A Conservative Revolution in Publishing

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A conservative revolution in publishing

Pierre Bourdieu
Published online: 29 May 2008.
To cite this article: Pierre Bourdieu (2008) A conservative revolution in publishing, Translation
Studies, 1:2, 123-153, DOI: 10.1080/14781700802113465
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Translation Studies,
Vol. 1, No. 2, 2008, 123153
A conservative revolution in publishing*

Downloaded by [University of Santiago de Compostela], [Manuel Poses] at 08:25 23 October 2014
Pierre Bourdieu
Translated by Ryan Fraser
This essay by Pierre Bourdieu was originally published in 1999 as Une revolution
conservatrice dans ledition in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126127: 228.
The translation appears by kind permission of Jerome Bourdieu.
A publisher is a person invested with the extraordinary power to ensure publication, to

confer upon a text and its author a public existence (Offentlichkeit) along with the fame
and recognition that this entails.1 Creation of this sort usually involves a consecration, a
transfer of symbolic capital (analogous to the one accomplished by a preface), bestowed by
the publisher not only upon the author but upon the publishing house as well, specifically
upon its list, the repertoire of authors, themselves more or less consecrated, that it has
published in the past.
Perception and misperception
Understanding the process of distinguishing the publishable from the non-publishable
among the mass of submitted materials (for a particular publisher, but ultimately for all
publishers) means accounting for the institutional mechanisms [dispositifs] (reading
committees, readers, editors of series either specialized or non-specialized) at work in
every house during the sorting and selecting of manuscripts (submitted by interceding
agents, or simply by mail).2 More precisely, it means coming to understand the objective
interactions between the agents involved in decision-making. This includes not only those
committees and commissions directly responsible for the decision to publish, but also the
editor in chief and his or her close colleagues, series editors, readers, administrative
This work is based on bibliographical research and statistics gathered from archives and publishing
houses by Paul Dirkx; on thirty-eight extensive (and sometimes repeated) interviews with publishers
and series editors in every sector of the field as well as with translators, critics, administrative agents,
press attaches, and foreign rights managers carried out by Pierre Bourdieu, Rosine Christin, Paul
Dirkx, Saliha Felahi, Claire Givry, Isabelle Kalinowski. Statistical data were prepared and overseen
by Rosine Christin. Interviews and transcriptions were financed by the research institute FranceLoisirs de la lecture.
1
Joachim Unseld analyzed Kafkas quasi-divine figure of the editor whose verdicts can mean
fame or oblivion for the author whose trust he or she holds. Joachim Unseld. 1994. Franz Kafka: A
writers life. Trans. Paul F. Dvorak. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press.
2
See Anne Simonin and Pascal Fouche. 1999. Comment on a refuse certains de mes livres. Actes de
la recherche en sciences sociales 126127: 10315.
ISSN 1478-1700 print/ISSN 1751-2921 online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14781700802113465
http://www.informaworld.com
124
Pierre Bourdieu
personnel, influential advisors who may act unofficially as series editors, and finally
translators, who have often influenced the publication of foreign authors.
At the same time, however, both the logic of the publishing field and the literary belief
that it generates and sustains tend to obscure the fact that the more or less charmed
interactions occurring in every editorial microcosm are themselves determined by the
publishing fields global structure. It is the latter that determines the size and structure of
the unit responsible for decisions (from what seems to be a single decision-maker in smaller
publishers to the complex power field of the major houses); it also determines the relative
weight placed by interacting agents on specific evaluation criteria, making them privilege
literary or commercial texts, art or money, to recall the old opposition dear to
Flaubert. In the global structure of the field and at any given moment, each house occupies
a specific position with respect to every other depending on its relative wealth in rare
resources (economic, symbolic, technical, etc.) and on the power that it confers upon the
field; it is this position that orients the specific position-takings of decision-makers their
stance regarding the publication of French or foreign literature, for example because it
defines a system of objectives and constraints as well as a margin (often restricted) for
confrontation and struggle between the players of the publishing game. Most changes in
editorial policy are attributable to changes in the houses position within the field. A
movement toward a more dominant position usually means a policy shift toward asset
management at the expense of innovation and a re-allocation of symbolic capital to more
commercial authors than those who, in the heroic days, the pioneering days, helped to
accumulate this capital in the first place.3
To shatter the illusion that the visible decision-making entities of a given house act
autonomously an illusion that promotes ignorance of the fields many constraints it
need only be remembered that all texts submitted for the choice of publishing
authorities are always already the product of a selection carried out by the fields
diacritical logic: authors decide where to send their manuscripts based on the more or less
accurate image they have of different publishers, at least of those attached to specific
schools (le nouveau roman) or made illustrious by great names of the present or past. It
is this image that determines the conduct of all agents involved: the editors themselves; the
critics, who are particularly responsive to the label effect of covers (Gallimards la
Blanche, for example); series editors; and all intermediaries who, through intervention
and advice, favor the perfect match often exalted as a discovery between an editor
and an author (You really ought to send your manuscript to X). Every position in the
publishing field comes with a system of objectives and constraints that are, at least
negatively, defined and often reinforced by the dispositions of the agents involved (and
these dispositions, in turn, are more often than not suited to the houses position). This
system tends to guide its constituents toward a certain range, more or less wide, of
position-takings.
Between an objectivist and structure-oriented view of the publishing field and the
collective vision entertained by its players even the most aware there is a chasm, as is
amply illustrated by Michel Deguys illuminating account of his experience with the holiest
3
To evaluate the symbolic capital attached to the name of a particular house and consequently to all
of its members and authors, we will base ourselves on a number of factors contributing to the houses
reputation as belonging to the nobility of the profession: its antiquity (associated in every social
order with nobility) along with the quantity and the quality of its editorial resources, which are
measured by its number of consecrated, classic authors, and specifically its number of Nobel Prize
laureates.
Translation Studies
125
of holies of Frances literary temples, Gallimards Committee.4 This experience, one of

enchantment followed by disenchantment, is a vital part of a game that, like literary
production itself, relies on a quasi-religious belief. The structural constraints revealed by
objectivist analysis and its statistics have little value unless the critic is also willing to
acknowledge the perceptible underpinnings of a literary belief, the mythical attributes of
the great house: the salon oval, the Committee and its historical incarnations in
the form of familiar first names reserved for the inner circle Gaston, Claude, Antoine; the
selective use of tu instead of vous; the idiosyncrasies of interactions that are always
somewhat hierarchical and that constitute what the inner circle itself calls the court.
These chosen few are also the chosen victims of a symbolic violence that comes upon them
with the suddenness of a crisis and that they experience as a sort of rapture. Possessed by a
belief in the power of literature, they are inclined at least until the end when, like in a fairy
tale, the spell is broken to misperceive the power-defined social relations generated by
their belief: The committee members disappointment manifests as an endless suffering
every time the numbers fall far short of what they would be if the weight of editorial and
authorial prestige were a reliable indicator.5 This is a chasm that opens suddenly between
a reality seen painfully close-up and illusions seen only from afar, or better yet between the
disenchantment of banal reality and the fetishistic attachment to the illusio, to such sweet
nothings as the unforgettable and inimitable inflections of a Jean Paulhan or a Raymond
Queneau, or the almost indescribable mystery of the verre a simple drink in any
ordinary place shared by members of the Committee at meetings end and assuming
there the prestige and mysteries of a sort of literary Communion. This is a dual truth
experienced intermittently by the almost schizophrenically doubled personalities of those
who know and do not want to know, who build between themselves and institutional
realities a wall of denial reinforced both individually and collectively.
It is one thing to discover that the committee does not really exercise its official
function as decision-maker (this role belonging to the president and his secretariat, and
the truth being that to be published, a book should not pass through committee6), and
quite another to understand its true usefulness as a bank of social and symbolic capital for
maintaining the houses control over academies and literary prizes, as well as over radio,
television and print media. Many committee members are famous for their far-reaching
contacts (two of them are cited in an article on the thirty most powerful personalities in
publishing7 and are responsible for nearly half of all television, radio or newspaper
panels).8
Outside of Gallimard there is also Grasset, where literary director Yves Berger is very
influential in the major literary prize process; editorial director Jean-Paul Enthoven is also an
editorial advisor to Le Point; assistant literary director Manuel Carcassone writes for Le Point
and Le Figaro; Bernard-Henri Levy, who is a literary advisor as well as the director of the
Figures series and La Re`gle du jeu, has a column in Le Point and is omnipresent in the
4
Michel Deguy. 1988. Le Comite, Confessions dun lecteur de grande maison. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.
Michel Deguy, op. cit., 31. See also op. cit., 64 [all translations from French sources, unless
otherwise attributed, are my own, R.F.].
6
Michel Deguy, op. cit., 111.
7
Alexis Liebaert. 1998. Les Parrains de ledition. LEvenement du jeudi, March 19.
8
It is not lost on Michel Deguy (op. cit., 26) that his eviction from the Committee attests to the
true function of this body. As a reserved and esoteric author eschewing media attention, Deguy could
not contribute his share of the profits associated with the possession of a specific type of social
capital.
5
126
Pierre Bourdieu
media; Hector Bianciotti is a member of the Academie francaise; house-appointed literary

