In France, the attribution to Sylvain Tesson of the role of godfather of the 25e edition of Spring of Poets sparks unprecedented controversy. In a letter signed by 600 (currently 1200) poets, publishers, booksellers, librarians, teachers and actors, nothing less than the exclusion of this successful writer is demanded.
Tesson’s latest work, With the fairies, currently sits at the top of sales. This book, in which the author introduces us to the beauty of Cornwall, Wales, the Isle of Man, Ireland and Scotland by sea, occupied the first position in the list of Fnac last week.
The reason for this outcry? The signatories see Sylvain Tesson as a “reactionary icon”.
In the letter published on the daily’s website Release on January 18 (and reprinted in the paper edition of January 22), it is claimed that Tesson is a leading figure of a “literary extreme right” and that with Michel Houellebecq and Yann Moix, he forms a trio “d “fashionable writers whose so-called mishaps reveal, in reality, the mysteries of a project of sinister coherence”.
In short, the French political-cultural world is in turmoil. Almost all the major dailies and magazines, both left and right, have spoken out on the subject. The debate now focuses on the defense of freedom of expression.
We will see what turn this affair takes over the coming weeks, but for the moment, things are to Sylvain Tesson’s advantage. “That the bourgeois left attacks the great writer Sylvain Tesson, with political insinuations, says a lot about the decline of a certain French left,” wrote Franz-Olivier Giesbert, of Point.
Interviewed by The Expressthe writer Patrice Jean said that the forum condemning the sponsorship of the Spring of Poets by Sylvain Tesson amounts to “buffoonery” and “baseness”.
In a tweet, former Minister of Culture Jack Lang supported Sylvain Tesson. “ Such cretinism is an insult to poetry which, par excellence, is free and without borders. “, he wrote. As for the new Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, she moved away from politics and wrote on X that she is happy that the Spring of Poets celebrates “this vision of poetry, open, free and popular”.
The recipient of the 2018 Goncourt Prize, Nicolas Mathieu, with clearly left-wing ideas, wrote on Instagram: “All my life I have admired the work of right-wing authors, reactors, even bastards, and have never never thought that it was necessary to align neither literature nor my tastes with my appetite for progress. »
In response to the tribune of Releasearound thirty intellectuals have published in Point another letter initiated by Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, philosopher and writer, to defend Sylvain Tesson. Among the signatories are Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry and Boualem Sansal, who denounce “this insidious doctrinaire, sectarian and retrograde poison, if not reactionary even beyond its laudable initial emancipatory intentions, of what is commonly called wokism “.
How did the signatories who demand the withdrawal of Sylvain Tesson come to make this gesture with such confidence? Drawing in particular on the work of François Krug French reactions: investigation into the literary extreme right published last year. We learn that Tesson admires Jean Raspail, author of a reference book for the extreme right (The camp of the saints).
Whether Sylvain Tesson has more right-wing or far-right political ideas is his business. We are not obliged to adhere to it. And if he tries to force them down our throats in his books or the interviews he gives, it is up to us to regurgitate them if we want.
Once again, we are trying to stamp an artist and his work with an ideology whose true bases we do not know. They try to make us believe that what emanates from a creator contains everything about him. However, nothing is more false than that.
Do those who demand the exclusion of Sylvain Tesson know that they are full of contradictions when they write at the end of their letter that “poetry is a fundamentally free and multiple word” and “that it cannot be neutral, without position in the face of life”?
They go on to say that “poetry is in us, it carries our pain. She is in the crowd […] She is also in the queer, the trash, the barbarism, the vulgar. In the anger that punctuates our breaths.” In short, for the signatories, poetry is where they want it to be.
The good news in this din which announces the awakening of nature is that The Spring of Poets has never been so talked about. So, let’s discover the words of the poets. Of all the poets.