Gallimard rejected Thursday June 11 the accusations made against her by Boualem Sansal, who strongly questioned her former publishing house in the media and in her book for its positions during and after her detention in Algeria. “The truth is that Boualem Sansal made his choices, political, financial and editorial and that, even if he seeks it, he cannot attribute responsibility to Éditions Gallimard,” writes the publishing house in a “clarification”.
“In his latest book, La Légende, as in certain interviews he recently gave about himself, Boualem Sansal gives Éditions Gallimard a role that they never played during his incarceration and after his release,” she indicates.
“The addition of approximations and ellipses does not make a truth. But it builds a legend, that of a writer on whom his historical publisher would have imposed a defense strategy and a lukewarm and diplomatic discourse with regard to the Algerian regime, without worrying, on his return, about the precariousness of his financial and material situation,” she adds.
Political and material reasons
In his press release, Gallimard responds point by point to all of Boualem Sansal’s accusations. In The Legend, released on June 2 by Grasset, the 81-year-old Franco-Algerian author is particularly harsh with the managers of Gallimard, including CEO Antoine Gallimard, whom he accuses of having “put him on the street” like “a homeless person”, by forcing him to leave the accommodation where he was housed for three months after his arrival in Paris.
“Those who loved me, admired me and flattered me were the first to spit on me,” he also wrote. Boualem Sansal, imprisoned for almost a year in Algeria, found himself at the heart of a controversy when he decided to leave Gallimard, his publisher for 27 years, for Grasset, one of the publishing houses of Hachette Livre, a group in the orbit of billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
He explained that he made this decision both for political and material reasons, Grasset having offered him an advance of one million euros for his book against €100,000 for Gallimard, according to him.
