Now rebranded as the Festival du Livre and taking place in the 19th-century splendour of the Grand Palais off the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in the centre of Paris, the Paris Book Fair took place from 11 to 13 April this year with Morocco as the guest of honour.
The crowds had turned out early, and by the time the Al-Ahram Weekly party arrived on the Fair’s second day there were already substantial queues snaking around the outside of the building. Recently renovated with its ornate facades restored and the panes in the iron and glass roof of the main exhibition space replaced, the Grand Palais looked more opulent than ever in the spring sunshine, its Beaux Arts swagger fully revealed.
Inside, the French publishing world had turned out in force for this annual event that functions as an important rendez-vous for French and francophone publishing. While the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs are larger and more international, both focusing on the English-speaking world, the Paris event is perhaps the only one in the world of its size today to be devoted entirely to non-English-language publishing.
It helps to emphasise the scale and variety of the French publishing industry, notably in its traditional strengths of literature, the humanities, and the social sciences, and it goes some way to underlining the traditional role played by Paris as an arbiter particularly of literary publishing.
It has often been said that the French capital plays a mediating role in introducing the literature of other countries to global audiences through translation and the international networks of French publishers. While this role is probably not what it once was, it is still the case that the French publishing industry plays an important role in making particularly francophone literary authors from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa better known abroad, with the publication of their work by Paris publishers being a kind of rite of passage for its eventual publication in other languages including English.
This has often been the case for writers writing in French from the Arab Maghreb countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, as well as for those from Syria and Lebanon. Arab writers writing in Arabic have also sometimes been able to access international readers by having their work published first in French translation before it makes its way into other languages.
The Paris Book Fair has never been restricted entirely to the publishing industry alone, and perhaps this is one of the most important differences between it and the London and Frankfurt events, its main competitors in Europe. Whereas both the London and Frankfurt Fairs are open to members of the public, neither is really directed at a general audience.
Both are pre-eminently trade shows, which is why when visiting them one may feel out of place. Smartly dressed office types in suits represent particularly the larger publishers at the London and Frankfurt Fairs, contrasting with the more traditional publishing uniform of lived-in tweeds, and they are likely to look through casual visitors as they make their way to meetings on the business side of the industry.
The contrast could not be greater with the Paris Fair, which even when it was still called the Salon du Livre, emphasising its partial role as a trade show, and held at the Paris exhibition grounds in the south of the French capital, it sold books to the general public, which then as now made up the majority of visitors. The organisers seem to have downplayed the business aspect of the Paris Fair even more today, turning it from a trade show into a “festival of books” and hiving off the professional side of things to the first day.
Visiting the Fair, it was clear that the publishers present were in the business of selling books, making their products better known to the general public, and not targeting professional visitors, assuming that any were present. In this respect, the Paris Fair is more like the Cairo International Book Fair than its siblings in the UK and Germany, and of course this also means that those attending are unlikely to be wearing business suits or carrying briefcases.
The Paris Fair has a festive air, something between a pop concert and a family day out, and this is underlined by its official aim of making books and reading more popular among young people.
According to figures produced by the Fair, young people make up a good proportion of the total number of visitors. This was certainly the case when the Weekly visited during one of the weekend days of this year’s event, probably prime time for visitors. Young people seemed to be everywhere, gathered in clumps by the Grand Palais’s ornate wrought iron staircases, sprawling on the floor, books in hand, and pressing against many of the stands expressly directed at them.
Moroccan books: Morocco was the guest of honour at this year’s Fair, and the Weekly made a bee line for the Moroccan stand situated opposite the main entrance to find out more about what the industry had put together for Paris audiences.
On the way, there was time to take in the stands of the larger French publishers, Gallimard, Seuil, Points, Plon, Lattes, J’ai lu, and others, all with a view to finding out what was being foregrounded for visitors. Many stands had organised signing sessions with authors, and as always these were very popular with the public.
Barely had the Weekly entered this year’s Fair before it ran into popular Algerian author Yasmina Khadra, real name Mohammed Moulessehoul, who was doing a brisk trade, all smiles, signing copies of his latest novel. Khadra, the author of some 40 novels, is one of the most famous Algerian authors in the world today, with, notably, the excellent Inspector Llob series of detective novels to his name, all of them set in Algiers.
His later novels are longer and more ambitious than the Llob series, and they are undoubtedly best read in their original French where the highly coloured Algerian character of the language can be best appreciated. As far as one knows, he has never attempted a novel in Arabic, with his focus on French, and avoidance of Arabic, reflecting the overall situation in Algeria and the other Maghreb countries where the French and Arabic literary milieux tend to be strictly separated.
Arriving at the Moroccan pavilion, the Weekly found Leila Slimani signing copies of her new novel J’emporterai le feu. One of the best-known contemporary Moroccan writers, and like Khadra writing in French, Slimani occupies a more “literary” position in the Moroccan field. She does not attempt cross-over works into genre fiction but instead positions herself as the author of works reflecting on contemporary Moroccan history and sometimes her own biography. She won the prestigious French Prix Goncourt literary prize in 2016.
