a conservative revolution in publishing - bourdieu

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A conservative revolution in publishingPierre 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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A conservative revolution in publishing*

Pierre Bourdieu

Translated by Ryan Fraser

This essay by Pierre Bourdieu was originally published in 1999 as Une revolutionconservatrice 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, toconfer 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-publishableamong 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 France-

Loisirs 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.

Translation Studies,

Vol. 1, No. 2, 2008, 123153

ISSN 1478-1700 print/ISSN 1751-2921 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14781700802113465

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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) forconfrontation 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 fieldsdiacritical 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.

124 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 officialfunction 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 ofsocial and symbolic capitalfor

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 veryinfluential in the major literary prize process; editorial director Jean-Paul Enthoven is also aneditorial advisor toLe Point; assistant literary director Manuel Carcassone writes forLe Pointand Le Figaro; Bernard-Henri Levy, who is a literary advisor as well as the director of theFigures series and La Regle 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.5 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.

Translation Studies 125


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media; Hector Bianciotti is a member of the Academie francaise; house-appointed literaryadvisors Dominique Fernandez and Francois Nourissier write for Le Monde and Le NouvelObservateurrespectively and sit on various juries, Fernandez on the Medicis and Nourissier onthe 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 experienceof 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, read-

able, 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 tosucceed, 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 non-

partisan 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

9 Jean Lahougue in Jean-Marie Laclavetine and Jean Lahougue. 1998.Ecriverons et liserons en vingt

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 Michel Deguy, op. cit., 31.

126 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 fieldTo 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 assupplementary 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 Michel Deguy, op. cit., 1718.15 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.



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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 small-

scale 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 orsubsidiaries disposing of their own capital. These subsidiaries can take the form of independentor limited liability companies (the small or medium-sized SARL or Societe a responsabilitelimitee), general partnerships (e.g., Lattes), limited partnerships (e.g., Le Seuil), or booksellerssuch as Corti (Complexe and Zoe are foreign publishers that specialize in French-languageliterature and market extensively in France, as is Noir sur Blanc, a Swiss company with abookseller and a small SARL in France). Five publishers have been treated in our multiplecorrespondence analysis (MCA) as supplementary elements: Harlequin, which specializes inpopular literature in translation; Jai lu, which has a certain profile on the contemporary scenefor publishing first-edition novels, but which published mostly second (paperback) editionsbetween 19951996; les Presses de la Cite, which disappeared for a year and then reemerged aspart of Presses-Solar-Belfond; and finally Fixot and Payot. Fixot-Laffont (Bernard Fixotbecame director of Nouvelles Editions Robert Laffont in 1993) has been treated here both as asingle group arising from the merger of Fixot and Laffont, and as the Laffont label, treatedhere as an active element; the Fixot label, which only publishes essays, has been treated as asupplementary element. By the same token, Rivages-Payot, the result of Payot-Francesacquisition of Rivages, has been treated as a single group, both companies being highlyinterdependent 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 thesupplementary element. Series (LArpenteur, for example) have not been distinguished fromtheir respective publishing institutions.19

18 The sample is very similar, in terms of the major variables, to the entire profession as reflected by

the statistics of the INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques). Despite

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.

128 Pierre Bourdieu


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The construction of pertinent characteristics20

Sixteen variables, divided into five groups, were chosen to construct the field of publishers.

Figure 1. Cloud of pertinent characteristics distributed along axes 1 and 2 (fifty-nine active modalities).

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.



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Legal and financial status (Figures 1 and 3)

The variable of legal status is presented here in three categories: publicly traded companies(societe anonyme [n24]), limited liability companies (SARL [n23]), and others (limitedpartnerships, general partnerships, foreign companies, etc. [n9]).

The variable of company size an index arrived at by combining the publishers socialcapital, its turnover and, to a lesser extent, its number of managers divides the sample intofive categories from the largest to the smallest: n14, n12, n12, n8 and n6. For fourcompanies, 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 herein five categories: from 1 to 3 salaried employees (15); from 4 to 9 (14); from 10 to 40 (11); from40 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 wasconstructed 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 theiraverage print runs, these numbers not being disclosed, we attempted to create an approximateindex 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 placereceived 15 points; in second place 14 points, and so on. To create the index, we took theaverage 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 prizesfor its authors: the variable has published a prize-winner was determined on the basis of thesix French national book prizes commonly considered to be the most prestigious (Goncourt,Femina, Medicis, Interallie, grand prix du Roman de lAcademie Francaise and the prixRenaudot), and resulted in the following two modalities: yes (13); no (43). The latter variable iscomplemented by another: has published a jury member of a major book prize, resulting inthe 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, from1993 to 1996, received funding for translation from the Ministry of Cultures department ofliteracy (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 Ministrysdepartment of culture, science and technology (direction generale des affaires culturellesscientifiques et techniques). Both lists were based on the number of funded titles. Based onthese two figures, then, is the variable ministry funding in five categories, in thousands offrancs: 0 KF (25); from 0.5 to 4 KF (16); from 4 to 8 KF (6); from 8 to 20 KF (5); more than 30KF (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.

130 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 ofcontemporary French authors,21 in which authors are classed according to the number ofcitations 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 theeighty most frequently cited authors from the list, we gave a point to each house per textpublished from any one of these authors. Hence the variable Indice Jurt (Jurt Index), in threecategories: 3 (44), 100 to 350 (7) and more than 350 (5).

The variable Nobel francais is based on the publication of works written by Frenchwinners 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 inParis (29); in other arrondissements on the Left Bank (4); on the Right Bank (9); in theprovinces (9); or outside of France (5).

