Sophie Nauleau, the artistic director of Spring of Poets, resigns. The latest twist in a controversy agitating the literary and media world for a week concerning the organization of the national event which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and which is to be held from March 9 to 25. The Spring of Poets is one of the rare times of the year when contemporary poetry is highlighted beyond amateur circles.
It all starts last Friday, January 19. A column published in the newspaper Release virulently contests the nomination of the writer Sylvain Tesson to sponsor the edition, a role traditionally offered to an actor or writer known to the public. She describes the writer as“reactionary icon” and affirms that this appointment would come “reinforce the trivialization and normalization of the extreme right in the political and cultural spheres, and in society as a whole, (…) against the extreme vitality of poetry claimed by the Spring of Poets”. The platform will collect 600 then 1,200 signatures from poets, publishers, booksellers and writers including Baptiste Beaulieu, Chloé Delaume, Jean D’Amérique and Nancy Huston.
Battle of “Hernani”
The successful travel writer, anchored on the right, certainly willingly assumes his reactionary positions. «I’m so reactionary that I prefer the beginning of my sentences to the end », he likes to repeat. The authors of the column, however, committed a factual error, which was later corrected: Sylvain Tesson, fan of the monarchist and traditionalist Catholic writer Jean Raspail, never signed the preface to his nationalist novel The Camp of the Saints – a fact put forward to denounce him – but the volume of his travel stories published in the “Bouquins” collection by Robert Laffont. A small nuance which is important.
The controversy is growing. The forums, in the media or online, are multiplying. A counter-petition in Pointon the one hand, the idea of a counter-Spring of poets, on the other, and it is a new battle ofto Hernani supported by the usually confidential contemporary poetry community. The scale of the crisis surprises even the authors of the text. The insults fly. The weekly Current values denounces “far left poets without talent and without audience”, treating the signatories of “cockroaches”.
“Amongst oneself”
Politics gets involved. The new Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, whose ministry supports the demonstration via the National Center for Letters to the tune of €260,000 per year, defends the writer. “Sylvain Tesson is one of those writers who have the desire to share the love of words with everyone,” while Bruno Le Maire denounces “the sectarian exclusion of an adventurous pen”. On the left, voices like that of Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the Communist Party, also recall the attachment to freedom of expression.
🖋️ Culture is generous, it needs authors who introduce our literary heritage and our new poetic scene:
Sylvain Tesson is one of those writers who desire to share his love of words with everyone.
I am happy that the Spring of…
— Rachida Dati ن (@datirachida) January 21, 2024
Others, like the writer and Prix Goncourt Nicolas Mathieu, contesting the terms of the petition, place the issue in the literary field: «Throughout my life, I have admired the work of right-wing authors, reactors, even bastards, and never thought that it was necessary to align neither literature nor my tastes with my appetite for progress. We must fear, as much as evil, the means we use to promote the advent of good. »
“Strange cabal”
Having not spoken since the publication of the column, Sophie Nauleau therefore decided, after eight days of media fever, to resign from the association on Friday January 26, leaving the leadership of the event vacant one month before its launch. “The choice, which I fully accept, of Sylvain Tesson as the magical godfather of “La Grace” (theme of the 2024 edition) triggered a startling cabal, dismaying, not to say monstrous. In this context, no words being audible, I preferred to reserve mine for silence », she explains in the press release announcing her withdrawal, adding: «To those who summon me to respond, I will remind you that I have devoted the last fifteen years, first on France Culture then to the Printemps des Poètes, to making the voices of poets of yesterday and of the past heard in all their diversity. ‘Today “. Sylvain Tesson, for his part, “bruised” in the words of its editor, has not yet expressed its position.