The Moroccan stand was hosting both the books sent by the Moroccan publishers participating in the Fair, but unfortunately not, as far as could be seen, their representatives (names and email addresses were displayed), and the series of events put together by the Moroccan Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication and the Conseil de la communauté marocaine à l’étranger for the occasion.
There was a display of classical Moroccan authors such as the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta, a native of Tangiers, and the 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi, born in Morocco but working in Arab Sicily, and panels on Morocco’s relation to the sea. The country is geographically mixed, with coastal plains on the North African pattern giving way to mountain ranges like the famous Atlas and, further south and east, the Sahara Desert. It faces both the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and the country’s stand emphasised this aspect of its geography in line with one of the themes of the event, the French “Year of the Ocean” which is also taking place this year.
Among the books on display at the Moroccan stand were selections from Moroccan publishers, apparently mostly francophone, including better-known ones like Le Fennec and Marsam. However, these would not have allowed visitors to the Fair to understand much about the Moroccan industry. Some 80 per cent of publishing in Morocco today is in Arabic, and yet there were few Arabic books on display, and these did not represent new production. It would have been interesting to find out more about publishing in Amazigh, a tiny segment of Moroccan publishing but a growing one.
The overall impression was that Moroccan publishing is mostly artisanal in scale, though this may be false and based on an inadequate sample. Like in the other Maghreb countries, Arabic-speaking Moroccan literary writers tend to publish in Beirut (or Cairo), while French-speaking ones publish in Paris, with Slimani being an example. This situation does little to develop at least this part of the local industry.
Discussion: As is so often the case with events of this sort, where talks and panel discussions tend to take place concurrently, it was not possible to attend more than a small sample from the programme put together for the Fair. This meant that discussions on such topics as “Morocco-France, a common future” featuring speakers from Morocco and France like veteran Moroccan francophone novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun and President of the Paris Institut du Monde arabe Jack Lang, had to be foregone.
However, it was possible to attend panel discussions on Morocco and the Atlantic, in line with the Year of the Ocean theme, and Moroccan heritage and migration, a catch-all title looking at the relationship between Moroccan communities abroad, especially in Europe, and the heritage of their homeland.
The mediaeval Arabs did not have a reputation as a sea-faring people, possibly wrongly given the sea voyages undertaken by Sindbad, a merchant based in Abbasid Baghdad, in the Thousand and One Nights, as well as the evidence of investment in Mediterranean shipping in Egypt under the Fatimid Caliphate. Morocco, facing both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, had a clear incentive to develop shipping and even naval power, according to speakers on the panel.
Even if Moroccan dynasties such as the Almohads and the Almoravids tended to be inward-looking, possibly feeling themselves to be naturally land-based owing to their origin among the interior Berber tribes, they developed forts along the Atlantic coast, and until the Christian conquest of Spain and its detachment from Muslim North Africa they controlled territories on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar, implying sea-borne trade.
Moroccan academic Leila Maziane of the Université Hassan II in Casablanca, chairing the session, reminded those present of the story that the 12th-century Egyptian ruler Salah al-Din al-Ayoubi (Saladin) had requested the then Moroccan Sultan Yaqub al-Mansur to send a fleet to assist him in battles with the European Crusaders. Even if it cannot be proved that the Sultan sent the requested assistance, the story testifies to Morocco’s reputation as a naval power, she noted.
The second panel, bringing together experts on Moroccan heritage and migration, saw animated discussion on the relationship between Moroccan communities abroad and Moroccan heritage and identity. Even before strong links were forged between Morocco and France and Spain during the European colonial period, the speakers said, Morocco had long been characterised by cultural pluralism, flowing from its Berber roots, its connections to Sub-Saharan Africa, and its history of successive invasions, from the Phoenicians and the Romans to the Arabs in the 7th century CE.
This linked the country to the rest of North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as to Europe, with such influences all contributing to its cultural heritage. Modern Moroccan writers like the novelist Driss Chraibi, writing in French, had taken Moroccan identity and the “coming and going” between Morocco and Europe as their theme. Today, that coming and going, as well as the growth of larger Moroccan communities abroad, had resulted in a new kind of Moroccan pluralism.
Last year’s Festival du Livre, held in the Grand Palais éphémère, a kind of temporary version of the Grand Palais while the historic building was renovated, saw 102,000 visitors buying 90,000 books during the three days of the event. This relieved many of the French publishers present, worried by the falling number of books sold in France and by evidence of young people being wooed away from reading by social media and the Internet.
This year, some 450 publishers had stands at the Fair, though these must have been in some cases very small judging from the Weekly’s visit. Publishing in France, unlike in many other countries, is also a protected industry, with the retail price of books being controlled to prevent discounting and to protect both the publishing industry and bookstores, the traditional method of distribution, from being undercut by Web-based companies.
Such industry details make an intriguing backdrop to the Paris Book Fair, with the number of people present, and particularly their youthful aspect, undoubtedly cheering those saddened by evidence of fewer people reading, but at the same time raising questions about the health of the francophone industry.
Like publishing elsewhere, this has been hit by waves of mergers and acquisitions such that the apparent diversity of French publishing is to a certain extent a façade, since even in France, with its tradition of small independents, most publishers are in fact owned by large holding companies.
Festival du Livre, Paris, 11-13 April.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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