End clap. After the emergence of a controversy arising from the choice of the writer Sylvain Tesson as sponsor of the 2024 edition, the artistic director of Printemps des poetes, Sophie Nauleau, announced her resignation in a press release sent this Friday, January 26 to the AFP.
“The choice, which I fully accept, of Sylvain Tesson as the fairy godfather of ‘La Grace’ (theme of the 2024 edition, from March 9 to 25) triggered a startling, dismaying, not to say monstrous cabal. In this context, no words being audible, I preferred to reserve mine for silence”, she explains, referring to a forum of 1,200 actors from the world of culture published last week and qualifying the writer as “reactionary icon”.
Sophie Nauleau refers to a forum of 1,200 actors from the world of culture (poets, publishers, booksellers, librarians, etc.) published last week in the daily Release and qualifying the 51-year-old travel writer, winner of the Renaudot Prize in 2019 for “The Snow Panther”, as a “reactionary icon” or even a “leading figure of (the) ‘literary extreme right'”.
“Make the voice of poets heard, in all its diversity”
Sylvain Tesson notably prefaced several novels by Jean Raspail, a monarchist and traditionalist Catholic writer, admired by identitarians, who died in 2020. The signatories, including the authors Baptiste Beaulieu and Chloé Delaume, believed that this “reinforced trivialization and normalization of the far right in the political and cultural spheres, and in society as a whole.
“To those who summon me to respond, I would remind you that I have devoted the last fifteen years, first on France Culture then to the Printemps des Poètes, to making the voices of poets of yesterday and in all their diversity heard. today”, adds Sophie Nauleau in the press release, announcing her “departure from artistic direction” of the event.
“For those, if there are any, who want to know who I am or what I think, all they have to do is listen to, for example, ‘Goethe’s Oak’, a radio documentary made in the Buchenwald concentration camp” , she said again. Coordinated by the association of the same name, the Spring of Poets is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the National Book Center and the Ministry of Education. Last weekend, the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati supported the choice of Sylvain Tesson as godfather, believing that he “is one of those writers who have the desire to share with everyone the love of words”.