneff also returned to the Consentbook in which Vanessa Springora recounts the relationship under the influence that she had with him when she was barely 14 and he was 50. “He says he hasn’t read the book, he’s not trying to understand, and I say that without wanting to overwhelm Matzneff”, watch the editor. Nowhere is reported the fact that the writer is the subject of a judicial inquiry. “It’s not my kind of beauty, pedophilia, says Bousquet. But slipping in a warning to condemn pedocrime is a way of distancing oneself from a publication, a form of hypocrisy. »
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