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Le Monde: No Major French Publisher Will Touch Marine Le Pen
Just another day in the democratic French Republic
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Le Monde has released an article reporting on the publishing of books by French politicians, a veritable cottage industry. The report confirms a few things which any observer of the genre will long have noticed, e.g.:

  • That French politicians write books to give off airs of literary gravitas.
  • “‘The exercise is getting banalized and is leading to a profusion of writings of variable quality,’ stressed [pollster] Brice Teinturier […]. [N]ew criticisms are addressed to politicians who are in office: they are criticized for writing instead of working.”
  • “Sophie Charnavel, head of the publisher Robert Laffont, considers that certain books are only there to occupy space and ‘are standardized’ so that their author is invited to the morning radio shows. A marketing exercise.”
  • That, as a rule, no one is reading the bulk of these publications.

E.g., European Commissioner for the Economy Pierre Moscovici’s memoirs have exactly zero reviews on Amazon.fr. Moscovici is well-known for his striking resemblance to pornographic actor-director Pierre Woodman.

The ultra-Zionist Socialist former prime minister Manuel Valls – who, being married to a Jewess, once declared that he was “eternally linked to the Jewish community and to Israel” – pointedly entitled his book Not a Drop of French Blood (his parents are Spanish and Swiss; and he is currently serving as a municipal councillor in Barcelona).

Admittedly, a few heavyweights are able to sell: Nicolas Sarkozy’s latest memoir The Time of Storms (volume I) has sold 238,000 copies and François Hollande’s The Lessons of Power has sold 200,000 copies (miraculous given how inert Hollande was as president). A few big names of the far left and far right like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Philippe de Villiers can also break into six-digit sales.

I was most struck however by a throw-away paragraph at the end of the article:

There remains however one unknown person before the 2022 presidential elections. The question is now sharply posed: till when will last the big publishers’ consensus to never publish a book signed by Marine Le Pen? For now, the cordon sanitaire [quarantining of the far-right] remains the rule for the 10 biggest publishers. “[Publishing her] would mean participating in her detoxification, which I do not want to do. My hat as a citizen takes precedence over my hat as a publisher,” said Olivier Nora [the CEO of the publisher Grasset]. Here too, economic and political motives are intertwined: “Morally, I am not ready to do this,” concluded Muriel Beyer [deputy head of Humensis, a major political publisher]. “And, professionally, my authors would not want to be part of the same publishing house as her.”

Thus we have a tacit agreement among the major publishers to exclude a candidate who appeals to a solid third of French voters and who has made every effort to assert her “republican” and “democratic” credentials; fully abandoning her father’s rebellious streak on race, World War II and the holocaust, Charles de Gaulle and the Algerian War, etc. Today, you’ll occasionally hear praise of Marshal Philippe Pétain from our globalist President Emmanuel Macron, never from putative far-rightist Marine Le Pen.

The article also makes clear that the big publishers range politically from centrist to far-left in political orientation and that the few who publish right-leaning books are subject to moral opprobrium.

The public censure and politically-motivated discrimination faced by Le Pen supporters likely also accounts for the fact that her party often runs the same candidates for both county and regional elections (60% of candidates running in the regionals are also running in the counties). Few people are willing, or can afford, to take the professional and social hit of public association with one of France’s most popular political parties.

Number of candidates by party running for both the regional and county elections: Rassemblement National (RN or National Rally), is Le Pen’s party.
Number of candidates by party running for both the regional and county elections: Rassemblement National (RN or National Rally), is Le Pen’s party.

A fine democracy we live in! A few will come to the conclusion that there is a slight contradiction between liberal-democrats’ idealistic pretensions and real human psycho-social power dynamics. It’s a shame Our Moral Betters are not more honest with themselves about the nature of their vaunted political pluralism and their instinctive demand of hegemony.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Censorship, France, Marine Le Pen 
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  1. There is something spicy about Olivier Nora – a Jew – at the head of a firm founded by a notoriously collaborationist publisher making this kind of declaration. The irony is not lost on some of us.

  2. Bartolo says:

    Alain Soral claims that this “cordon sanitaire” strategy comes from B’nai B’rith. It certainly is applied assiduously almost everywhere.

    • Replies: @Pâquerette
  3. Ray P says:

    Why can’t Marine Le Pen get a ghost-written book published which no-one will read like everyone else’s? It’s is certainly a conundrum in a country where sleazy seducers of teenaged-girls have their juicy memoirs on sale.