advisors Dominique Fernandez and Francois Nourissier write for Le Monde and Le Nouvel
Observateur respectively and sit on various juries, Fernandez on the Medicis and Nourissier on
the Goncourt. Nourissier is also a critic for Le Figaro Magazine and Le Point.
From a literary vantage point, this game of dual selves, authorized by the dual experience
of ideals coexisting with everything that overtly contradicts them like the replacement of
truly great authors responsible for the prestige of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise over the
past century and who continue today to ensure its readerships loyalty with the likes of
Labro, Gisbert, Deniau or Jardin9 becomes particularly evident in the letters (the first in
particular) written by committee member and reader/selector Jean-Marie Laclavetine to
author Jean Lahougue, who had been published previously but was now being served a
rejection. These letters proclaim as self-evident the tacit expectations that determine
whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected by the great publisher, expectations that
end up constituting the houses literary dogma, or worse yet its doxa:10 the solid
composition of nineteenth-century literature, its consistency of characterization,
fluidity and simplicity of narrative, the solitary act of creation free from contextual
constraints once designated as socio-economic-historical, life made accessible, readable, appreciable to the reader, etc. This is what has led to the rejection of theory,
referred to as the terrorism of the 60s by some publishers interviewed who are not always
commercially oriented and by critics who are not always conscious of being conservative
in their reviews. It is, furthermore, what has led to the most extraordinary of literary
restorations: the return to orthodoxy, understood here as the right (orthe`) belief (doxa)
and the belief of the right.11 It is necessary as well but this is the focus of the entire
present article to describe the mechanisms, and specifically the antagonisms, defining the
relationship between established houses and smaller, fledgling ones who, in order to
succeed, must return to the font of artistic belief, to the strictest observance of the religion
of literature, not only to make a name for themselves but also to sustain the precious
illusion that, at some level, the field still obeys the unwritten laws of a pure and nonpartisan art, that the spectacular logic of the mass market is not, as yet, all-powerful in
French publishing,12 that there are still, even at Gallimard, people who suffer (Deguys
word) to see what has become of Frances number one literature factory.13
It is telling that even the sharpest observer can remain oblivious to structural changes
occurring within the confines of his or her editorial microcosm (both exalted and inwardly
detested) and can end up holding familiar colleagues or administrative entities (the
secretariat in particular) responsible for new developments that are essentially without
agent. As is always the case with ordinary experience of the ordinary world, one may
sometimes catch intermittent, lightning-bolt glimpses of structural truths, yet ones
perception of cause and reason will remain unchanged: And fatal may well be the
strategy not Gallimards, but nobodys in particular, or perhaps that of the times that
causes a great publishing house to become a mutating counterfeit of its former self [ . . .], to
criverons et liserons en vingt
Jean Lahougue in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue. 1998. E
lettres. Seysel: Champ Vallon, 28.
10
Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op. cit., 8, 32, 56.
11
Jean-Marie Laclavetine in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op.cit., 32 (Literary
theorys most productive years [roughly 19551975] were the poorest for the production of novels.).
12
Jean Lahougue in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue, op. cit., 22.
13
9
Translation Studies
127
descend into the monotonous traffic of influential interests and journalism [ . . .], its former
cultural values becoming [ . . .] cultural-economic values; [ . . .] it is quite possible that no
monumental decision was ever made to adapt publishing to this era of massive print runs
[ . . .], stock turnover [ . . .], profiteering, de-skilling, and finally the scrapping of the poem
and the essay.14 And why do the beginnings of a structural analysis sketched out here by
Deguy serve neither to determine some course of action nor to understand the behavior of
the various players of the game? Perhaps because they are, indeed, mere beginnings of a
type of analysis that has never been considered a research objective in its own right, one to
be pursued with methodological rigor and using any and all available tools (this is the very
definition of scientific intention, which seems to be excluded from practice). They cannot,
therefore, provide as systematic an assessment of the game as could a well-conducted work
of scientific research, which might further serve to counteract the appearance of fatality
and therefore to overcome fatalism.15
The structure of the publishing field
To avoid surrendering to the fatalistic attitude that attributes any new development in
publishing to uncontrollable, large-scale economic forces (globalization created Frances
two major groups, for example), we have focused on the publishing field as a relatively
autonomous social space that is to say one capable of translating all external forces
(economic and political) according to its own particular logic in which the principles
governing editorial strategies become manifest. Because our objective was to analyze the
factors determining these strategies, it was important that we narrow our scope from all
publishers enjoying at least a nominal existence (attested by a label on a book cover
Fayard, Laffont, etc.) to include only those that were autonomous enough to have
developed their own editorial policy. What made the selection difficult is that publishers,
like all industrial and commercial enterprises,16 are united by a complex network of
interests, whether financial (through interest acquisitions of varying importance),
commercial (through print runs and advertising) or familial. Another difficulty was the
extremely secretive attitude of a professional milieu that is ill disposed to the prying
questions of outsiders and therefore disinclined to disclose either tactical information
regarding sales or descriptive information regarding the social characteristics of their
executives.17
Ultimately, we retained for the purposes of this study a sample of sixty-one publishers
of literature written in French or translated into French, all of which published between
July 1995 and July 1996, and of which fifty-six were treated as active and five as
supplementary elements in our multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Because it was
never our objective to compile an exhaustive inventory of French publishing, nor even to
analyze a cross section of this group, but rather to profile the structure of the literary
publishing field, we have excluded publishers specializing in the social sciences (keeping in
14

This said, we should be careful not to overestimate the practical effects of the type of knowledge
that scientific research provides, for it too can coexist with an intractable naivety.
16
See Pierre Bourdieu. 1996. The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Trans. Lauretta C.
Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
17
On this subject, and on other types of obstacles preventing the analysis of editorial strategies, see
Paul Dirkx. 1999. Les obstacles a` la recherche sur les strategies editoriales. Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales 126127: 7074.
15
128
Pierre Bourdieu
mind that most publishers of literature have catalogued works from this domain), new
paperback editions, fine arts, practical works, dictionaries or encyclopedias, schoolbooks,
book clubs (France-Loisirs, Le Grand Livre du mois). Excluded as well were those smallscale publishers who have not yet made a name for themselves and have yet to exercise any
real influence in the field (and that are difficult to analyze statistically due to insufficient
data).18
The degree of autonomy enjoyed by decision-makers is difficult to measure, especially
in the case of subsidiaries of larger companies, and varies over time. This is why we have
examined these subsidiaries in detail and on a case-by-case basis, relying on information
provided by interview respondents and documented sources in order to determine which of
the subsidiaries enjoy true editorial independence. Since the year of the study, 1996, major
financial transactions have shaken the world of publishing, the most important being the
acquisition of Havas by the Compagnie Generale des Eaux in 1998. A number of
institutions have witnessed similar modifications (the creation of Hachette Litteratures in
1997, Le Seuils acquisition of LOlivier, as well as acquisitions of other minority and
majority share-holdings, etc.). The picture becomes more complex still when we consider
that the larger and more compartmentalized a publisher becomes, the more extensive and
complex become its decision-making mechanisms (at least in appearance), until they end
up functioning as a sort of sub-field within which agents (financial, commercial, literary)
confront each other with various degrees of authority depending on the position of the
decision-making unit within the publishing field (and this authority itself can vary over
time due to changes in position and to the type of work in question).
The institutions under examination here are for the main part independent companies or
subsidiaries disposing of their own capital. These subsidiaries can take the form of independent
or limited liability companies (the small or medium-sized SARL or Societe a` responsabilite
limitee), general partnerships (e.g., Latte`s), limited partnerships (e.g., Le Seuil), or booksellers
such as Corti (Complexe and Zoe are foreign publishers that specialize in French-language
literature and market extensively in France, as is Noir sur Blanc, a Swiss company with a
bookseller and a small SARL in France). Five publishers have been treated in our multiple
correspondence analysis (MCA) as supplementary elements: Harlequin, which specializes in
popular literature in translation; Jai lu, which has a certain profile on the contemporary scene
for publishing first-edition novels, but which published mostly second (paperback) editions
between 19951996; les Presses de la Cite, which disappeared for a year and then reemerged as
part of Presses-Solar-Belfond; and finally Fixot and Payot. Fixot-Laffont (Bernard Fixot
ditions Robert Laffont in 1993) has been treated here both as a
became director of Nouvelles E
single group arising from the merger of Fixot and Laffont, and as the Laffont label, treated
here as an active element; the Fixot label, which only publishes essays, has been treated as a
supplementary element. By the same token, Rivages-Payot, the result of Payot-Frances
acquisition of Rivages, has been treated as a single group, both companies being highly
interdependent with regard to the distribution of editorial tasks and the movement of capital.
Of the two, the Rivages label has been treated as the active element, and Payot the
supplementary element. Series (LArpenteur, for example) have not been distinguished from
their respective publishing institutions.19
18
The sample is very similar, in terms of the major variables, to the entire profession as reflected by
conomiques). Despite
the statistics of the INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes E
domination by the two major groups, the publishing sector with its many barely independent
medium- and small-sized companies, many of them family run has grown considerably since the
1960s (the growth rate, 6.3% for 1996, exceeds the industrial average, investment in this sector being
rather weak), and sales figures continue to grow.
19
The Annex contains a detailed account of the choices made for each of these groups.
Translation Studies
Figure 1.
129
Cloud of pertinent characteristics distributed along axes 1 and 2 (fifty-nine active modalities).
The construction of pertinent characteristics20

Sixteen variables, divided into five groups, were chosen to construct the field of publishers.
20
Livre-Hebdos supplement to number 216 (30 September 1996) lists a total of 1,002 francophone
publishing houses, with their foundation dates, executives, total workforce, distributors, specialties
and the number of titles published per annum. The catalogue of the Salon du livre (tome 1, 1997, 39
626) demonstrates a similar state of affairs. The information provided by these two documents was
completed and sometimes corrected with reference to available internet databases or by direct enquiry
to the publishers themselves. We consulted the annual publications and statistics of the Societe
Nationale de lEdition (SNE), and the chamber of commerce provided us with structural and
biographical information. There is also the Documentation francaise, which suggested a number of
helpful sources, specifically Janine Cardona and Chantal Lacroix. 1996. Statistiques de la culture.
Chiffres cles. Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 5970.
130
Pierre Bourdieu
Legal and financial status (Figures 1 and 3)

The variable of legal status is presented here in three categories: publicly traded companies
(societe anonyme [n 24]), limited liability companies (SARL [n 23]), and others (limited
partnerships, general partnerships, foreign companies, etc. [n 9]).
The variable of company size an index arrived at by combining the publishers social
capital, its turnover and, to a lesser extent, its number of managers divides the sample into
five categories from the largest to the smallest: n14, n12, n12, n8 and n6. For four
companies, the index could not be determined due to lack of information.
Third on the list of variables is the companys number of salaried employees, presented here
in five categories: from 1 to 3 salaried employees (15); from 4 to 9 (14); from 10 to 40 (11); from
40 to 100 (6); from 100 to 400 (5); for five companies, this data could not be obtained.
Financial or commercial dependency on other publishers

This is a variable that accounts for publishers investment in other publishers and was
constructed with the following two modalities: publishers that count another publisher among
the shareholders (20); publishers that have no other publisher among the shareholders (36).
Another variable divides the group according to the distributor (which sometimes has
control over a portion of the publishers capital), resulting in the following seven categories:
Harmonia Mundi (11); Centre de Diffusion de lEdition (CDE) (5); Le Seuil (11); Hachette (9);
Interforum-Dil (7); others: Ulysse and Belles Lettres (11); Flammarion-Gallimard (2).
Weight on the market

