IT WOULD BE AN exaggeration, though not very much of one, to say that French publishers live and breathe by Apostrophes, a book-chat television showbroadcast in prime time every Friday on France’s Antenne 2 network. After all, the host of Apostrophes, Bernard Pivot, invites only a small percentage of the thousands of authors published each year in France to appear as guests. But Pivot’s influence is such that most authors and publishers consider an appearance on his show to be a crucial, if not indispensable, ingredient in the making of un best seller. A cultural institution now in its twelfth year, Apostrophes is far more influential than the literary salons whose place it has taken. Week by week it defines what might be described as a national required-reading list. It is essential viewing for mandarins of both Left Bank and Right. “Even people who don’t watch Apostrophes say they do,”says Franycoise Verny, a prominent editor whose move last year from the Gallimard to the Flammarion publishing company was front-page news. The program’s impact is especially great within the tightly knit publishing industry, concentrated in the Latin Quarter of Paris. “Publishers are obsessed with getting their authors on Apostrophes,” says Anne Pons, an editor of the newsmagazine L’Express, which compiles France’s most credible best-seller list.
Behind this phenomenon is the boyish and genial Pivot, fifty-two, a man with an undisputed talent for extracting anecdote and insight from the most reserved of authors. Eclectic in taste, Pivot likes to group quite disparate titles under an often fanciful thematic heading like “Modesty and Shamelessness” or “Hygiene in France From the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century.” He sometimes devotes an entire show to a major figure such as Marguerite Yourcenar, the first female member of the Académic Francaise. Yet pedantry is foreign to Pivot, who says that his show “must seem like conversation, which unfolds spontaneously.”This approach is perhaps why Pivot draws as much as fifteen percent of the Friday-evening audience. That rating, in turn, is why France’s librairies, or bookshops, stock up on the titles scheduled to be discussed on Apostrophes, no matter how abstruse they may seem. Pivot’s role is without equivalent in the United States: imagine the combined clout of The New York Times Book Review and Miami Vice. Only once has anyone questioned the propriety of Pivot’s influence. In 1982 the leftist intellectual Régis Debray, an adviser to President Francois Mitterrand, declared that Pivot had established “a veritable dictatorship over the book market.”Mitterrand disavowed Debray’s remark.
Pivot, a self-described provincial gourmand from the Beaujolais district, near Lyons, insists that he is no more than “an intermediary between intellectuals and the television audience.” It may be that such a role is possible in France because books and authors here are accorded what seems an exceptional importance in national life. In 1979, for instance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing appeared on Apostrophes to discuss a book he had just published. He confided to Pivot that if he had not become President of the Republic he should have liked to be Guy de Maupassant. Some might have considered this presumptuous, given Giscard’s modest literary gifts, but most of his countrymen understood the sentiment. France is a nation of readers, and in a nation of readers the writer is an aristocrat.
You CAN FIND almost anything in Quid, the French omnibus reference work whose contents range from an explanation of probability theory to sports records to estimates of the annual cost of the flu. You can read in Quid, for instance, that in France books may be bought at 20,200 stationers, train-station kiosks, newsstands, and tobacconists, as well as in 600 proper bookstores. And that half those bookstores are located in Paris. And that 50 percent of the sales of major new titles of intellectual significance occur within the capital’s bohemian or affluent Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Sixteenth arrondissements. And that 44 percent of the adult French population read ten or more books a year and 18 percent read at least twenty-five.
In France, however, best sellers are not always determined in the straightforward manner that they are in the United States. They are usually— though not always—noted in Les Succès de la Semaine, the list provided each week by L’Express. This is only roughly equivalent to the best-seller list published weekly in The New York Times Book Review, for although the magazine surveys eighty bookstores in sixty-six French cities (plus Brussels and Geneva), it does not compile sales figures. Instead it gathers bookstore owners’ often subjective notions as to current noteworthy books that are doing well. “Practical” titles—on diet, health, finance, and so on—almost regardless of sales, are ignored on principle. Anne Pons explains, “Those aren’t books.”