  4. It is more of a status question than a technical publishing question. Maybe a bit of an economic question too.
    And I would not bet on the question, whether Marine Le Pen would at all be interested in writing a book.

  5. @Bartolo

    For french readers, it comes from the book “FN, Tout ça pour ça” written by Anne Kling. The proof is an article from the same leftist newspaper ‘LeMonde’ on 03/26/1986. It is Mrs Kling who made the bulk of analytical work about the proliferation of the jewish lobby since the afterwar in France, with Emmanuel Ratier in another category. Soral sold her books at a time.

    If you want an example of censorship during the French presidentials, you have the censorship of Christian Combaz with his “Portrait de Marianne avec un poignard dans le dos”, which was pretty harsh with the center-leftist-rightist french political celebrities. The book was supposed to be released before the elections and was cancelled just a few weeks before.

    Guillaume, in addition to your article, I will add for your US curious readers a quote from the center-right newspaper ‘Figaro’ 05/19/2021 :

    “Mein Kampf : Fayard [a French big publisher] wants to historicize the Evil with its new translation […] contextualized big reknown historians […] Over the 1000 pages, half at least is filled with explanations […] showing at each page its ludicrous, delirious and criminal nature. […] The goal of this publication is to offer a rigorous alternative to these free-roaming versions of Mein Kampf”.

    One can obviously perceive the French ass-wiping ideology, coming from undoubtedly great historians in this example. It makes a good counterpart for censorship.

    • Replies: @Bartolo
  6. The message is clear (“come l’eau de roche”), France is 100% a Plutocracy in practice.

    The second message is that women were allowed to vote for the first time in 1944 and since then men still view them as second class citizens and no woman has ever been French Prime Minister or President – Those are French democratic values.

    Some German politicians even resigned from their CDU positions when Merkel was elected Chancellor – the first in Germany.

    This tells you how hypocrite those countries that preach openness, equality and their “democratic values” around the world are when their own houses are on fire!

    • Replies: @Saint Michel
  7. I’ve seen a few media blurbs that suggest Le Pen is picking up popularity with the young voters. That would be interesting if it is true.

    What is she doing on social media? Her website has plenty of videos of her appearances on national media, like this morning’s (1 June 2021) appearance on CNEWS’ La Matinale ( https://www.cnews.fr/emission/2021-06-01/la-matinale-du-01062021-1087814 ), or other clips like assembly speeches, etc., but nothing that talks directly to the voting public.

    The German Left Party member Sahra Wagenknecht does a weekly vlog, surprisingly with a very pro-German people bent that includes her opposition to immigration, opposition to harmful environmental edicts that screw the little guy, opposition to globalism, opposition to the current German approach to COVID, and so on … views that put her strongly in opposition not only to many in her party, but also in opposition to pretty much all other parties aside from the AfD. Doing so, she’s picked up 250k subscribers on YouTube alone, with nearly 16m views of her videos since 2019, and that’s just YouTube; Wagenknecht is on several of the other big social media outlets.

    Although she’d always be at risk of being blocked, LePen might nevertheless get her message out to far more people by pulling a Trump and using social media to connect to more people with her message

  8. TG says:

    “The article also makes clear that the big publishers range politically from centrist to far-left in political orientation…”

    Excuse me, this is utter rubbish. The big publishers and the other elites are extreme far-right capitalists. There is nothing ‘moral’ or ‘progressive’ or in any way decent or human about them.

    Mass immigration into Europe has one objective: to force population growth, to drive wages and living standard down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. End of story. It is a vicious and utterly amoral policy put in place by a vicious and utterly amoral elite for their own selfish motives the public be damned. It is always a mistake to use the terminology of the enemy.

    There is little so disgusting as a rich person pushing policies that will enrich themselves at the expense of impoverishing everyone else, and then claiming the moral high ground. Unless these people themselves consent to making the same sacrifices that they DEMAND be UNDEMOCRACTICALLY inflicted upon their less-wealthy fellow citizens, they have no standing to preach about morality and any such claims should be rejected with outrage (I include also their employees and people whose jobs and careers depend on toeing the party line).

    • Agree: Fluesterwitz
  9. It’s not remotely surprising that the oligarchs want total dominance of not just the politics, but the entire intellectual world.

    They also wisely know that politics is downstream from culture… and any cultural achievement, even just selling a few hundred thousand biographies, could open the door more widely for them losing their iron grip.

