“Don’t ever call me France again/France has let me down!” It’s October 17 at Pee & Bee, an Italian restaurant in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Maison Perrin celebrates the release of Florent Barraco’s book Michel Sardou. Truths and legends. On this occasion, a special Sardou karaoke is organized. What a surprise to us to see the emblematic boss of Perrin, Benoît Yvert, transform himself for one evening into a room attendant, microphone in hand. Can we imagine Antoine Gallimard or Françoise Nyssen shouting about The Sergeant’s Laughter Or Be a woman ? Yvert makes fun of snobbery. His friend Dominique de Villepin says of him that he has “a head of the end of the race”, “a physique that stinks of the right”, but Nietzsche would respond to this offense of facies that “every deep spirit needs a mask” .
Calling himself “liberal before being conservative” Yvert is an open man behind his retro look. At Perrin, he also published The People’s Cause by Patrick Buisson that Jacobins! by Alexis Corbière. It’s difficult to be less sectarian than this reader “addicted to old books” who knows the complete works of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot like the back of his hand – on many subjects, his erudition would make Pic de la Mirandole look like a footballer. Some remember seeing Yvert offer his gloves to a frozen Christiane Taubira at the Brive Book Fair in 2021. If he likes the song Antisocial from Trust, this gentleman of rare urbanity never loses his composure. A necessary calm when you operate in an environment, publishing, constantly disrupted by rivalries, takeovers and other low blows?
The Castelot revelation
For the purposes of this portrait, we find Yvert at the Lutetia bar. He orders a glass of fresh milk, like the turbulent hero ofClockwork Orangeeven if he identifies more with the obsessive and slightly maladjusted character played by Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. He was born under de Gaulle, in 1964. As a child, he spoke to his mother (from a noble family) and spoke to his father (“a bourgeois Parisian with an SFIO tendency”). When his parents separated, he ended up with his mother on avenue de La Bourdonnais, near the Eiffel Tower. He immerses himself in books at an age when others still suck their thumbs: “I was 7 years old when I read the Napoleon by André Castelot. It was a revelation.” The budding historian had a haphazard education, touring the private colleges on the left bank: La Rochefoucauld, l’Alma and finally Stanislas where he rubbed shoulders with Jean-Michel Blanquer, “then hairy”. In 1983, he was 19 years old when he went to interview Castelot at his home on avenue Foch: “It was God. I remember him telling me that times were difficult because his Francis I was only 110,000 copies sold – a score I never reached as a publisher! He recommended me to Perrin, where I signed a contract for a biography of Duke Decazes.” This project will never see the light of day but Yvert begins to bring projects to the most prestigious French historical publishing house (founded in 1827). Besides that, he taught the history of political ideas at the Catholic Institute of Paris before discovering his first vocation: the resale of old books.
The nostalgic Chateaubriand was only 27 years old when he opened a bookstore on Boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg called Le Conservateur (in homage to the ultra-royalist newspaper of the Restoration). The clientele is handpicked: we meet François Furet and François Mitterrand, who come in turn with Michel Charasse and Georges Kiejman and buy in cash “Memoires of right-wing people who know how to write”. Jacques Pilhan, Alain Madelin and François Léotard complete the cast of regulars. In the mid-1990s, a stunning character pushed the door and exclaimed: “Where are the poets?” It is not the ghost of Alfred de Vigny but the secretary general of the Elysée, Dominique de Villepin. Yvert helps him build his Napoleonic collection and a friendship develops, strengthened by the failed dissolution of 1997 – while everyone turns their backs on Villepin, Yvert continues to receive him in his bookstore and at his home for dinner. In 2002, when Villepin was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, he convinced his bookseller to change careers and hired him to work alongside him.
Pro-Bush and anti-Sarkozy
With the phlegm and humor that characterize him, Yvert tells us about this experience which lasted three years, between the Quai d’Orsay, Place Beauvau and Matignon: “I was in charge of the mission, then technical advisor (perhaps the term which corresponds to me least in the world) and finally to advise in short. I must admit a mistake: in 2003, I was pro-Bush! I therefore did not participate in the writing of the famous speech to the UN. Two years later, when Villepin made the choice to enter into a direct confrontation with Sarkozy, I understood by common sense that Sarkozy was going to massacre him. I preferred Villepin free. At that moment when he found himself a pretender and surrounded by courtiers while I said what I thought, I understood that it was time for me to take my cliques and my slaps.”
In 2005, Yvert found himself both director of books and reading and president of the National Book Center (CNL), located in a private mansion on rue de Verneuil with 45 employees and a 25 million euro intervention budget for finance festivals and award grants to authors: “I discovered a mess of little marquises. I put some order into it. In this sense I hope to have been useful, and I initiated many things to digitalization.” As early as 2009, and although he really liked his position, he made this observation: “The administrative elite hated Sarkozy but were too cowardly to leave.” Judging himself to disagree too much with the presidential line, he presented his resignation to the Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel. She, used to enarques, worries: will he be able to reintegrate his original body? Well no, he does like everyone else: he looks for work.
Here he is back at Perrin, under the leadership of the boss of Plon, Olivier Orban, who is training him. When asked about the Robert Redford of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Yvert always has grateful words: “In publishing we only talk about numbers, with Orban we talked about letters. He had the art never to make meetings heavy. He was a great editor, instinctive and quick, always knowing how to make you available.” Water has flowed under the bridge since Castelot’s lamentations over 110,000 books sold. Last year, Perrin’s biggest success, Total History of World War II by Olivier Wieviorka, reached 45,000 copies. Times are tough, and we have to be inventive. Does he imagine opening a collection of graphic stories, like what Les Arènes does with the cardboard ofHistory of Jerusalem by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier? Yvert doesn’t hold back anything. Working a lot, he relaxes by watching series (Cobra Kai on Netflix) or by listening to his favorite group again, the early Genesis (that of Peter Gabriel). As for his retirement, he already knows what it will look like: after having corrected others for a long time, he will write his own books. He is not about to abandon the History of France.
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