What is the "rentrée littéraire"?
If you have been chatting with French friends or reading French news lately, you will have at one point or another heard the “rentrée littéraire” being mentioned. Unless you have been completely consumed by your Francophilia, it is also likely that this phrase was quite alien to you; and furthermore, that any attempts at Google-translating “rentrée littéraire” did not prove fruitful at all. This would all be quite normal: on a scale going from eating snails and frog legs to public transports being on strikes just as France starts hosting the Euro 2016, the rentrée littéraire ranks quite highly amongst the violently French things that the French enjoy doing.
So what is the rentrée littéraire? The word “rentrée” itself can be translated as “return” or “coming back”. In general, when just speaking of “la rentrée”, the French are referring to the couple of weeks in late August to early September when all of France goes back to its usual working life, having enjoyed a lengthy summer break. “La rentrée scolaire” is the main component, as millions of pupils resume classes on the same week. An important point is that the summer break is much more pronounced in France than in the UK: Paris, especially, is a ghost town in August, looking like most of the population has just vanished.in London, by comparison, slows down quite a bit, but nowhere near to the extent of Paris. In general, it can be said that while the calendar year ends on 31 December, the “real” working year ends in late June.
The phenomenon of France coming back to life at the beginning of autumn is thus what constitutes “la rentrée”. And so “la rentrée littéraire” refers to a similar process, but this time occurring within the literary world: it is the highmark of the publishing season, a time when publishers are frantically spreading the word about their authors and promoting the huge mass of new books they’re releasing, when literary news are given much more attention in the media. Even if you aren’t an assiduous reader, you will be exposed to book news, be it through watching television, listening to the radio, reading the papers, or having chats around the coffee machine. Of course plenty of other things happen while the rentrée littéraire is going on, but during these two months books are a recurring subject of conversation that no one can avoid.
A common sight during the rentrée littéraire: 24-hour news channels with segments on literary news.
Technically, the rentrée littéraire begins in mid-August, a couple weeks before the general rentrée; it ends in the early weeks of November, and this period is really all about the major literary prizes. Starting in mid-September, each literary prize’s jury gradually announces its shortlist - generally one name at a time every couple of weeks, steadily building up the hype. The excitement reaches its peak in late October, with all the potential laureates being known and the final results to be decided on by mid-November. The are quite a few different prizes with varying amounts of prestige attached to them, and some of them have their own peculiar traits: the Prix Femina is awarded by an all-female jury (not necessarily to a female author), while the Prix Goncourt des lycéens by secondary school pupils aged 15-18. In general, all these pizes are awarded within a few days of each other. This has sometimes led to some rivalry, as for example the Femina and the Goncourt, sometimes "stole" a novel that was about to be selected by the other.
Houellebecq, having just won the Prix Goncourt, savouring his finest hour
For publishers, this period is an absolutely crucial period of the year. Just around the corner is December, when everyone is trying to find Christmas gifts (ie: a book) for their families. All of the books which have won a prize proudly bear a label (often eye-catchingly red) with the name of the prize on it, and are displayed in the most visible parts of bookselling stores. So winning a literary prize is guaranteed to tremendously boost a book’s sales, and this is especially true of the more prestigious ones like the Goncourt.
Any publisher has to make the most out of the winter shopping period, from which books benefit enormously; and to maximise potential sales during the end of the year, a literary prize is a crucial asset. So it is that to optimize their chances of snagging at least one literary prize, publishers gather plenty of “ammunition” to be fired in one go, releasing a huge amount of new books between September and November. The figures vary from year to year, but up until 2012 more than 600 new titles appeared on the bookshelves during this period. This is an obviously disproportionate amount of new books, so every year has its copious share of tragically “left behind” books that are overshadowed by their prize-winning cousins and so are neglected by the public. Nevertheless, every September, all publishers line up their titles for the battle to come.
Sometimes the rentrée littéraire is criticised for being more akin to a successful marketing ploy than a reflection of France’s auto-proclaimed status as a country uniquely appreciative of literature and all matters intellectual. However, it is important to keep in mind that the literary prizes, and so the rentrée littéraire, only matter so much to publishers… because they are also matter a great deal to the French! The Goncourt, Femina, Renaudot, and Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française were all created before the 1930s (the Goncourt in 1903, the Femina in 1904), and were already prestigious affairs. This was long before books had been commercialised to the extent that they are now in an age of mass marketing. According to the UNESCO, there are many times more books published in the elsewhere: more than 180,000 new and revised titles per year in Britain, 82,000 (only new books) in Germany, “only” 41,000 in France. On average, each Frenchman thus actually buys significantly less books than his neighbours, even though they are the object of more public attention.
It is also likely that the literary prizes are such important events because of the traditionally high profile enjoyed by the French literati in their country, and the importance of culture in the public sphere. Hugo had to fight the “battle of Hernani”, a series of controversies over the aesthetics of theatre that escalated into a small riot at its premiere; along with the other Romantics, he had to lead an intellectual struggle against the then-prevailing classicism. France is also proud of its intellectuels, these writers, poets, journalists, and academics who take strong public stances in politics and often expressed themselves directly in the media. Frenchmen will point you to a lineage of such prestigious figures, going back from Voltaire, Hugo, through Zola or Camus and Sartre, to more recent examples like Foucault and Bourdieu. This pride in being a country that values its intellectuals, whether it is actually justified or not, at the very least creates a strong impetus for giving literature a prominent place in public opinion.
Zola's J'accuse...!, written during the Dreyfus Affair, is the most famous example of an intellectuel's political commitment,
The rentrée littéraire has often been criticised on both sides. Some publishers consider it to be suicidal, since only a select few books end up benefiting from the whole ordeal. There have been writers who have called into question the prize juries for various reasons (conservatism, nepotism, big publishers dominating the list of laureates) or who snob the whole media ruckus. Yet the rentrée littéraire lives on; all the media cover it, and every Frenchmen is at least aware of it. There are many valid criticisms to be made of it, but despite its obvious commercial purposes, it is also a welcome opportunity to really put literature in the spotlight and get excited about books during a couple of feverish months. The French are proud of their language and their literature, and so it is also likely that if you ever ask one of them to explain the rentrée littéraire, they will do so with barely-concealed glee.