Because we were unable to gain a measure of these publishers commercial success from their
average print runs, these numbers not being disclosed, we attempted to create an approximate
index based on bestseller lists (from LExpress and Livres-Hebdo), accounting for each
publishers rank in each of the lists during the year of the study. The publisher in first place
received 15 points; in second place 14 points, and so on. To create the index, we took the
average of the two lists and arrived at the following five modalities: 0 citation (28); 1 to 11 (8);
14 to 100 (8); 100 to 300 (6); more than 400 (6).
A publishers commercial strength can also be gauged by its ability to obtain national prizes
for its authors: the variable has published a prize-winner was determined on the basis of the
six French national book prizes commonly considered to be the most prestigious (Goncourt,
Femina, Medicis, Interallie, grand prix du Roman de lAcademie Francaise and the prix
Renaudot), and resulted in the following two modalities: yes (13); no (43). The latter variable is
complemented by another: has published a jury member of a major book prize, resulting in
the following modalities: yes (12); no (44).
Because a publishers ability to obtain funding from government sources can also contribute
to its market strength, we created an index based on the list of French publishers who, from
1993 to 1996, received funding for translation from the Ministry of Cultures department of
literacy (direction du livre et de la lecture). The index also drew on the list of publishers who,
from 1990 to 1997, received funding for translation from the Foreign Affairs Ministrys
department of culture, science and technology (direction generale des affaires culturelles
scientifiques et techniques). Both lists were based on the number of funded titles. Based on
these two figures, then, is the variable ministry funding in five categories, in thousands of
francs: 0 KF (25); from 0.5 to 4 KF (16); from 4 to 8 KF (6); from 8 to 20 KF (5); more than 30
KF (4).
Symbolic capital
This can be evaluated following a number of indices: antiquity and location, editorial prestige
(accumulated symbolic capital) and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Translation Studies
131
Four distinct periods configure the variable of foundation date: from 17081945 (19);
19461975 (11); 19761989 (17); 19901995 (9).
To evaluate accumulated symbolic capital, we created an index based on Joseph Jurts list of
contemporary French authors,21 in which authors are classed according to the number of
citations that they receive in a corpus of twenty-eight textbooks on literature, dictionaries and
other histories of literature published since the Second World War. After determining the
eighty most frequently cited authors from the list, we gave a point to each house per text
published from any one of these authors. Hence the variable Indice Jurt (Jurt Index), in three
categories: 3 (44), 100 to 350 (7) and more than 350 (5).
The variable Nobel francais is based on the publication of works written by French
winners of the Nobel Prize since 1930, with two modalities: yes (10); no (46).
As for location, publishers may be situated in the fifth, sixth or seventh arrondissements in
Paris (29); in other arrondissements on the Left Bank (4); on the Right Bank (9); in the
provinces (9); or outside of France (5).
Importance of foreign literature

We constructed another variable to represent the percentage of translated titles from all titles
published: from 1 to 5% (17), from 5 to 10% (12), from 10 to 25% (16) and more than 25% (19);
for two publishers this information could not be obtained.
The variable has published a foreign Nobel Prize winner is an indicator of both financial
and symbolic capital and has two modalities: yes (14); no (42).
The language from which a publisher translates the most often is an indicator of its standing
in the sector. For this reason, we have created a variable allowing us to determine the positions
of different languages within the sample. Ten language groups were created based on the fifty
publishers for whom this information was provided. Statistics on geographical and linguistic
affinities helped us put together a table (Do they publish a particular language?), which then
allowed us to create the variable language in six modalities: English and rare languages (5);
English only (9); English, European languages and others (16); English and European
languages (7); no English but others (9); no language (8); no response (2).
These data were analyzed using specific multiple correspondence analysis, a variant of MCA
allowing for the treatment of modalities in active questions as supplementary.22 The figures
present a Euclidean cloud of the fifty-nine active modalities, which are indicated on axes 1 and
2 of Figure 1 and axes 1 and 3 of Figure 3, as well as a cloud of the fifty-six active publishers on
the same axes of Figures 2 and 4 respectively. To encode the data, we used SPSS 8.0. 1F and
ADDAD 97L8 software;23 EyeLID 2.0 software was used for postfactorial investigation.24 The
modalities contributing only weakly to the axes of Figures 1 and 3 are in small characters;
publishers contributing weakly to the axes of Figures 2 and 4 are also in small characters.
21
Joseph Jurt, Martin Ebel and Ursula Erzgraber. 1989. Franzosischsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur
19181986/87. Eine bibliographische Bestandsaufnahme der Originaltexte und der deutschen
Ubersetzungen. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
22
We present here only a preliminary and provisional MCA developed initially with Salah Bouhedja
and then more systematically, and with more precise data encoding, with Brigitte Le Roux and Henry
Rouanet. The complete results of this second phase of research will be published at a later date, along
with an explanation of our methodology: Pierre Bourdieu, Brigitte Le Roux and Henry Rouanet,
LEdition litteraire en France, une mise en oeuvre raisonnee de lanalyse geometrique des donnees (work
in progress).
23
ADDAD (Association pour le developpement et la diffusion de lanalyse des donnees), 151
boulevard de lHopital, 75013 Paris.
24
See Jean-Marc Bernard, Robert Baldy and Henry Rouanet. 1988. The language for interrogating
data LID. In Data analysis and informatics, ed. Edwin Diday, 46168. Amsterdam: Elsevier/North
Holland.
132
Pierre Bourdieu
Figure 2. Cloud of fifty-six publishers distributed along axes 1 and 2 according to their rank in
ascending hierarchical classification (AHC).
Figure 2 distributes the publishers of the study on axis 1 from the largest, oldest and most
prestigious houses which, by the fact that they have accumulated great financial and
symbolic capital, are in a position (as can be seen, among other things, by their place in
bestseller lists) to dominate the market by various means, such as their control over
national literary prizes and the press to the smallest and newest: Chambon, Climats and
Zoe, which dispose of scant economic resources and almost no symbolic capital (at least
symbolic capital that is institutionally recognized) and which virtually never appear on
bestseller lists. Occupying the middle space between these extremes are the houses
displaying one or more properties that signal a potential for advancement to more
dominant positions: the publication of national book-prize winners or participation in
prize juries, for example.
Translation Studies
133
Figure 3. Cloud of pertinent characteristics distributed along axes 1 and 3 (fifty-nine active
modalities).
This ascending classification25 helps us distinguish a leading rank of seven publishers:

Le Seuil, Gallimard, Flammarion, Grasset, Minuit, Albin Michel and Laffont (Figures 2
and 4), which stand out from all the others by being public limited companies (except Le
Seuil); as well as in their foundation dates (prior to 1946); the size of their personnel (over
100 salaried employees, except Grasset [n70] and Minuit [n11]); their index of
importance (all scoring 5, except Grasset and Minuit); their number of translated titles
(under 10); the amount of funding they receive for translations (over 30 KF, except Albin
Michel [17 KF], Flammarion [26 KF] and Laffont [15 KF]); and their symbolic capital
25
On the methodology of Euclidean classification, see Brigitte le Roux and Henry Rouanet. 1993.
Analyse des donnees multidimensionnelles. Paris: Dunod, 120. In English, see Brigitte le Roux and
Henry Rouanet. 2004. Geometric data analysis: From correspondence analysis to structured data
analysis, ed. Patrick Suppes. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
134
Pierre Bourdieu
Figure 4. Cloud of fifty-six publishers distributed along axes 1 and 3 according to their rank in
ascending hierarchical classification (AHC).
(over 350 for five of them, zero for Albin Michel, and 127 for Laffont). Moreover, all have
published at least one French Nobel Prize winner (except Laffont and Le Seuil), one or
more foreign Nobel Prize winner and one major national prize winner (Femina, Goncourt,
etc.), as well as one or more jury members for these prizes. All have a high index of
commercial success owing to their presence in bestseller lists (over 400, except Flammarion
[200] and Minuit [60]), and none (except Grasset and Laffont) have other publishers among
their shareholders. With the exception of Minuit, all translate from English and other
Western European languages, and all are situated in Paris, five of them in the fifth, sixth, or
seventh arrondissements.
The secondary ranks are mainly made up of smaller limited liability companies created
after 1946, having few salaried employees (under ten), little symbolic capital and scant
commercial success. Standing out from this group is a class of very small houses (n19):
ge dhomme, Chambon, Champvallon, Climats, Complexe, Des Femmes, Hamy, Nadeau,
A
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135
Noir sur Blanc, Ombre, Picquier, Jean-Michel Place, Presence africaine, Salvy, Le Temps
quil fait, Verdier, Virag, Zoe and Zulma. These are smaller limited liability companies
(SARL) situated in the provinces or outside of France. They are absent from the bestseller
lists and do not win prizes. It is in the area of translation, however, that their editorial
strategies differ significantly: fully half of them (n9) do not translate from English and
none of them translates from English exclusively. Between this class of very small houses
and the top ranks is a middle class of medium-sized Parisian houses founded after 1946.
They are companies of moderate importance half of them SARL companies having
more than ten salaried employees and translating almost exclusively from English.
These small, innovative publishers may not exercise much influence in the field, but
they are nonetheless its raison detre. They justify its existence, represent its ideals. For this
reason, they play a crucial role in its transformation. Deprived of resources, they are in a
way condemned to a strict observance of universally proclaimed norms. As the owner of a
small publishing house in the south of France puts it: We cant make waves, we dont have
the means. We are virtuous by obligation.26 And she is exemplary both in her expression
of the sentiment shared by all small-time publishers condemned to literary virtue, and in
her articulation of worldviews and strategies: to survive in a literary milieu that she
detests, she scouts for authors who conform to her expectations of literature. She
distrusts reader reports and reads herself as many manuscripts as [she] can, refuse[s] to
see authors before having read their texts, describes herself as fanatical about
translations, etc. With respect to the prevailing perception of her profession, she
characterizes her own work in negative terms. I dont feel like real publisher, she
explains: [My contacts] arent powerful people. I dont publish journalists who are going
to go off and write articles afterwards.
Located for the main part in the provinces and run largely by women with extensive
knowledge of literature, these small-time publishers lack selecting and evaluating
authorities such as reading committees, which are often fertile ground for accumulating
social capital in the form of contacts useful for promoting authors and books. They are
absent (or excluded) from all aspects of the commercial publishing game: they can neither
compete for literary prizes, advertise to any great extent, nor cultivate contacts with high
society or with journalistic networks (most do not have press officers), nor compete for the
purchase of foreign rights for international bestsellers. They publish far fewer Anglophone
authors, even though translations constitute a sizeable portion of their list (more than a
quarter), and herein lies what is undeniably the greatest virtue that they make of necessity:
they make use of their talent and pioneer audacity to discover minor authors writing in
minor languages (Catalan, Brazilian, Korean, Hungarian, etc.), authors who are less
expensive to buy in but far more interesting from a literary point of view. (It should be
noted, by the way, that they may rely on close association with smaller bookstores which, in
the field structure of bookselling, occupy a position of homology to their own: We
count on bookstores almost more than on critics, confirms a member of Cortis staff.
These bookstores often defend small publishers and avant-garde authors with an almost
missionary dedication, and their networks of representatives provide a very effective
counterweight to the commercial strength and advertising resources of the major houses.)
A rigorous analysis of the publishing field should account for those agents who have no official
status but who nonetheless help the field to function by using their influence over literatures
26
Contrary to our custom in quoting extracts from interviews, we could not give detailed
characteristics of our interviewees for fear of disclosing their identities.
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Pierre Bourdieu
consecration and circulation. These are the taste-makers, influential critics who are often
associated with particular publishers a recent trend in the business is to assign some critic of
importance the direction of a series or some other institutional responsibility like a reading
committee or with personalities of influence in the milieu, such as those discussed in a
recent article in the Grasset-owned Magazine litteraire, which is eminently suited for describing
the network of power relations in which Grasset is a cornerstone. Along with editors like Yves
Berger, Claude Cherki, Claude Durand, Olivier Cohen, Jean-Claude Fasquelle, Francis
Esmenard, Charles-Henri Flammarion, Bernard Fixot, Antoine Gallimard, Jerome Lindon,
Olivier Orban and Jean-Marc Roberts, the article listed personalities who exercise a
tremendous promotional influence by hosting television panels (Guillaume Duran, Bernard
Pivot), or who have journalistic/editorial influence (Jean-Paul Enthoven, editorial director of
Grasset, editorial advisor to Le Point and director of the Biblio-Essais series at Livre de
Poche). There is also Franz-Olivier Gisbert, director of Le Figaro and Le Figaro Magazine,
biographer of Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac, novelist, and for the past year host of a
literary TV program; Bernard-Henri Levy, a loyal associate of Jean-Claude Fasquelle,
CEO of Grasset and director of a number of magazines such as Le Magazine litteraire; or
Pierre Nora, who heads a series at Gallimard and directs Le debat; Angelo Rinaldi; and, last
but not least, Philippe Sollers, leading light of the publishing world.27
To sum up, what we see emerging here, in terms of the global volume of retained capital, is
the opposition between large, old and venerable enterprises like Gallimard, which
concurrently retain all forms of economic, commercial and symbolic capital, and those
smaller fledgling enterprises that are in the beginning stages of accumulation and are
almost completely deprived of all forms of capital, even if they retain a small, incipient
amount of symbolic capital in the form of esteem or admiration from a small number of
discoverers: avant-garde critics and writers, enlightened booksellers and informed
readers. This incipient symbolic capital cannot be ascertained using available indicators
because it accumulates very slowly, in a way proportionate to the growth of the fund, the
publishers true wealth amassed from a core number of long-term writers. Moreover, the
more palpable signs of consecration, like the Nobel Prize or the status of classic
conferred by the academic community, come about only after the work of conversion
carried out by the writers themselves as they are helped along by their entourage of
discoverers. Like all such work, this takes a good deal of time.
Axis 2 of Figures 1 and 2 distinguishes the houses according to the structure of their
capital, in other words according to the relative weights of their financial capital (and
commercial strength) and their symbolic capital obtained from recent or present activities
(as opposed to the capital measured by the Jurt index, which reflects what they have
accumulated since their foundation).28 Publishers are distributed on this second axis
according to the form and degree of their dependency (financial or distributional) on other
publishers. There is a contrast here between independent houses, either large or small, and
subsidiaries that depend on higher authorities or organisms (like the Centre de diffusion de
ledition, Hachette) to distribute their publications. Older and largely dependent mediumsized houses tend to dispose of an economic capital far surpassing their current symbolic
capital (even if they retain vestiges of an illustrious past). Firm in their resolve to publish
27
Alexis Liebaert, loc. cit.