Another peculiarity of the list is its rapid turnover. This reflects the feverish output of the French publishing industry, which commissions and manufactures books at a far brisker pace than American publishers do. The average book is stocked by bookstores for only about twelve weeks. Consequently, success can come and go virtually overnight. So it was with Dans le secret des princes (In the Confidence of Princes), France’s nonfiction success story of 1986. This was a good example of a “livre d’actualité,” a book that plays off, or creates, news headlines. Dans le secret des princes consists of an extended interview with Count Alexandre de Marenches, the director of the French equivalent of the CIA for eleven years under Presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. His interlocutor was Christine Ockrent, a popular and respected radio and television journalist. Marenches made few true revelations. He did tell Ockrent that the Direction générale de la securité extérieure, the agency he once ran, possessed bushels of Gestapo documents that had never been examined, and he claimed that their contents might modify several established reputations, causing veterans of the Resistance to bristle. Nonetheless, controversy sells, in France as elsewhere, and it was unusual for a former top French intelligence officer to speak publicly at all. Marenches’s book sold 450,000 copies within six weeks of its publication, last September—a phenomenal performance. (Only about a dozen U.S. authors in 1986 sold as many copies of their books as Marenches did of his. To put that in perspective, remember that the difference in size between the two countries makes a sale of 450,000 in France equivalent to a sale of two million in the United States. Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood, the best-selling U.S. nonfiction title last year, sold 2.4 million copies, but it did so not in six weeks but over the course of seven months.) The Marenches book really took off after its subject was featured on Apostrophes. His bushy eyebrows knowingly cocked, a red Légion d’Honneur pip in his lapel, Marenches was the embodiment of Gallic gray eminence.
Aside from fiction, what the French read most is politics and history; they never tire of books about their political and social system. These frequently offer explanations of why it works so badly. One notable example of this genre was Toujours Plus! (Always More!), an indictment of corporatism—meaning the fragmentation of French society into its component economic interest groups— by the essayist Francois de Closets. Published in 1982, it sold 1.2 million copies. Closets followed up with a stern look at French trade unionism titled Tous ensemble (All Together), which put him at the top of the Express list again, at the end of 1985.
Alphonse Boudard, a journalist, enjoyed some success last year with a mixture of nostalgia and social history, in La Fermeture (Closing Time). This told the story of the shutdown of the Parisian brothels in 1946 by the bluenose parliamentarian Marthe Richard. More contemporary in its subject was Tête de Turc (Turk’s Head), a translation of Ganz Unten {At the Very Bottom), by the German investigative journalist GÜnter Wallraff. This Black Like Me— style exposé of the exploitation of Turkish immigrant workers by German industrialists sold 130,000 copies last year. It remained on the Express list for an extraordinary twenty-five weeks. France has its own troubles with immigration from Algeria and other North and West African countries, so a certain guilt factor was undoubtedly involved. But one also suspects that the French took some satisfaction in reading about the sins of a not always friendly neighbor.
The average Frenchman believes, with good reason, that his government does not always tell him the truth. An entire genre of high-level exposés, known as enquêtes, and typically better documented than livres d’actualité, work this rich vein. One recent example is Enquete sur trois secrets d’Etat (Inquiry Into Three State Secrets). Its authors, the journalists Jacques Derogy and JeanMarie Pontaut, examined the Rainbow Warrior affair (in which France’s not-socovert sinking of a Greenpeace protest vessel in New Zealand provoked a major governmental crisis) and two other instances in which state secrecy was invoked to cover wrongdoing or incompetence. La Nomenklatura francaise (The French Nomenklatura), by the journalists Alexandre Wickham and Sophie Coignard, described the permanent ruling class of the Republic in terms derived from an earlier best seller, about privilege in the Soviet Union, La Nomenklatura, by the Russian émigré Michael Voslensky. Another recent book appealing to French readers’ enduring curiosity about the Soviet Union was Le K.g.b. en France, by the journalist Thierry Wolton. Published in 1985, this book explained why Mitterrand was moved to expel some fifty Soviet diplomats from France two years earlier.
