The editor had left the Fayard publishing house in March 2022, as part of the OPA launched by Vivendi, the group of Vincent Bolloré, on Lagardère, for the merger of the Editis and Hachette groups.
Le Monde with AFP
The editor Sophie de Closets, who had left the management of Fayard in March, was appointed president-director and general of Flammarion editions, the Madrigall group announced on Monday 11 on Monday. “From this day, Sophie de Closets conducts organizations and all the editorial developments of Editions Flammarion”, wrote in a press release the group leader, Antoine Gallimard.
“I am happy to join a house and a group that have been carrying the values of freedom, independence, creativity, requirement, essential to our businesses, for so long,” said M de Closets, cited in the press release.
Flammarion, who publishes Michel Houellebecq and Christine Angot, had an interim direction from the end, at the end of December, Anna Pavlowitch, hired by a competitor, Albin Michel.
eighteen years at Fayard
Sophie de Closets, 44, had left Fayard in difficult conditions, after eighteen years in this house, including eight years to direct it. She was the first figure of an important Hachette house to leave when the Vivendi OPA project, Vincent Bolloré’s group, on Lagardère, for the merger of Editis and Hachette, was deposited with the authority financial markets.
“Sophie de Closets was not part of his own free will from Fayard,” said one of the authors she edited in June, the essayist and novelist Jacques Attali. She was in serious conflict with one of the administrators of the parent company Lagardère, who is none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. The former President of the Republic criticizes him for having protected from the events from two journalists from the newspaper Le Monde, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, having published books, including hatred: the Sarko years, in 2019 .
Besides Mr. Attali, who said he was determined to follow M me of closets “wherever she goes”, and MM. Davet and Lhomme, several unhappy authors of the change of direction at Fayard have left this publisher, and should be tempted to join Flammarion.
The number two of books in France in France in 2021, the novelist Virginie Grimaldi, is thus without publisher, as well as the sociologist Didier Eribon, or the journalist author of a shock survey on the nursing homes of the Orpea group, Victor Castanet.