Following the lists that formed the basis of the Jurt index and that stop in 1987, we were able to
determine that most of the symbolic capital for these houses was accumulated before the Second
World War. Therefore, if we took into account only those famous authors first published after 1945,
the capital of the leading houses would be more comparable to that of the smaller, more recent
houses, but would not garner the same esteem and respect from the avant-garde critics and
connoisseurs.
28
Translation Studies
137
more or less exclusively commercial texts, they differ from all other houses: from the
leading and fully consecrated ones on the one hand, and from the smaller and deprived
ones on the other. As for the smaller houses, only the well-trained eye of the discoverer
can foresee which might gravitate toward the type of literature that accumulates great
symbolic capital and eventually commercial capital, especially when the school system
begins to collaborate and which will simply grow economically using strategies that are
more or less obviously commercial.
Because they are subsidiaries of larger groups (other publishers are often among their
shareholders), these houses are in good economic standing but are weak in terms of
symbolic capital, a situation that makes their overall capital structure dissymmetrical
(unlike the houses situated at either extreme of the first axis, which manage more or less to
balance both types of capital). Division into four classes allowed us to distinguish one class
made up of Actes Sud, Belfond, Calmann-Levy, De Fallois, Denoel, Fayard, Latte`s, Plon,
POL, Rivages, and Stock, which are for the most part subsidiaries with the status of
limited company. All were founded before 1990, have between ten and 100 salaried
employees, are of moderate importance and have had great success on bestseller lists. This
class corresponds more or less to the group of houses located at the bottom of the figure.
Almost burdened by their prestigious past, they are, to quote a connoisseur, the soft
underbelly of editorial production. They yield the occasional delectable morsel Plons
long-standing and prestigious collections of foreign literature Terre humaine and Feux
croises are a good example but for the main part produce a literature lacking originality,
a commercial literature that passes itself off as innovative only by appealing to the
allodoxia.
The third axis contrasts publishers who publish little or no translated literature, mostly
from minority and rare languages, and those who are frequently forced by the market to
translate the sort of literature mainly Anglophone that more or less guarantees
commercial success (Figures 3 and 4).
Positions and position-takings
In view of the structural constraints imposed by the field, the autonomy of the institutional
mechanisms of decision-making seems limited indeed. So limited, in fact, that one could
easily conclude that any editorial position-taking that is, any adopted stance or
strategy is the direct consequence of a publishers position in the field. And indeed there
is no doubt that constraints inscribed in the field structure tend to orient publishers of
comparable position toward similar editorial policies (this is the case for translation,
notably), and even to create a real sense of solidarity between them, at least those at the
dominated end of the field. Yet in fact there is a factor that mediates between the
constraints of the field and any position taken: the dispositions of the agents involved,
agents who have been oriented by their understanding of these inscribed constraints
toward a specific knowledge of the fields objective probabilities, of their own possibilities,
their room for maneuver, their chances.
This is why we would have liked to include more distinctive characteristics of the
publishers alongside those described earlier: objective characteristics such as social origin,
educational capital and social trajectory, as well as other, less definable ones such as ethnic
disposition or specific competencies in the literary, technical and commercial aspects of the
profession. All of this information is concealed, as many observers have concluded, behind
a formidable veil of secrecy. It may nonetheless be possible, on the basis of document
analysis and ethnographic inquiry, to establish a rough correlation between a chief editors
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Pierre Bourdieu
characteristics and those of his or her publishing house, as well as a summary