A major legislative election was held in March of 1986, costing Mitterrand his control of the National Assembly, and a presidential election is due in 1988. Books about contemporary domestic politics have abounded and will continue to do so until the presidential election is finished and its implications are thoroughly explored. One of the most successful political titles of 1986 was Dimanche, 16 mars 1986, 20 heures (Sunday, March 16, 1986, 8 P.M.), by Christine Clerc, a reporter for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro. Published before the 1986 elections, the book presented a scenario (now largely come to pass) for la cohabitation—the political coexistence of the Socialist President Mitterrand and the incoming conservatives, led by the new Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. After Chirac was installed as Prime Minister, Maurice Duverger’s Bréviaire de la cohabitation (A Cohabitation Handbook) was published, essential reading for anyone confused by the prospect of a government that was left and right at the same time. The upcoming presidential election, which must be held by May of 1988, has already induced a new crop of political books. Le Ve President (The Fifth President), by the political commentator Alain Duhamel, offers portraits of ten presidentiables, or potential successors to Mitterrand. The “after Mitterrand” genre even includes a whodunit— Meurtre a I Elysée {.Murder at the îlysée), by the pseudonymous Jean Duchateau, which revolves around the fatal shooting, at the presidential palace, of Mitterrand himself.
For the French, statesmanship and authorship go hand in hand. (“Govern without writing?” the magazine Lire [To Read] once speculated, concluding immediately: “Impossible!”) Some politicians take this to heart and actually write their own books; some of the results are even worth reading. Giscard and Pompidou received generally lukewarm notices for their political and personal reflections, but Mitterrand got high marks for his, titled La Paille et le grain (The Wheat and the Chaff). Charles de Gaulle is the standard by which all others are measured. Each of the five volumes of his memoirs was a best seller, and collectively they sold 3.8 million copies.
HISTORY, ESPECIALLY in the form of biography, is a mainstay of the Express best-seller list. One recent success in the long line of them was Louis XIV, a revisionist biography of the Sun King by the historian Francois Bluche, which climbed up the chart as Jean Orieux’s Catherine de Médicis was coming down. Figuring prominently at the end of 1986 was the third and final volume of Jean Lacouture’s monumental De Gaulle. The subjects of other successful biographies in recent years have included Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mitterrand. One recent and provocative biography, an English translation of which will appear this year in the United States, was published by an intimate adviser to Mitterrand, the Socialist economist Jacques Attali. His flattering study of Siegmund Warburg, the financier and consummate capitalist, struck many on the left as inconsistent with Attali’s participation in a Socialist government.
The vogue in biography, according to Pierre Lepape, a book critic at Le Monde, was launched a decade ago by the English historian Murray Kendall’s study of Louis XI, which sold about 100,000 copies in translation. Now every major publisher has a line of biographies to satisfy the French taste for history in the grand old style—what Lepape calls “novels that are true.”
Pure history also does well, especially when it concerns one of the so-called grands sujets that continue to nourish controversy, among them the French Revolution and the Second World War. A fixture of French middle-class living rooms is the bibliothèque. Anyone with an hour of high school French knows that bibliothèque means “library,” but here it denotes an imposing floor-to-ceiling glassed-in bookcase. Those shelves have to be filled, and Lacouture’s complete oeuvre on De Gaulle will take up a good six or seven inches. Then there is the five-volume Histoire de la Résistance en France, by Henri Noguères, and the seven-volume series on the Occupation, by Henri Amouroux, which together will fill another eighteen inches or so. One long-running title on the Express list last year was L’Identité de la France: Espace et histoire (The Identity of France: Territory and History), a weighty tome by the late French historian Fernand Braudel, which was rapidly succeeded on the list this year by a companion volume, Les Hommes et les choses (Men and Things). Books like this become best sellers with surprising frequency. As Lepape explains: “There are some books one must have in one’s home.”
