VIDEO. “What is my crime and who are the judges?”, replies the writer Sylvain Tesson, contested godfather of the Spring of Poets

“What is my crime and who are the judges?” The writer Sylvain Tesson finally responded to the controversy over his appointment as godfather of the Spring of Poets, Sunday January 28, during an interview with France 2. The author of successful stories was targeted by a column published in Release on January 18, signed by authors such as Nancy Huston, Baptiste Beaulieu or Chloé Delaume, accusing him of “a reactionary ideology” and to be a “figurehead” of the’“literary extreme right”.

Sylvain Tesson greeted this last expression with a shrug; “The French language offers such a breeding ground, such a store of words…”replied the writer, questioned by Laurent Delahousse. “I want to admit that I like what remains rather than what crumbles… Which I prefer to admire than to revolt. I am willing to be a retrograde, an out of date, a rebel…”he then said. You can say that I am a workhorse, that I am an old locomotive rather than a Formula 1 car. But they found a word which is the word of absolute conformism and which closes the debate, it is: ‘extreme right ‘.”

“I’m a little disappointed to realize that those who should be bards prefer to become magistrates.”

Sylvain Tesson, writer and godfather of Spring of Poets

at France 2

For Sylvain Tesson, the criticisms leveled against him are “symptomatic of an energetic incapacity to accept that things can be something other than oneself”. Then he denounced a form of ambient conformism. “Poetry and literature – at least that’s what I believed, poor naive – is precisely the place, the place, the homeland, perhaps the brilliance, where everything is permitted, where everything is possible, where things contradict each other, meet, collide, oppose each other… This is called freedom.”

The writer, finally, explains having agreed to sponsor the 25th edition of the Spring of Poets – dedicated to “grace” – to transmit the love of poetry, particularly in schools, in memory of those who “came to explain to me, when I was 7 years old, that Victor Hugo was perhaps better than Mickey”.

The artistic director of Spring of Poets, Sophie Nauleau, announced her resignation on Friday, denouncing a “staggering, dismaying, not to say monstrous cabal”, linked to his assumed choice of Sylvain Tesson. On Saturday, Minister of Culture Rachida Dati expressed her support for Sylvain Tesson from Angoulême, deploring the “sectarianism” which sees supporters and adversaries of the writer opposing each other. Questioned by the press, during a visit to the international comics festival, she summed up as follows: “I was surprised that poets excluded other poets”.