understanding of this correlations logic: smaller houses are more likely to be headed by
younger people and women, originating from a higher social class, benefiting from an
extensive background in literature and demonstrating a great intellectual and emotional
investment in their work; the major houses, on the other hand, are more likely to be left to
heirs or technicians who are either trained on the job or legitimized by the occasional
university degree. While positions in new houses tend to be adapted to the personalities
occupying them, re-made in their image so to speak, those in older and more established
companies tend to mold or produce their occupants through inheritance (the profession
includes many heirs sons, daughters, nephews or nieces) and co-opting, both of which
have the effect of producing a chief editor in the houses image.
Another characteristic distinguishing between houses is a specific competency vital to
success in the profession. A books dual nature as both a signifier and a commodity, a
symbolic and an economic entity requires an editor to have a dual character, one that can
reconcile art and money, love of literature and the pursuit of profit, by devising strategies
situated somewhere between the two extremes of cynical subservience and heroic indifference
to the houses economic needs. The publishers competency that of any professional in the
business of books is in this important sense made up of two fundamentally antagonistic
aptitudes that must be harmonized: the literary aptitudes of reading and the technicalcommercial aptitudes of counting. Ideal publishers should be at once inspired
speculators, risk takers and meticulous accountants who may even be somewhat miserly.
Depending on the positions that they occupy in the field structure (determined, to re-state it
broadly, by the distribution of economic and symbolic capital), on the trajectories by which
they came to occupy these positions and on their dispositions, publishers can be people of
commerce much like art dealers. Immersed in the anti-economic economy of pure art, they
will lean toward one or the other pole, combine more or less successfully these two passions
that are, from a sociological standpoint, as incompatible as fire and water: the pure love of art
and the mercenary love of money.29 By one or the other of these two passions and at different
moments, all forms of dual consciousness and double play will be set in motion. The
occasional economic extravagance on a non-commercial work, for example, will serve as
an alibi for the commercial publishers otherwise mercantile policies. The pure publishers
mercenary mindset, his or her submission to market necessities, can then be justified by
invoking the literary audacities that it allegedly makes possible.
In a way, it is during the houses heroic beginnings that the choice is easiest to make
because, all things considered, there really is no choice. As the avant-garde publisher cited
above puts it: we are virtuous by obligation, a statement corroborated by the translation
of foreign works. According to one literary agent, the cheap*, crowd-pleasing books are
very expensive because everyone in the world wants them, because they are worldwide
successes. On the other hand, you have good novels and very good authors who are
unlikely to sell in large numbers, but who offer quality. And these books are often taken on
by smaller publishers who accept them because of their quality. [ . . .] The financial,
economic or commercial side of things is not their priority. [ . . .] Even if they wanted to
and I dont think it is their mission or their direction but even if they wanted to, they
29
On the editor as a type of art dealer, see Pierre Bourdieu. 1996. Flaubert, analyst of Flaubert: A
reading of sentimental education. In The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Trans.
Susan Emanuel, 343. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
*
Translators note: English in source.
Translation Studies
139
wouldnt be able to, given the kind of money that has to be fronted for people like John
Grisham or Stephen King; they just wouldnt be contenders at that level because they dont
have the means. So more often than not, they rely on books of quality. It is clear, then,
that they could not even if they wanted to, and furthermore they would not want to,
because they would not occupy the position that they do, a position in which they have
placed themselves voluntarily, if they did not have the requisite disposition, the virtue
required to accept the necessities (the same observer remarks, for example, that it is often
women [he names Viviane Hamy, Joelle Losfeld and Jacqueline Chambon], who run these
types of houses, the real houses).
Things are relatively simple at the other pole as well, for those editors who are
ditions
commercial through and through, editors like Bernard Fixot (CEO of Nouvelles E
Robert Laffont-Fixot-Seghers, a subsidiary of Groupe de la Cite) who carries out without
fuss his duties as publisher,* as he puts it, and who declares in plain language the economic
reality of his profession. Coming from a background far removed from the more cultivated,
literary circles, and reaching the top of a major group after climbing through every echelon
of the fields commercial sector (from a storekeeper at Gallimard, he became a vendor for
Hachette, then a representative for Garnier, a commercial director at Gallimard and finally
the founder of his own house), he had difficulty fitting in with the publishing world, which
looked down on him he left the sixth arrondissement for the Right Bank, the business
district as something of a black sheep. His leaning is toward a sort of literary populism
mixed with anti-intellectualist sentiment, which prompts him to cater first and foremost
(and with some sincerity) to the widest possible readership. He runs what he refers to as a
business like any other and uses the methods of any ordinary marketing director who
mobilizes every available managerial and commercial technique marketing, advertising,
bargain pricing, etc. to maximize profits. Despite a number of token concessions to the
values of the milieu the concern he expressed for Julliard, which he took over in 1995, and
the Pavillons series, for example; or his effort to clear his name by creating two other
series, Bleu noir and Rideau rouge he continues to compete for international
bestsellers, to hit hard with one shocking publication after another (stories of kidnapping,
rape, incest, true-life stories of transsexuals, etc.), pulp fiction and all manner of sensational
narratives designed to pull in high retail and foreign-rights profits.30
This first-generation publisher with his on-the-job training, this salesman with no
scruples but with consummate expertise in all commercial aspects of the business, is more
than justified in calling himself a professional, yet at the same time he cannot help but
come across as limited, handicapped even, amputated of the vital literary dimension
informing a publishers strategies. In the eyes of an old school literary agent, he
doubtless appears to be among these people who are quote unquote amateurs: there
is a contingent of editors who are running publishing houses and who are, at the risk of
sounding malicious, almost illiterate; the publishers dont know how to read, which is of
*
English in source. Presumably, Fixot has switched to English to invest his position with a pragmatic
or commercial connotation.
30
Bernard Fixot markets his bestsellers internationally: La Reine des bandits apparently sold 600,000
copies in Japan; Jamais sans ma fille 3.4 million copies within five years of its first publication
including all editions. To generate buzz around his books, which remain largely unknown or ignored
by literary critics, he has developed strategies to compensate for a complete absence of the type of
symbolic and social capital possessed by a number of larger houses, strategies that require only
money to implement: targeted advertising (pre-publication, for example in a womens magazine),
massive advertising campaigns on Europe 1, an invitation to Jean-Pierre Foucaults Sacree Soiree.
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Pierre Bourdieu
course the first thing any publisher should know. What they can do, however, is count.
They cant read, but they can count [ . . .]. For me, its hard to see publishing in the hands of
people who [ . . .] really dont like books, who would be as much at home heading a
pharmaceutical company. And then the absolute limit is reached when publishing houses
follow the trend arising in the United States and pass into the hands of conglomerates
that have nothing to do with publishing banks, oil companies, electricity companies.
And what of those heirs who, because of their houses evolution and that of the
publishing field in general, find themselves resorting to strategies strikingly similar to those
employed by newcomers with no literary education? Although the risks involved for
major houses are insubstantial compared to those run by smaller ones, commercialism is
most certainly a factor for the long-standing and prestigious publisher too, brought
inevitably by its accountants, finance and marketing people into the race for profits, for
bestsellers: Gallimard how should I put it? has enjoyed its status as the Queen Victoria
of French publishing it was the first, the greatest, and internationally the most famous
publisher for a long, long time [ . . .] and now today, to be up to date and competitive, to
remain in the leading ranks, [ . . .] it has to publish books that sell, so the more negative
commercial and popular side of publishing has scored a victory there as well.
Explaining what could be called a publishers style determined by both the editors
habitus and constraints inscribed in his or her houses position in the field as revealed by its
list may perhaps be a matter of reconstructing, as if for a person, the formula generating
its decisions. Gallimard displays the character of nobility on the decline. Wishing to
concede nothing of its rank while at the same time adapting itself to compete for
international bestsellers, it is a house that knows how to mobilize effective yet temperate
modernizing strategies allowing it to reap both commercial and literary benefits. It knows
how to offset commercial decisions with a number of heroic discoveries from the pool of
minor writers and languages, and how to manage its funds skillfully through the
rejuvenating effect of re-editions (paperback series for adults or young readers) that often
involve little more than a simple change in layout.
Without doubt the most telling indicator of the correlation between the structure of
positions and that of position-takings31 is that a houses growth in literary capital is
virtually always accompanied by an accrual of commercial criteria and objectives, the
powers-that-be managing at best to delay for a short time the inevitable slide toward the
commercial pole. This is why certain avant-garde houses on their way to consecration, like
Minuit, distinguish themselves from all other publishers in the field: strategies of resistance
stemming from an ascetic aristocratism have helped Minuit stand firm first in the absence
of success, and then against the threat of success, making it one of the few publishers that
have managed to avoid making compromises for the editorial economy;32 it stands
31
To verify the correlation between the space of positions and that of position-takings, we reviewed
537 texts from 510 authors translated into French between July 1995 and July 1996 and published by
the houses of our sample, and established the following variables for each of the titles: genre (novel,
short story, narrative or tale), source and target publisher, source language (for Anglophone texts, we
distinguished between English and American), the translators name, the authors name and
gender, the source texts original publication date and that of the French translation (1995 or 1996),
critics evaluations, prizes won, the number of pages, the total number of foreign authors published
by the house in question, the number of authors of the same nationality and language. The research
required to carry this project through proved much too large, and in the end it had to be abandoned.
32
Michel Deguy, op. cit., 18: With the exception of Editions de Minuit, which has remained faithful
to its clandestine beginnings.
Translation Studies
141
opposed in its strategies both to the smaller, avant-garde houses newly integrated into
the field and to the more prestigious, long-standing houses like Gallimard. Long
canonized themselves, these houses canonize academic authors who seek to perpetuate
the most traditional of literary forms, or young authors who either identify
spontaneously with traditional models or are uninformed enough to consider the older
house a bastion of avant-garde writing. Consecrated authors discovered by the house in
its remote beginnings (Samuel Beckett and Claude Simon), or authors initiating new
generic lines like the nouveau roman with its uniform book covers and its
promotional campaign led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, can only increase the symbolic
capital of the house as well as its power to attract educated readers (as the sales figures
attest) and potential authors. These authors may continue in the style of the new lines
as they become popularized enough to achieve a measure of commercial success. Having
achieved fame and critical recognition, some newcomers may reap the benefits offered
by the house (often in the form of trivial national prizes) even if their work has strayed
from its avant-garde origins or, put more subtly, has become little more than an
attenuated or watered-down variant of the rebellious break with tradition for which it
was originally praised. The house thus paradoxically becomes a victim of its own desire
for social rejuvenation. It remains to be seen whether a small house, having reached the
summit of consecration, can persevere in the combination of audacity and caution that
has allowed it to participate in the class of small businesses in economic terms very
few salaried employees, an ostentatious self-exclusion from mass marketing and
advertising, a relatively small list, the refusal to translate or compete for international
bestsellers while participating in the class of the greatest houses in all other terms,
including sales success ensured by no other means than the consecration that its label
confers on even its boldest ventures.
The dynamics of the field and emerging trends in publishing production
The dynamics of the field cannot be understood as an evolution of separate and parallel
histories as they are described in the histories of the publishing business and might
spontaneously be cast in terms of the convenient biological metaphor of birth, youth,
maturity and decay. Their principle becomes manifest in the structure of the field: it is the
newcomers who generate movement; they make themselves competitive through a regime
of self-denial and self-exploitation. Their very existence rescues the literary establishment
from stasis. They return to the fount of literary belief, reject ascetically anything evoking
the economic dimension of literary production (through the choice of blank covers without
illustrations, for example), whether it be advertising or marketing. In so doing, they
relegate the old avant-garde, by now consecrated or soon to be consecrated, to a past
characterized as depasse and declasse, out of the game for the time being at least. Or
into a past characterized as classical, both removed from the game and granted the
status of timeless.
This is why, in our spatiotemporal conception of the field, the different synchronic
positions correspond to different moments in the houses diachronic trajectories
(synchronized artificially by the spatial representation here). The future of the newcomers
is still undecided. On the basis of the few objective indicators available, it is not easy to
foresee whether they are fated to disappear more or less quickly or whether they will
survive and evolve in the direction of commercial success or indeed of literary
consecration, perhaps with commercial success as an added benefit although there
would be little risk in predicting a happy economic fate for a house like Carrie`re, which
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Pierre Bourdieu
published the bestseller of all bestsellers, Paulo Coelho translated from Brazilian, and is
run by the heiress to a great commercial house.33 Or perhaps a more difficult future, at
least over the short term, for discoverers like Ibolya Virag.
Survival, as the high number of disappearing houses indicates, is an accomplishment
guaranteed only to those who are able to respect the fundamental law of the field: the
combination of literary competency and economic realism. This is why a number of subtly
diversified strategies can be found among very small, hyper-specialized publishers, strategies
allowing them to gain the advantages associated with control over a niche market where
there is little competition (the area of language-related books, neglected by the large houses,
is one such niche) while avoiding the limitations associated with extreme specialization.
Philippe Picquier, for example, is a specialist in East Asian languages Korean, Vietnamese,
Chinese, Japanese and tempers his bolder ventures as the head of a house specializing in
experimental literature with a number of publications that nevertheless afford him a
measure of commercial success within his field: classics of Chinese or Japanese eroticism,
detective novels, Chinese or Japanese classics and popular novels consecrated by cinematic
adaptation.
If the future of small, fledgling publishers is unclear, and if the logic of their current
choices leaves more than one critic perplexed, it is not only because of the uncertainty
inherent in any discoverers risky strategies but also because a book, as an ambiguous
economic and symbolic object, lends itself particularly well to the cultural allodoxia, that
fundamental miscomprehension surrounding the identity and the symbolic status of a
cultural object, and a miscomprehension that results in cheap reproductions and
imitations being invested with a kind of authenticity. Beyond writers themselves,
who may well, as was discussed earlier, be deceived by an outdated image of a publisher
(the Gallimard of Georges Lambrichs and the series Le Chemin, for example), the
allodoxia can also pull in critics, who also often fall victim to the hysteresis effect, as well
as publishers who think they see signs of the avant-garde in a work that is really nothing
more than an imitation.
Todays players of the literary game, specifically authors and editors, are especially
susceptible to this illusion because they are so well aware of the adventures of avantgarde houses. Just as todays most cunning authors indulge in inconsequential erotic
sacrileges to delude themselves into thinking they are braving the censors, imitating the
great heresies of the past, some editors are savvy enough in the art of double play to
produce, on their own and others behalf, more or less convincing simulations or
simulacra of avant-garde works with the complicity, and therefore gratitude, of other
editors, critics and amateurs. These are all the more complicit, all the more inclined
toward the allodoxia because they have been educated in the tradition of modernity
and want above all else to be discoverers capable of avoiding the errors of the
conservative past.
Certain publishers new to the game may try to reconcile strategies that would be
irreconcilable if the literary field were more autonomous: those geared toward a long-term
investment in writers promising long and productive careers, and those geared toward
more immediately profitable literary production over the short term. They are supported in
this ambition by a type of modernized marketing based on the methodical use of the
allodoxia. They ally themselves with certain journalists who agree, in the name of
generational solidarity, to rethink the conflicts of the literary world in terms of the
33
Anne Carrie`re is the daughter of Robert Laffont and was for a time director of press services for
Laffont.
Translation Studies
143
dubious notion of generation,34 which is less an instrument of knowledge than a weapon