French readers have a voracious appetite for works of organized and authoritative fact. It is no coincidence that the encyclopedia was invented by a Frenchman, Denis Diderot. Parisian Métro riders have long diverted themselves with the Que sais-je? (What Do I Know?) paperback summaries of various disciplines. Quid and the Petit Larousse illustré dictionary together sell 1.5 million copies every year. In 1986 Larousse brought out an ambitiously titled volume, Chronique de Ihumanité (The Chronicle of Humanity). The success of this breadbox-sized reference work has already spawned imitators.
Another current vogue is for works of popularized science. Among the first of these books was Jean-Pierre Changeux’s L’Homme neuronal (Neural Man), a dissertation on the brain and nervous system, which sold 550,000 copies in 1983. Two strong performers last year were L’Un est l’autre (One Is the Other), an essay on human sexuality by Elisabeth Badinter, the wife of a former Socialist Minister of Justice, and Biologic des passions (The Biology of Passion), by the neurophysiologist Jean-Didier Vincent. The publisher Le Seuil has a whole line of scientific titles edited by Odile Jacob, the daughter of the French biologist and Nobel laureate Francois Jacob. A collection of autobiographical essays by the scientist himself, La Statue intérieure (The Interior Statue), rose high on the Express list last spring.
Occult and self-help titles often do very well—so much so that sometimes even L’Express can’t ignore them. One major 1981 title was Les Prédictions de Nostradamus, which presented the sixteenth-century French seer’s prophecies along with a modern commentary. Because of a purported connection between certain prophecies and the ascent to power of Mitterrand’s Socialists that year, the book became a national event and sold 400,000 copies. Weight-loss and exercise books hold but faint appeal for the French, who prefer to read about eating well. The biggest nonfiction hit in recent memory addressed two national preoccupations: health and food. Ma Médecine naturelle, a fitness-through-nutrition guide by the popular singer Rika Zaraï, sold 1.8 million copies en librairie—that is, in its initial trade edition. The book remained on Les Succés de la Semaine, in L’Express, for a remarkable forty-eight weeks.
MOST OF THE major French publishers— Gallimard, Grasset, Le Seuil, Flammarion, and Albin-Michel— jealously guard their printing and sales figures, and any figures released tend to be inflated. Marianne Grangiè, the editor-in-chief of the trade weekly Livres Hebdo, says, “Every publisher claims that the others are all lying.”But the truth will out over lunch at Fernand or drinks at Deux Magots, and a rough scale of values obtains. Respectable sales begin at around 5,000 or 6,000 copies for a first novel. Fiction is judged pretty successful if it sells 40,000 or 50,000 copies. The threshold for nonfiction is set somewhat lower, at 20,000 or 30,000. While the editors of L’Express, as noted, do not base their best-seller list on solid sales figures, many of the books on the list achieve a sale of at least 100,000 before their run is through. Anything over 300,000 is a phénomène.
In sheer numerical terms, the landmark nonfiction book in France was, until recently, Henri Charrière’s Papillon, the story of the author’s escape from the Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guiana, published in 1966. It sold more than a million copies (not including book club sales or poche—meaning “pocket,”this term being preferred to the French word for “paperback,” inasmuch as relatively few French trade titles are hardbound). Now Charrière’s record has been broken by Zarai’s nutrition hit. On the fiction side, La Peste (The Plague), by Albert Camus, is commonly cited by French publishers as the alltime best seller, at 2.5 million copies. But Quid states that Camus’s L’ítranger (The Stranger) is the real champion, having sold 3.5 million copies exclusive of clubs and poche.