Importance of foreign literature

We constructed another variable to represent the percentage of translated titles from all titlespublished: 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 financialand 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 standingin the sector. For this reason, we have created a variable allowing us to determine the positionsof different languages within the sample. Ten language groups were created based on the fiftypublishers for whom this information was provided. Statistics on geographical and linguisticaffinities helped us put together a table (Do they publish a particular language?), which thenallowed 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 Europeanlanguages (7); no English but others (9); no language (8); no response (2).

These data were analyzed using specific multiple correspondence analysis, a variant of MCAallowing for the treatment of modalities in active questions as supplementary.22 The figurespresent a Euclidean cloud of the fifty-nine active modalities, which are indicated on axes 1 and2 of Figure 1 and axes 1 and 3 of Figure 3, as well as a cloud of the fifty-six active publishers onthe same axes of Figures 2 and 4 respectively. To encode the data, we used SPSS 8.0. 1F andADDAD 97L8 software;23 EyeLID 2.0 software was used for postfactorial investigation.24 Themodalities 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.



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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 inprize juries, for example.

Figure 2. Cloud of fifty-six publishers distributed along axes 1 and 2 according to their rank in

ascending hierarchical classification (AHC).

132 Pierre Bourdieu


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This ascending classification

25

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

Figure 3. Cloud of pertinent characteristics distributed along axes 1 and 3 (fifty-nine active

modalities).

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.



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(over 350 for five of them, zero for Albin Michel, and 127 for Laffont). Moreover, all havepublished 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 scantcommercial success. Standing out from this group is a class of very small houses (n 19):

Age dhomme, Chambon, Champvallon, Climats, Complexe, Des Femmes, Hamy, Nadeau,

Figure 4. Cloud of fifty-six publishers distributed along axes 1 and 3 according to their rank in

ascending hierarchical classification (AHC).

134 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 inher 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 evaluatingauthorities 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 lessexpensive 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 withsmaller bookstoreswhich, 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 officialstatus 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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consecration and circulation. These are the taste-makers, influential critics who are oftenassociated with particular publishers a recent trend in the business is to assign some critic ofimportance the direction of a series or some other institutional responsibility like a readingcommittee or with personalities of influence in the milieu, such as those discussed in arecent article in the Grasset-ownedMagazine litteraire, which is eminently suited for describingthe network of power relations in which Grasset is a cornerstone. Along with editors like YvesBerger, Claude Cherki, Claude Durand, Olivier Cohen, Jean-Claude Fasquelle, FrancisEsmenard, Charles-Henri Flammarion, Bernard Fixot, Antoine Gallimard, Jerome Lindon,Olivier Orban and Jean-Marc Roberts, the article listed personalities who exercise atremendous promotional influence by hosting television panels (Guillaume Duran, BernardPivot), or who have journalistic/editorial influence (Jean-Paul Enthoven, editorial director ofGrasset, editorial advisor to Le Point and director of the Biblio-Essais series at Livre dePoche). There is also Franz-Olivier Gisbert, director ofLe Figaro and Le Figaro Magazine,biographer of Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac, novelist, and for the past year host of aliterary 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; orPierre Nora, who heads a series at Gallimard and directs Le debat; Angelo Rinaldi; and, lastbut 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 ofretained 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 oflong-term writers. Moreover, themore 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 otherpublishers. 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 medium-

sized 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.28 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.

136 Pierre Bourdieu


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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, Lattes, 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. Thisclass 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 guaranteescommercial 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, behinda 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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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 technical-

commercial 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 translationof 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.

138 Pierre Bourdieu


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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

commercial through and through, editors like Bernard Fixot (CEO of Nouvelles Editions

Robert Laffont-Fixot-Seghers, a subsidiary of Groupe de la Cite) who carries out without

fuss his duties aspublisher,* 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 forHachette, 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, andthe 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, hedoubtless 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 banditsapparently 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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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 formulagenerating

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 therejuvenating 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 anascetic 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 thathave 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.

140 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 itwas 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 literaryconsecration, perhaps with commercial success as an added benefit although there

would be little risk in predicting a happy economic fate for a house like Carriere, which



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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: thecombination of literary competency and economic realism. This is why a number of subtlydiversified strategies can be found among very small, hyper-specialized publishers, strategiesallowing them to gain the advantages associated with control over a niche market wherethere 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 inexperimental literature with a number of publications that nevertheless afford him ameasure of commercial success within his field: classics of Chinese or Japanese eroticism,detective novels, Chinese or Japanese classics and popular novels consecrated by cinematicadaptation.

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

allodoxiacan 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 avant-

garde 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 modernityand 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 Carriere is the daughter of Robert Laffont and was for a time director of press services for

Laffont.

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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 ofallpractices ofallyouth in allcountries: 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-Hebdo279 (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 tolook for writers in France and by this they mean, presumably, otherwriters 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.



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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 theestablishment like Julliard, which, as far back as the mid 1950s, was pitting young, newwriters women such as Francoise Sagan and Minou Drouet against the aging pontiffs atGallimard.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 greatinfluence on the daily and weekly newspapers as well as on prize juries),39 the fruits of whichare 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 beensuccessful 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, andsimplisticas well.40 It is aliterature strong in depictions of forbidden pleasures, designed to get a young readers bloodgoing.

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: Moreand 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 Houelle-

becqs success) constitute, in their very ambiguity, one of the most significant and subtly

* English in source.38 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.

144 Pierre Bourdieu


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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 inter-

dependent 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 re-

acquired 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 strictlycommercial 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 totheir 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 semi-

independent, satellite subsidiaries: Gallimards Le Promeneur, Le Seuils Fiction et

Compagnie, Laffonts Seghers, Payots Payot romans, Mercure de Frances

Bibliotheque americaine, POLsRevue 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-

a conservative revolution in publishing - bourdieu

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