for diminishing the status of literary forebears. Through this type of alliance, they claim to
provide young readers, validated and all-validating on the basis of their youth alone,
with young and trendy authors able to break with the previous generations esoteric
preoccupations. It is telling that the critics concerned with those emerging trends in literary
commerce that are shaking up the publishing field have been watching the Flammarion
subsidiary Jai lu, along with its literary director Marion Mazauric, very closely.
Mazaurics strategy has been to assemble authors scattered between many different
publishers in order to provide a new demographic of readers between the ages 20 and 30
readers of paperback editions for the most part with bargain books from 19 to 25 francs
(Raphael Sorin, literary critic for LExpress and editor for Flammarion, used the review
Perpendiculaire as a forum to promote Mazaurics initiative): The consequences of this
operation are far from clear. These publishers may be reprising the anti-establishment
rhetoric of May 1968, but unlike the youth back then, todays rebels are well versed in the
dialectics of marketing, and this has the effect of weakening the list.35 The result is a
marketplace saturated with fashionable cliches36 circulating among trendy writers, urbane
journalists and modernist editors, cliches that can be found as easily at LOlivier as at
Fayard or Fixot, at POL as at Flammarion or Albin Michel. They all advocate a return to
the traditional narrative (or in todays more fashionable discourse, to story telling*), which
is synonymous with a return to real life (novelists are looking at the world around them,
affirms one voice; another remarks that they are more open in their novels to todays
realities).37 This interest in young French novelists (and specifically Im not making this
up in the new school of novelists born of literature for youth) is linked naturally with
an interest in American youth literature (The Americans and the British know how to
34
Generational solidarity has helped found an international literary commerce rooted in the
alleged unity of all practices of all youth in all countries: There is more similarity between French,
English, Italian or Spanish authors of the same generation than between French authors publishing
today and those who began writing before the 1970s. Moreover, these young writers have grown up
reading foreign novels [. . .] In all of these countries, as in France, it has become clear that literature
can speak of things like football and rock and roll [. . .]. Journalists who talk about books in
newspapers, on television or on the radio belong to this new generation of 2535 year olds, like the
readers and booksellers. Olivier Cohen, cited in C. Ferrand. 1998. Olivier Cohen au pied du mur.
Livres-Hebdo 279 (February 6): 5657.
35
C. Ferrand. La nouvelle generation. Livres-Hebdo 282 (March 20, 1998): 6063.
36
Michel Deguy evokes the inept cliche circulating among the new journalists that it is pointless to
look for writers in France and by this they mean, presumably, other writers than the one currently
speaking while the British moors, the American asphalt and the Patagonian pampa are positively
teeming with writers of Nobel-Prize caliber (Michel Deguy, op. cit., 113). And later on he evokes the
new cliches and biases of literary journalism: 1. American literary history segmented into decades,
the almost nymphomaniac interest in retro and worn-out fashions (the early eighties, or late
seventies); 2. The novel, and the foreign novel at that, is most worthy of attention; 3. Intellectuals are
to be mistrusted (Michel Deguy, op cit., 187).
*
English in source.
37
Bernard Fixot offers just one example of this surprising discourse: When we came into this
profession, my associate Antoine Audouard and I, we were rather reticent about the French novel:
this obsession with introspection when the only important thing is to tell a good story! So we decided
to publish stories about the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people and discovered that in our
day and age, reality is often stranger than fiction. Bernard Fixot, Madame Figaro (January 4, 1993).
The self-evidences of Jean-Marie Laclavetine return to mind.
144
Pierre Bourdieu
tell stories), which, according to the old stereotype, is believed to offer everything that a
stilted and abstract, formalist and hermetic French literature cannot, namely rebellion,
violence and sex. And if the promoters of this neophilia the new governing principle of
publishers decision-making merge syncretically the youth of authors, readers and even of
(rejuvenated) editorial personnel, it is because they have blurred the lines between literary
creation and advertising, and consider the immediate success of beginning authors and
novels to be the indisputable proof of their discoverers instinct, their nose for a new
literature, one more modern, less dogmatic and less elitist because more accessible than
1960s experimentalism and, above all, more suited to the inextricably literary and
commercial interests of young publishing execs laying, with libertarian overtones, their
new deal* on the market.
LOlivier is likely the house that best exemplifies this modernism pitting youth against the
establishment like Julliard, which, as far back as the mid 1950s, was pitting young, new
writers women such as Francoise Sagan and Minou Drouet against the aging pontiffs at
Gallimard.38 It knows how to play the public relations game imposed on todays professions
(nearly half of its French authors are also journalists, and a number of them exercise great
influence on the daily and weekly newspapers as well as on prize juries),39 the fruits of which
are apparent in abundant media coverage and in the many prizes (including two Feminas)
conferred upon its publications. Its list consists almost exclusively of works that have been
successful in the United States. Its tastes lean, in the words of a small, avant-garde editor,
toward an urban literature that is rather violent, rather brutal, and simplistic as well.40 It is a
literature strong in depictions of forbidden pleasures, designed to get a young readers blood
going.
To these literary agents promoting youth-oriented literature on an international scale,

we may concede that the value of a work being labeled youthful or youth oriented is
perhaps the simplicity of literary form, structure or style that this label implies: More
and more books are being written in England and France that may or may not be oriented
to a young readership, I dont know. But they are written in a youthful sort of language, a
language that is almost spoken. This is often fabricated as with Marie Darrieussecq in
Truismes [ . . .]: the style there is obviously intentional, studied but it is meant to be
youthful, modern, a language [ . . .] that comes across as simple, accessible to any reader at
the most basic level of comprehension [ . . .]. For people who read little or not at all, and
who have never had the chance to go to university or have a literary education, these books
still come across as books, real books, and for those who are a little more in the habit of
reading, they dont come across as something too primitive, something completely
unacceptable.
These commercial events converted into literary events (the paradigm being Houellebecqs success) constitute, in their very ambiguity, one of the most significant and subtly
*
English in source.
The move to publish young is also apparent in the marketing campaigns of booksellers and the
press. See A[nne] Simonin. 1998. LEdition litteraire. In LEdition francaise depuis 1945, ed. Pascal
Fouche, 5455. Paris: Le Cercle de la Librairie.
39
A maneuver that is not lost on the well-informed, like this small-time provincial editor: I dont
have any sort of network. I dont publish journalists who are going to go off and write articles
afterwards.
40
On the paradox of mass production becoming an instrument of snobbery, see Pierre Bourdieu and
Loc Wacquant. 1998. On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1:
4158.
38
Translation Studies
145
disguised manifestations of a profound transformation in the publishing field. They arise

from a new category of economicliterary agents who have become strong through
familiarity with the literary fields previous, more autonomous state, and who are now able
to mimic avant-garde models, be it sincerely or cynically, within the fields new, more interdependent state characterized by the increasing pressure of economic constraints and the
attraction of the commercial pole.
Jean-Yves Mollier has shown that from 1880 to 1920, publishing grew from small
family companies to large-scale, almost industrial enterprises.41 This growth, however, had
neither the scale nor the brutality of the structural disruptions brought about over the last
twenty years by the irruption of an uncompromising financial logic into the relatively
protected (some would say archaic) world of French publishing. Since 1986, when Jimmy
Goldsmith made his bid to take over les Presses de la Cite, which was subsequently reacquired within a few months like any other publicly traded company, the merging process
has gone on unabated, from simple buyouts to interest acquisitions not to mention the
dependencies created through investment in production and distribution. And the
consequence has virtually always been to abandon literary policies in favor of strictly
commercial ones. Actes Sud, for example, was once a smaller house promoting literature
translated out of Arabic. Now, apart from a few series like Sindbad, the house no longer
has any coherent translation policy. The result is a disparate list where Korean series
financed by militants are published side-by-side with translations financed by any number
of secondary sources (such as the four Finnish writers published one after the other in 1995
thanks to Finnish funding to aid translation). Losfeld et Salvy was acquired by Hachette,
who kept the label but removed the houses founder, and with him his editorial policy. And
there are fears that a similar fate awaits the executive of La Decouverte despite all the
promises made to them and subsequently denied.
Larger groups, it is true, often agree to leave a relatively wide margin of freedom to
their subsidiaries. Bernard Fixot declares that he leaves Julliard and the Pavillons series
the freedom to publish quality books without worrying too much about the bottom line
(he learned a sound lesson from Robert Laffont, the man he calls his intellectual matre
and whose slogan he continues to repeat after twenty years: You have to know how to lose
money42). The Pavillons series, however, publishes no more than ten titles a year, and
Julliard no more than twenty-five. Granted, it is not entirely untrue that major commercial
publishers, as well as those of the old guard converted to the religion of the new market,
continue to preserve a place for the work of the discoverer, even as they sacrifice literary
concerns to the pressures of the market and the pursuit of the bestseller, especially on the
foreign markets. This perverse homage paid by the vice of commerce to the virtue of the
profession can take the form, for example, of classical series published by semiindependent, satellite subsidiaries: Gallimards Le Promeneur, Le Seuils Fiction et
Compagnie, Laffonts Seghers, Payots Payot romans, Mercure de Frances
Bibliothe`que americaine, POLs Revue de litterature generale, etc. This largesse, however,
is somewhat tempered by the fact that acquisition and integration generally result in a
reduction of the number and literary autonomy of decision-making entities, and that
41
Jean-Yves Mollier and Patricia Sorel. 1999. Lhistoire de ledition, du livre et de la lecture en
France aux 19ie`me -20ie`me sie`cles. Approche bibliographique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
126127: 3959.
42
Pierre Bourdieu. 2003. The production of belief: Contribution to an economy of symbolic goods.
In The city cultures reader, second edition, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall and Iain Borden, 1039.
New York: Routledge.
146
Pierre Bourdieu
responsibility for watching the bottom line for both long- and short-term publications
tends to be transferred to accountants and other finance specialists who are less inclined to
favor the long-term investments required for an avant-garde literary policy. All of which, as
Jean-Marie Bouvaist has remarked,43 contributes to the progressive triumph of products of
low literary value and high distribution value, of a sort of commercial universal
diametrically opposed in its social evolution and literary quality to a literary universal
developed over time through international exchange.
Another indication that publishing is evolving into a sector of mass production (of
profits) like any other is the fact that books as such represent no more than approximately
25% of the two major groups turnover. New modes of distribution have aligned the
professions most commercial sector with the imperatives of global commerce and
consequently with a new business model imposed from the other side of the Atlantic:
editors are being displaced from the powerful oligopolies they once occupied to subaltern
positions in subsidiaries run by managers* from the finance or media sectors, who are not
the most competent in the area of literature44 and who impose on publishing the
entertainment* model. The publishing field in France has experienced, albeit somewhat
later than other European countries, the effects of this American model.45 A growing
number of agents responsible for the editorial policies of the different houses do not belong
to the publishing milieu either by education or by professional interest.46
By way of example, a few names from the major groups: Jean-Luc Lagarde`re, CEO of Matra, a
group where books represent a mere 13% of turnover, and which counts Fayard, Latte`s, Stock,
Harlequin, etc. among its subsidiaries, was trained as an electrical engineer; Pierre Dauzier,
CEO of Groupe de la Cite, graduated from Essec [grande ecole for management and business
students]; Serge Eyrolles, CEO of Eyrolles, director of the Editions dOrganisation and
president of the National Union of Publishers, is a civil engineer by training and after repeated
stints in the United States is fully converted to the American model; Jean-Marie Messier,
43
Jean-Marie Bouvaist. 1993. Crise et mutation de ledition francaise. Paris: ministe`re de la Culture,
89.
*
English in source.
44
On this subject, see Peter Calvocoressi and Ann Bristov. 1980. Freedom to publish: A report on
obstacles to freedom in publishing prepared for the Congress of the International Publishers Association.
Stockholm: International Publishers Association/Almquist & Wiksell International.
*
English in source.
45
See Jean-Marie Bouvaist, op. cit., 89. Philippe Schuwer is likely justified in blaming the famous
publishing crisis on the brutal importation, since 1970, of rationalization techniques such as
management control with its projected operation accounts, the digitizing of management costs, etc.
Philippe Schuwer. 1999. Nouvelles pratiques et strategies editoriales. In Pascal Fouche, op. cit., 425
59.
46
Reflecting these changes is the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has transformed the way it structures
its advertising space. The largest and most central spaces are offered to Germany and Anglophone
countries. All other literatures, especially those of smaller countries, are relegated to the margins. See
Gustavo Sora. 1998. Francfort: la foire dempoigne. Liber 34: 23. The editor of a small French
publisher observes: Its becoming more and more commercial [. . .]. They put up huge photos that
were once of great writers but are now of ministers or international bestsellers [ . . .]. In the beginning,
it was row upon scintillating row of smaller, politically minded publishers . . . That has disappeared
completely and has been replaced by houses specializing in spiritualism, cult writing: when it comes
to things like that, the shelves are full. And another: When we go to the Salon du livre in Barcelona
or Madrid, its sad. The more they integrate, the larger they become, the more that literature falls by
the wayside.
Translation Studies
147
president of the French water utility and owner of 30% of Havas where he advocates
audiovisual and multi-media strategies was trained as an engineer.
Translations antagonistic functions