As these numbers suggest, novels consistently outsell nonfiction books. Popular tastes run to the romantic and the picaresque. French readers, according to Lepape, of Le Monde, like “thick novels set in another time, another place.”In the past decade the multivolume saga has enjoyed a vogue, as it has in the United States. The trend was kicked off in 1977 by Maurice Denuzière’s Louisiane, the first of three volumes of a family chronicle set in and around New Orleans. Louisiane, trading on the Cajun French connection, sold 800,000 copies. Its publisher, the JeanClaude Lattès company, has assiduously developed other blockbusters. Nicole Lattès, the managing director, was intrigued by a nonfiction work on Breton seafarers and asked the author, Irène Frain, for a novel à la James Clavell about a nineteenth-century sailor from Quimper who made his fortune in India. The result, Le Nabab, sold 300,000 copies on publication in 1982. Probably the most successful work in this genre was La Bicyclette bleue (The Blue Bicycle), a family saga set in wartime France, along lines similar to those of Gone With the Wind (so similar, in fact, that a copyrightinfringement suit resulted). It sold about 800,000 copies en librairie and another million and a half through France’s very large book clubs.
But numbers are not everything. Publishers, writers, and readers share the belief that books should have something to do with literature. Where novels are concerned, true distinction is summed up in the phrase “les Goncourtables,” meaning books worthy of consideration for the Prix Goncourt or other awards bestowed every November. There is a clear division between “literary” books and all the others. The middle ground, held in Anglo-American publishing by narrative writers like Paul Theroux and John Irving, and genre masters like John Le Carré and Elmore Leonard, seems sparsely populated in France—yet a significant number of works of real distinction achieve wide popular success every year.
Few have done this as handily as the Marguerite Duras novel L’Amant (The Lover). Its first printing, in September of 1984, by the small but venerable Editions de Minuit, was a mere 25,000 copies. By the time it won the Goncourt, two months later, 200,000 copies had been sold; the figure soared to 750,000 by the year’s end. L’Amant’s success illustrates why serious literature has proved of enduring value to French publishers. Prizes like the Goncourt, the Fémina, the Médicis, the Renaudot, and the Interallié reward publishers commercially for bringing forth quality works. The Prix Goncourt, which is the most prestigious of the awards, typically assures further sales of at least 120,000 copies. The prizewinners as a group dominate the Express Fiction list well into spring.
BERNARD PIVOT GIVES the various prizes their due, assembling the winners each year on a special show. But in fact his program has a far greater impact on the general book-buying public than the prizes do. Mere selection for Apostrophes, which is announced ten days beforehand, boosts bookshop orders and sales. In many instances a pleasing appearance by a telegenic author has assured the commercial success of a book. The editor Francoise Vernv recalls the appearance a few years back of a swashbuckler named Cizia Zykë, the author of an autobiographical account of gold-prospecting in South America, titled Oro. “You thought he was going to pull out his Colt and lay it on the table,” Verny said. The next day the bookstores saw a run on Zykë’s book.
L’effet Pivot—the Pivot effect—was evident more recently in the somewhat surprising success of La Force de l’amour (The Force of Love), a work of autobiographical reflection by the late French businessman and prominent Freemason Michel Baroin. The president of a large insurance company and of the retail chain FNAC, Baroin was known for an uncommon spiritualism and moral concern. By the time he died, last February, in a plane crash in Zaire, Baroin had come to be regarded by many of his countrymen as a kind of wise man, exemplifying what the French refer to as la vie associative. Upon the posthumous publication of La Force de l’amour, Baroin’s son Francois went on Apostrophes to talk about his father. The fragility and sincerity of the youth, who appeared to possess something of his father’s character, struck a deep chord in viewers and lifted the book to the top of the Fxpress list last April.
Possibly Apostrophes could happen only in France. The Americans and the British prefer their book talk in black and white, in neat and definitive review columns. The Germans talk endlessly on television, about books among other things, but never seem to have much fun doing it. For the French, however, Apostrophes offers the entertainment value of witty, erudite conversation and the personal rapport they desire with the writers they admire. Pivot diverts his viewers and, more important, brings them closer to the writers they read— and vice versa. In Zykë’s case and that of Francois Baroin, le courant est passé, as they like to say in France: the current passed. They had instinctively followed the advice Pivot once issued to those who find themselves in the guests’ chairs on his austere set: “Be yourself; speak with sincerity and, if possible, with passion.”
—Brendan Murphy