  10. If the French want to know what the future holds for them, they should read Jean Raspail’s CAMP OF THE SAINTS, which of course the Zionist French plutocracy does not want the public to read. So far the majority of French white zombies have less will to survive than George Romero’s walking dead zombies had to fight for survival.

  11. The right in France should get together and form their own publishing houses. If they fear getting fire bombed, they could do all their business online and have the actual printing done in a country that’s out of the reach of terrorists. The delivery of the books to the reader could be mailed in plain white packaging. I’m sure Le Pen’s books would sell very well.

  12. @Nostradamus

    There was a female French prime minister, Edith Cresson. She later ended up in Santer´s EU commission which had to step down summarily for charges of corruption. Cresson was also affected. I did not know that some German politicians resigned their CDU positions when Merkel was elected Chancellor. I guess they rather fell foul of a purge of the party by Merkel´s regime. Having had to live under her regime and its utter contempt for the constitution and the laws of the country, let alone its well-being, I could only applaud politicians resigning their positions in protest against this awful woman.

  13. Bartolo says:
    @Pâquerette

    Thank you, you seem to be extremely well informed!

  14. Bartolo says:
    @TG

    With all due respect, it’s you who is wrong. The policies you describe are supported today by the fake left and the fake right in the political “centre” and by the greens. If you want to define all plutocratic parties as ipso facto right wing, that is your choice, but understand this has not been the case for decades now.

  15. The fact that the anti-French Leftist and liberal establishment refuses to publish Le Pen is not surprising. They are merely exercising their will to power. The game was lost when these constellation of forces captured the commanding heights of the French information economy.

  16. Sadly MlP is not very good and looks like a drunken Normandy fisherwoman.
    She’ll lose badly again.
    It would be better for everyone if she stood down – even her hot little niece would be better than her.

    • Replies: @The Alarmist
  17. Three additional points: (1) French public libraries, like American, tend to exclude a lot of books on the right. Finding books by Eric Zemmour or Jean-Marie Le Pen at them is not easy. Similarly, in the United States, my public library has an ebook service called Cloud Library. It has Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and other anti-white writers, but no Candace Owens, Jason Reilly or Thomas Sowell. (2) Is it true that Solzhenitsyn wrote a book about Jews and Russians that has never been published in an English translation? (3) Every now and again on French radio I hear discussions about freedom of expression. Almost never mentioned are the rightists who have actually been harassed by the laws. It’s rather remarkable.

  18. Mr. Ed says:

    @Joe Paluka:
    ‘The delivery of the books to the reader could be mailed in plain white packaging.’

    I assume that you’re either 1> under thirty, or 2> not very fluent in English.
    You just wrote that the delivery could be mailed.

    Time to repeat grade 7.

    Yes, I know these things don’t really matter to good Americans.

  19. @Whataboutery2020

    Careful, or the good looking younger woman you might wind up with is Macron’s protégée, Maud Bregeon.

  20. Une question pour vous, Monsieur Durocher: You quoted the boss of Robert Laffont but you also seemed to include her renouned publishing house in the arrogant gaggle of big publishers who are shamelessly participating in political censorship. Has Robert Laffont really joined the industry’s consensus to blockade the words of Marine Le Pen and her supporters — as you say “a solid one-third” of the French electorate?

    That would be disgraceful in view of the fact that the towering sociopolitical issue of unrestricted immigration (i.e. replacement) remains precisely what Le Pen seems to have in common with Jean Raspail, who attacked that policy in his novel of the century. And it was Robert Laffont who first published Le Camp des Saints in Paris in 1973, has published several new editions of the same and has consistently defended Raspail against his many political detractors.

    In the latest edition from Robert Laffont, 2011, author Raspail thanked Robert Laffond and took the trouble to cite chapter and verse the dozens of sentences in his (now grandfathered) novel that he would be unable to write today because of a slew of French censorship laws enacted after the book first appeared (and some possibly because it appeared).

    How can a French democracy survive under control of a French elite that despises so many French patriots?

    • Replies: @E_Perez
  21. E_Perez says:
    @St-Germain

    How can a French democracy survive under control of a French elite that despises so many French patriots?

    Wrong question, Mr. St. Germain.

    The “resistance” never fought for the ‘survival of French democracy’ but for the (((French elite that despises French patriots))).

    Unless your compatriots understand this (and 1789) France is doomed.