Policies regarding foreign literature may offer a better idea of the strategies adopted by
large and small houses when it comes to publishing French writers. Indeed, there is a very
pronounced opposition between smaller editors who act as discoverers, investing their
cultural and linguistic competence in the search for avant-garde works in minor languages
and countries, and the major commercial editors who are led by scouts* or agents on the
lookout for commercially valuable information, who publish international bestsellers
mainly translated from English. These are purchased at great cost in aggressive bidding
wars that emphasize profitability (as measured by sales figures) over content. Put simply,
foreign literature is one of the most profitable investments for both small and large houses.
Both reap its economic benefits. For the former, however, it also serves as a means to stem
the invasion of commercial, specifically Anglo-American, literature.
At the literary pole, publishers import texts by little-known authors commanding small
fees and writing in minor languages (they will also translate the more experimental of
Anglo-American works). This helps them establish a foundation of economic capital with a
minimal outlay of funds. An observer remarks: the costs are much lower than what would
have to be spent putting together a list of French authors of equal reputation, and despite
the vagaries of intercultural differences, the risks are lower as well, because books
negotiated for translation have already had a measure of success in their countries of
origin.
The director of a small, avant-garde house founded in 1987 believes that publishing foreign
literature helps to avoid many of the dangers associated with small publishing. Careful not
to follow Anglo-American models too closely, she has invested in a number of young
Catalans and Austrian (Elfriede Jelinek), Irish and Scottish writers. It is as if, beyond the
obvious economic forces, her choices were guided by a certain affinity between herself as a
small, subversive editor and minority-language writers. Very conscious of the fact that her
most daring ventures are dictated by her position in the field, she notes that she is forced to
take on a book that she covets personally very early because if it is already successful, it is
already too expensive for her. However, she is also quick to point out that if she has been able
to publish quality authors like Elfriede Jelinek, it is because they were rejected previously by
every house in Paris. One of her neighbors in the publishing space says much the same: I have
to be astute: I try to spot authors the moment they arrive on the scene in the country whose
language l know and practice. Otherwise . . . I am not going to get involved with Americans.
[ . . .] Rule number one: you have to see things as they emerge because you cant afford the very
famous authors. This means that larger houses are always following the lead of their smaller
rivals, which are always under threat of having their discoveries stolen away (like Maurice
Nadeau47 and now Jacqueline Chambon).
By refusing to treat translation simply as a commercial investment, small publishers reject

the commercial strategies of larger houses. At Corti, for example, the use of scouts* is
considered a sort of sell-out: We are not interested in that, not in the least. [ . . .] It seems to
me that the best judges of which books are worthy of translation are the translators
*
English in source.
See Maurice Nadeau. 1990. Graces leur soient rendues. Memoires litteraires. Paris: Albin Michel,
especially the chapter on John Hawkes, 43842.
*
English in source.
47
148
Pierre Bourdieu
themselves. [. . .] As for agencies, we go to them for rights, but that is where it ends. The
choice is often left to the translator. Nevertheless, it is often the case that the publisher
him- or herself maintains a certain complicity, based on familiarity, with the works and
authors of specific languages and nationalities: for Jacqueline Chambon, it is Catalan, for
Anne-Marie Metailie, Brazilian, for Ibolya Virag, Hungarian, and for Picquier the
languages of the Far East.
Jacqueline Chambon is noteworthy here. She expresses eloquently the personal
engagement of certain editors whose work is more comparable to the critic/discoverer
than to the commercial director: I realized that there was some very interesting literature
out there [. . .], autonomous Catalan literature, written in Catalan and coming out of
Catalonia. There was Pla, for example, who wrote a huge book that is something like a
diary, and which is a masterpiece, a beautiful book . . . Then there was Trabal in the 1930s,
and other young writers like him. [. . .] There is a Catalan humor that is very, very funny.
And it is not at all mechanical like English humor. [ . . .] These are people I am very fond of
personally, outside of the business. They are not hommes de lettres. That is an old French
tradition: writers are hommes de lettres. They belong to a sort of inner sanctum. They
have their eye on the Academie, or at least on prizes. They are personalities, but they dont
consider themselves artists. For them, writing is almost a career whereas in countries like
Germany, writers are like painters: they are artists. And for Catalans its the same. They are
not literati at all. Pamie`s earns a living as a football critic for El Pas. [. . .] I feel at home in
that world. There isnt the whole networking side of things. [ . . .] They do television and
radio appearances. For example, there is this very, very funny show, a kind of Guignols for
the radio [ . . .]. These are real people, it is a pleasure to see them; they have a sort of worldly
intelligence.
This long quotation expresses the feeling of many similar publishers and booksellers. It
is there to give an idea of a very special way of living with literature, one that is nevertheless
common in all of the literary professions from authors to copyeditors, one that suggests
a sort of total investment of self free of utilitarian considerations, one that is its own
justification and reward. Jacqueline Chambon sums up the opposition between the world
of literature and the universe of scouts,* agents, money, credit transactions and preemptive
offers* in a simple reminder of what should be the publishing professions most basic rule,
first-hand reading: Readers reports leave me cold because, for me, a book is not about a
subject, but rather about the way its treated, and so I cant make a decision based on a
readers report.
At the extreme opposite, commercial pole, where the translator is often little more than
the adaptor of a foreign product (the phrase is, after all, produce a translation),
translation itself is first and foremost a financial investment geared, overtly or not, toward
the production of bestsellers. The director of a foreign-language series in a large house
notes that for her, this means only the most profitable foreign literature: womens novels,
escapist fiction will be translated, mostly from English. In other words, the more a house
approaches this pole, the more it produces lucrative translations based on selection
processes involving the purchase of international speculations and the hiring of scouts* or
American literary agents* (even in France, as one informant observes, Americans are the
*
*
*
*
English
English
English
English
in
in
in
in
source.
source.
source.
source.
Translation Studies
149
masters). Major publishers interested in producing bestsellers (in 1995 alone, Albin
Michel published eight bestsellers many subsequently adapted for cinema from a total
of thirty-five translated authors and thirty-six titles, two of them by Mary Higgins Clark,
reigning queen of the genre)48 are an important reason for the massive importation of
Anglophone literature, which represents nearly 65% of all translations published by the
houses in the study 36.7% from the United States, 26.5% from other Anglophone
countries. The foreign-literature director of a large commercial house explains: American
authors have agents. Every morning, they receive monstrous piles of manuscripts, and if
they arent already sponsored, or are not extraordinary enough to capture the agents
attention, they are rejected immediately as unsolicited.* By that I mean that in order to
clear the very first hurdle, in order to be accepted by an agent, an author must already
possess extraordinary qualities. And the product is launched onto the market with the
type of financial backing that has made more than one French agent become a buyer
against his or her better judgment.
As for the books themselves, they exploit the lowest common denominator of pseudoexistentialist sentimentality, of the type found in telenovelas or soap operas.* Written for
the main part by and for women, they deploy that most commercial mode of seduction: the
cliche-filled verbiage adorning the cover. In 1998, Calmann-Levy published Jacquelyn
Mitchards novel As Deep as the Ocean. On the cover, an irresistible blurb* by Mary
Higgins Clark, an expert on the subject of bestsellers: A superb, heart-rending story. I
loved it!; on the back cover, the irrefutable argument of commercial success that begets
commercial success: 3,500,000 readers worldwide.
The fees are always higher, the competition for good investments fiercer, and the
specialized personnel (one or more agents responsible for purchasing and transferring
rights, scouts in several countries, etc.) more indispensable for commercial publishers. In
the interviews, the emphasis is always on the purchase of rights rather than on problems of
translation or on the potential demands of the French market. In spite of this, literary
directors may try to justify their choices on democratic principles, claiming they are only
responding to the demands of their French readers. Smaller editors, they argue, will
only publish what they like, what appeals to them, without stopping to think about what
others want or are looking for. Sometimes I will publish a book even if I dont approve of
its subject personally, or of its literary qualities, etc., even if it isnt my cup of tea. Ill say:
This isnt my cup of tea, but it might be so-and-sos cup, or so-and-sos, or so-and-sos in
the press, maybe, or a readers. So I think that publishers in the general market should be
broad-minded enough to try to look beyond their own tastes, their own choices. Because
there are really two types of publisher: the militant type, who defends a certain idea of
literature right, O.K., thats how I am, because we all have things that we need to defend.
But there are also publishers who need to be generalists, who are not only thinking of their
own enjoyment, but try to provide others with enjoyable reading as well, you see.
The editors who reiterate that their houses essentially import (Anglophone) texts pre-selected
for them by one or more foreign editors are often the same ones who speak of their purchases
48
Apart from bestsellers, Albin Michel publishes classical and modern, autonomous authors as well.
Canadian author Jane Urquhart (launched by Nadeau), for example, can be found in their Grandes
Traductions series, along with Elias Canetti, Victor Erofeev, Mia Couto and John McGahern.
*
English in source.
*
English in source.
*
English in source.
150
Pierre Bourdieu
as discoveries, innovations, a passion. We make a real effort to discover new talent to

