Back at his office at Grasset at the end of August 1989, the publisher Jean-Paul Enthoven discovered the manuscript of a young teacher in a technical high school in Caen. The originality of the subject – the thought of great philosophers seized through their food – enchants it. The belly of philosophers Lance Michel Onfray as a hedonist, materialist philosopher, obsessed with the concordance between personal life and theoretical thought. Between the Parisian and the Norman, it is the beginning of a fertile friendship, which, alas, will not resist personal resentments and political antagonisms.
In The Publisher and the philosopherAnne-Sophie Beauvais returns to this symbolic relationship of the fractures of our time. On the one hand, the son of an agricultural worker and a cleaning lady of the Orne, having as an animal totem the boar. On the other, a worldly dandy with tanned complexion and white pants. The first has continued to come back to its modest origins and its earthly anchoring, the second took seven decades to lift the veil on its Algerian youth. Michel Onfray hates the figure of Don Quixote, Jean-Paul Enthoven wanted to make his life a novel. To spice up this human comedy again, it is necessary to introduce secondary colorful characters color: Bernard-Henri Lévy, best friend of Jean-Paul Enthoven who welcomed Michel Onfray in his stable at Grasset but never masked his contempt for the Normand, Raphaël Enthoven, darling child of the publisher who participated in the adventure of the Popular University of Caen initiated by the philosopher in 2002, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, press genius who was able to tame the rebel while surfing on his success …
“Paranoia” against mythomania
In 2010, this is the turn. Michel Onfray publishes The twilight of an idolcharge against psychoanalysis and its founder, Sigmund Freud. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth Roudinesco, guardian of the Freudian temple, treats him with all names. But BHL also comes out of wood and exhausting the test: “banal, reducing, childish, pedant, sometimes bordering on ridicule.” Jean-Paul Enthoven defends its author and, exceptional, opposes his double BHL. But despite the immense success of the book, Michel Onfray leaves him, injured by what he considers to be a lack of support from the house. Whoever, at Grasset, wanted only a small monthly income so as not to exceed the salary that his adored father touched, becomes a mercenary of the publishing and multiplies the publishers. His prodigious ability to write no longer knows any brakes: 140 pounds in thirty years. His hatred of the Parisian elite and “Babylon” sometimes turns in conspiracy.
Since then, the two men have come close to death, stuck for one, a heart accident for the other. But nothing, even the proximity of the nothingness, can no longer reconcile them. Jean-Paul Enthoven does not hide his regrets for their past friendship while castigating the “paranoia” of his former author. The philosopher hardens the attacks on his ex-publisher, depicts as a mythomaniac incapable of all sincerity.
An ideological ditch
Refusing to choose a camp, Anne-Sophie Beauvais is empathetic with the two, and tries to understand the biographical motivations behind the quarrel. It is also the ideological gap between two France which will become gaping under Emmanuel Macron through the crisis of yellow vests. Coming from a libertarian and Girondin left, Onfray takes populism and sovereignism. The ancient cantor of atheism develops increasingly civilizational obsessions, until defending mass in Latin. Impenite Elitist, Jean-Paul Enthoven illustrates the passage from the left Caviar to a globalized liberalism.
Transferring the genealogy of this friendship between a Proustian publisher and a philosopher who passed from nietzscheism to decadence, Anne-Sopie Beauvais depicts an intellectual world endangered. Grasset is today one of the last publishers still geographically located in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In bookstores, the sales of Michel Onfray are silent. But between a webtelé, the review Popular front Then the CNews channel, the intellectual has long found other supports for its anti -liberal invective. Let us admit here our nostalgia for a libertarian philosopher and dogmas’ slayer, which we loved so much.
The Publisher and the philosopherby Anne-Sophie Beauvais. Robert Laffont, 242 p., € 20.
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