  22. ia says:
    @TG

    to force population growth, to drive wages and living standard down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few

    If that were the case they are doing a pretty bad job. The French actually discriminate against hiring non-French/European (good for them). Surely, most, or a large percent, of Muslims and blacks are on some kind of welfare; or else own the little shops (alimentation). The only other non-French/Europeans I dealt with were in internet connection, c. 2006.

  23. The article uses the term “far right” to mean something it does not mean. Hitler is usually called “far right” when he was not anything like the right. He was a hard leftist and good buddies with Stalin until it became apparent that Stalin was preparing for war against Germany.

    MlP, is a leftist with sensible attitudes about immigration. A rare combination.

  24. @TG

    Agree. With the exception that there are many in the political, media and activist caste who are too dumb and/or brainwashed to know what they are doing; also, hardly anyone is self-critical enough to realize one’s own hyprocrisy and one’s own preaching the bitter water of “moral” policies while drinking the sherry reserved for the preachers.

  25. Armoric says:

    There is no democracy in Jewish-run Western countries. It’s a shame there’s been vote rigging in the US election, especially through the voting machines, but it’s not like there would have been fair elections if not for the rigged voting machines. The real fraud is that most politicians and news media are under Jewish control and support race replacement. Opponents to the race replacement program are slandered, insulted, vilified and kept out of the media. It’s not a democratic system at all.

    Under that system, Trump was not allowed to defend White people. He couldn’t even say the word “White”. As for Marine Le Pen, she’s been told she had to undemonize. The National Front used to be opposed to race replacement, and that is demonic. Marine Le Pen now needs to keep reassuring the authorities that her political party is no longer demonic.

    As part of the undemonization, Marine Le Pen has fired most serious nationalists from her party. The survivors understand they must keep silent. The party no longer has grassroots activists. The leadership is now partly made of homosexuals. The party has been renamed “Rassemblement National” instead of “Front National”. The word “rassemblement” means gathering, regrouping, rally. As part of the regrouping, they have been hiring a few African and Arab candidates, and it makes you wonder if the new name of the party should not be “Remplacement National”.

    Examples:
    https://twitter.com/E_Louvel/status/1390385655012904961/photo/1

    There is also Didier Améla, who is Togolese. He is a candidate for the Rassemblement National in France, while in Togo, he is the President of a Togolese political party called the National Front.

    And there was the case of the Algerian candidate Kamel Agag-Boudjahla. The party leadership chose him over the long-time activist Marie-Laure Duchanoy, who told them she had some doubts about his sincerity. Then, last month, Kamel suddenly denounced the RN, which he said was based on hatred and conspiracy theories. He announced he would write a book titled “I infiltrated the RN”. There was some talk of expelling Duchanoy from the party for her opposition to the Algerian candidate.

    Meanwhile, Richard Sulzer is the leader of a movement within the RN representing activists of the Jewish faith. He warns against the presence in the next elections of RN candidates that have a “sulphurous” past, that is to say a demonic past. “Sulphurous” is a word used by the Jewish media against White nationalists. Sulzer is a former advisor to Marine Le Pen and has given her a list of neonazis that must be taken off the list of candidates.

    Marine Le Pen’s tactic of undemonization is not just a tactic to avoid trouble. She doesn’t seem to care that White people are being replaced. But I will still vote for the RN, since it is the only supposedly anti-immigration party allowed in the media.

    • Thanks: eah
    • Replies: @eah
  26. A French book which should be required reading is The Camp of the Saints.

    Then again, the entire West is already living the novel’s nightmare.

    • Thanks: St-Germain
  27. eah says:
    @Armoric

    As part of the undemonization, Marine Le Pen has fired most serious nationalists from her party.

    Something similar is happening with the AfD in Germany, principally via George Meuthen, who is leading a campaign to politically castrate or expel members of the s.g. Flügel (right wing) of the party, which is usually described as ‘völkisch-nationalistisch und rechtsextreme’ (the latter a form of ‘demonization’ of course) — Meuthen and his allies in the AfD are ostensibly trying to make the AfD more ‘bürgerlich’ (respectable) in order to both escape unwanted attention from the Verfassungsschutz (this attention is largely due to pressure from the media and the Systempartein, i.e. established political parties) and attract more voters — there is no evidence this is working however (the AfD lost some support in the recent election in Sachsen-Anhalt) — to many supporters, the AfD is, above all, and must remain, ‘völkisch-nationalistisch’ — the last thing these people want is for the AfD to become a slightly right of center version of the CDU.

    • Agree: St-Germain
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