feed this collection (Albin Michels Special Suspense series) that Francis Esmenard [the
companys current CEO] created twenty years ago when he launched the first Mary Higgins
Clark, a hugely successful book, and when he reprised and renovated the old trick of
illustrating the cover underneath the blank dust jacket, the opposite of what is normally done.
It is the same rhetoric for the Grandes Traductions series, published by the same house. The
agent responsible speaks of discovering new talents from different countries, etc.. A literary
director from Plon, to cite another example, considers the Frankfurt Book Fair an occasion to
make discoveries while meeting fellow publishers who are passionate.
Foreign literature agents representing the worlds major houses on the international scene
create vast information-sharing networks where everyone speaks English (says the same
literary director), where everyone knows and helps each other with the quasi-magical
phrase: Hi! X, I have a book Y that is absolutely the book for you. Everyone
systematically relies on their network of informers (literary agents, scouts, foreign
publishers and, sometimes, translators) to reduce the risks. There is fierce competition
among [French] publishers to be the first to acquire manuscripts, an agent responsible for
Anglophone literature observes. Because of this, adds an agent from another major
commercial house, the timeliness of the information is crucial. The search for hard
information has little to do with the content (and especially the form) of the works
concerned, even when a consecrated author is involved, and is better characterized as a
sort of industrial espionage than as a literary prospecting mission even among the more
enlightened importers of supposedly chic and contemporary works: Its all about
establishing the kind of ties with American agents and editors that assure you of getting the
information very, very early. To win certain deals, houses will even put up a preemptive
offer* to prevent higher bidding from elsewhere, and it is becoming more and more
common to sign contracts for potentially profitable manuscripts before the original is even
published, which means before it is even read.
In his memoirs,49 Pierre Belfond relates how, in 1988, he bought the publishing rights to Gone
with the Wind 2, the sequel to the legendary bestseller Gone with the Wind. The auction was
blind, meaning that it took place with no text, excerpts, synopses or even titles, since not a
single page had yet been written. The literary agent involved could only specify that a) the
novel would be published in the United States by Warner Books; b) the writer commissioned to
write the sequel would be a certain Alexandra Ripley; c) the projected submission date for the
manuscript was the end of 1989. After bidding 200,000, then 650,000 dollars (at a time when,
in his own words, no publisher had ever put up that kind of money for translation rights), he
won the bid at a million and one dollars. Pierre Belfond: I looked at those numbers with
trepidation. What if the book was bad? I tried vainly to reassure myself that Warner Brooks
would surround Alexandra Ripley with the very best literary advisors, that the novel would
return to the shop, be re-shaped and polished until it was perfect: these reassurances werent
enough to compensate even temporarily for a manuscript that we would not see for eighteen
months.
When asked what made his series Feux croises different from Gallimards Du monde
entier or from Stocks Bibliothe`que cosmopolite, the agent from Plon replied: Oh! I
think we all do pretty much the same thing. Albin Michels literary director reiterates this
opinion: Bah! You mean Du Monde entier, and Seuils production of foreign works, etc.
I mean, in essence there isnt a great difference, you know.
*
49
English in source.
Pierre Belfond. 1994. Les Pendus de Victor Hugo. Sce`nes de la vie dun editeur. Paris: Fayard, 19.
Translation Studies
151
The moral of the story

These reflections, which are the result of an extensive labor of collection and analysis, may
well to deploy the well-known rhetoric be disqualified as false or trivial. And we
certainly cannot expect that they alone would suffice to dissipate the fog of intellectual
discourse surrounding the return of narrative or figuration, the crisis of the French
novel, or the end of the avant-gardes, all of which prevent literary theorists from
looking at themselves without complacency. It may be possible, however, that sociology,
despised professionally by the pharisees of the cult of art because it destroys their illusions,
is really the closest ally of those who wish to defend the precious assets acquired by
opposing the autonomy of the literary and artistic field to the commercial forces that
would subordinate it. These are high stakes, both from a political and a literary point of
view, for those who make a living from literature, those who live for literature and those
who depend on these first two groups in order to access the world of literature.
Is the integration process affecting the world of publishing transforming practices
profoundly by subordinating them to strict commercial norms really irreversible and
irresistible? Is resistance to the ascendency of commerce over art little more than the futile
struggle of a sort of nationalist archaism? One thing is clear: as long as there are advocates
supporting small houses, small houses publishing young and unknown authors, booksellers promoting young authors published by small houses, critics discovering and
defending these publishers (mostly women), labor without economic interest labor for
the love of art will remain a realistic investment assured of receiving at least minimal
recognition, both material and symbolic.
Clearly, the real bastion of resistance to market forces is to be found among these small
publishers rooted in a national tradition of avant-gardism that is inextricably literary and
political (and that can be found in cinema as well). They defend experimental authors and
literatures dominated by their countrys politics, and do so without counting on state
funding, which usually goes to the companies oldest and wealthiest in terms of economic
and symbolic capital. Only here, in this practical internationalism opposed in its very
essence to the arrogant hermeticism of commercially dominant nations, can the tradition
of imperialism of the universal50 survive (The English buy nothing except American
products. As for Americans, they are only interested in themselves, thats all, says the
female literary director of a large house). Some may advocate resignation to the necessities
of an economy obeying its own implacable law of maximizing profits in the short term.
Others may dismiss our arguments as the defense of a nationalism considered outmoded or
archaic. To them, we would respond without too many ethical or political misgivings that
in this case, defending the French tradition does not mean giving in to nationalism, but
rather defending the conquests, intrinsically international and internationalist, of the entire
history of literature.
Is this explicit declaration of things suspected by everyone but known for certain by no
one enough to break the complicities and complacencies of the coterie, the laziness and
conformity that are implicit in everything sophisticated and fashionable and that compel
critics, both ensconced and in the process of becoming ensconced, to obey the demands
(and commands) of commercial publishers, to acknowledge only a literature that falls
neatly into well-worn patterns? Will the critics vigilance make it harder for a mercantilist
philosophy availing itself of a kind of demagogical populism to justify bluffing its way to
50
Pierre Bourdieu. 1992. Deux imperialismes de luniversel. In LAmerique des Francais, ed.
Christine Faure and Tom Bishop, 14955. Paris: Francois Bourin.
152
Pierre Bourdieu
commercial success? At the very least, we can hope that it will encourage those who still
believe in the possibility and necessity of defending arts freedom from money to
acknowledge their solidarity, to assert it consciously and, in so doing, to organize a
more effective resistance.
Annex
Publishing groups and subsidiaries included in the study
ditions Robert Laffont (Fixot-Seghers-Julliard-Berlitz). This
Were included: Nouvelles E
publisher was treated as both a subsidiary in its entirety (turnover, personnel, Interforum
distribution), and as two isolated and autonomous sub-units the Laffont label and the
Julliard department (whose capital belongs to Plon, itself a subsidiary of Groupe de la
Cite) treated as independent publishers (the Fixot label, acquired by Laffont in 1993 and
with no capital of its own, was treated as a supplementary element); Plon; Les PressesSolar-Belfond, of which Belfond and Les Presses were isolated and treated as supplementary elements. These subsidiaries are editorially independent in every area except
administration, distribution and to some extent the transfer of rights.
Were not included: Berlitz (foreign languages, language learning methods); Seghers, a
department of Robert Laffont, for which data are no longer obtainable; Librairie
Academique Perrin, which does not publish literature but essays and writing for young
people; Olivier Orban, an annex of Plon; Solar, which does not publish literature but art
and practical books; Nathan; Bordas; Larousse; Dalloz; Dunod and Masson (which do
not publish literature).
Hachette-Matra group
The following subsidiaries, all highly independent small and medium-sized businesses, were
included: Fayard, executor of the Mazarine, Pauvert and Le Sarment funds; Grasset and
Fasquelle; Latte`s; Calmann-Levy; Stock (the capital of all of these subsidiaries belongs
almost entirely to Hachette-Livre); De Fallois, 33% subsidiary of Hachette-Livre;
Harlequin (as a supplementary element).
Not included: Librairie generale francaise (Librairie des Champs-Elysees, Le Masque,
Le Livre de Poche); Hachette Reference, including Le Chene and Pluriel; Le Sarment;
Hachette Pratique; Hachette Jeunesse; Marabout; Gerard de Villiers; Editions n1;
Hachette Litteratures, created in 1997, after the study.
Gallimard group
Included: Gallimard; Denoel; Mercure de France.
Not included: Gallimard-Electa, a specialized department publishing art books;
Gallimard Jeunesse; Folio, a department publishing only re-editions; Le Promeneur,
LArpenteur, only series.
Flammarion group
Included: Flammarion; Jai lu (treated as supplementary), 35% subsidiary of the group,
publisher of paperbacks and first editions financed internally (from Librio and Jai lu, for
example).
Translation Studies
153
Not included: Aubier, publisher of classical literature, philosophy, psychology, and the
humanities; Arthaud, art and practical books; Maison rustique, practical books; Le Pe`re
Castor and Delagrave, textbooks and pedagogy.
Albin Michel group

Included: Albin Michel.
Not included: the departments Jeunesse, BD, and Education; Magnard, textbooks and
books for young readers; Vuibert, school and university textbooks; Le Grand Livre du
mois; Canal Plus Editions.
Le Seuil group
Included: Le Seuil; LOlivier, which was re-acquired by Le Seuil in 1995 but retained a high
level of editorial autonomy.
With its distribution department, Le Seuil includes many publishers of highly varying
interdependence, from simple commercial distribution to minority (not majority) shareholdings.
Among the publishers distributed by Le Seuil were included: Autrement; Nil; Corti;
Viviane Hamy; Metailie, in which Le Seuil holds shares; LOlivier, acquired by Le Seuil in
late 1995; Phebus, in which Le Seuil holds shares; Rivages; Bourgois; Minuit.
Not included: Arlea, Odile Jacob, Milan, and Adam Biro, which did not publish
literature from 19951996.

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A conservative revolution in publishing*

A publisher is a person invested with the extraordinary power to ensure publication, to

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of holies of Frances literary temples, Gallimards Committee.4 This experience, one of

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media; Hector Bianciotti is a member of the Academie francaise; house-appointed literary

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Michel Deguy, op. cit., 1718.

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The construction of pertinent characteristics20

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Legal and financial status (Figures 1 and 3)

Financial or commercial dependency on other publishers

Weight on the market

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Importance of foreign literature

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This ascending classification25 helps us distinguish a leading rank of seven publishers:

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Alexis Liebaert, loc. cit.

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characteristics and those of his or her publishing house, as well as a summary

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dubious notion of generation,34 which is less an instrument of knowledge than a weapon

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To these literary agents promoting youth-oriented literature on an international scale,

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disguised manifestations of a profound transformation in the publishing field. They arise

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Translations antagonistic functions

By refusing to treat translation simply as a commercial investment, small publishers reject

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as discoveries, innovations, a passion. We make a real effort to discover new talent to

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The moral of the story

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Albin Michel group

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