This year’s Maghreb des Livres Book Fair, the 31st, organised by the French association Coup de soleil, saw people from across the French capital and further afield make a bee line for the Paris City Hall for the two days of the event on 28 and 29 June.
This was despite the high temperatures that reigned across France like much of the rest of Europe during the last week of June and the first week of July, causing visitors to the Fair to resort to impromptu cooling methods that included fanning themselves with newspapers or magazines or, for those who had come better prepared, using the handheld electric fans that have spread like a rash across the French capital, almost displacing other devices like otherwise ubiquitous mobile phones.
Some of the speakers on the panels attended by the Weekly seemed to be visibly wilting in the heat, though they valiantly roused themselves when it was their turn to speak. Elsewhere at the Fair and in addition to the panels there was the usual mix of author talks and interviews, book signings, and discussions, many of them related to Algeria, the guest of honour at this year’s event.
Perhaps attendance was slightly down on what it had been in previous years but given the high temperatures and the lack of ventilation in the Paris City Hall, a creaking 19th-century building that seemed to be suffering in the heat, Coup de soleil is to be congratulated on another memorable edition of this event, now running since 1994.
One of main aims of the Maghreb des Livres is to give visitors the opportunity to purchase books on the Arab Maghreb countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia that they might not otherwise have come across. Unlike some larger book fairs aimed predominantly at a professional audience, the Maghreb des Livres is aimed at the general public, and all the books on show are for sale.
Another main aim of the Fair and one of its main selling points is that in addition to books authors are also very much in evidence, with this year’s sample including some 125 authors of books on or from the Maghreb countries signing copies of their works and in some cases also giving interviews about them. Judging by the visitor profile on the day the Weekly visited, there was a wide range of different age groups.
The Paris bookstore Tiers-mythe had brought together a large selection of books in French on the Maghreb, either by French authors or by francophone Maghreb ones, for the pop-up bookstore occupying the main hall of the Paris City Hall. Trade seemed to be brisk, no doubt helped by the end of the need to handle cash – almost everyone in France now seems to pay by mobile phone – and there was a mix of older and newer titles.
Among the older titles on display were works by the first generation of Algerian writers, discounting the earlier French writers who also lived in and wrote about Algeria, which included the now canonical figures of Mohamed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and many others who typically wrote about their country during the years leading up to and during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s.
All of these writers wrote in French, still a major literary language in Algeria today but one now sharing the limelight with Arabic, and, to an increasing extent, also Algerian Berber. Today, their classic works are available in inexpensive paperback editions such as those offered to readers at the Maghreb des Livres Fair.
The works of members of this foundational generation or generations, often thematising aspects of Algerian history and identity as these struck writers who were themselves making important contributions to the independence struggle against France, have come in for renewed scrutiny by subsequent generations of readers in recent years. They are eager to know more about how things felt at the time these works were written and to compare their perceptions, and predictions, to later developments.
The works of the Franco-Algerian novelist Albert Camus, a member of the European community in Algeria before the country’s independence, have been re-examined both in France and in Algeria, for example, not so much for what they have to say about Camus’s much-vaunted philosophical views, explained in essays such as Le Mythe de Sisyphe and in some of his novels, but about his Algerian background.
Camus played a significant role in the early years of the Algerian Independence War, later falling silent as opinions polarised and his favoured solution of peaceful co-existence between Algeria’s then Arab and Berber and European communities seemed less and less likely to be achieved. He wrote a great deal about Algeria, some of it collected in readily available essay collections, as well as Le Premier Homme, a semi-autobiographical novel about childhood in Algiers, for some readers perhaps his best.
Much the same thing could be said of the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose works on Algeria and the Algerian independence struggle, written while, but mostly after, his appointment at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in what was at the time French Algeria, have found a new lease of life in universities across the United States, where they have been incorporated into the academic discipline of Post-Colonial Studies.
As anyone who has read Fanon’s Algerian books will know, they consist of essays on various themes including the Algerian national struggle, colonial rule and psychiatric disorders, the formation of Algerian national identity in the post-independence period, and Algerian women and the Islamic headscarf or veil. In the last years of his life, Fanon became a kind of staff-writer on El Moudjahid, the French-language newspaper produced in Tunis by the Front de Libération nationale (FLN), the Algerian independence movement, where his role was to explain the actions of the FLN to an international audience.
His books, put together in a hurry by his editors, or consisting of material for which he may not have always wished to be remembered, have at last been receiving proper editorial attention in recent years, though there is still a long way to go. A major new set of previously unpublished materials by Fanon was published in France in 2018 under the title of Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté.
This was used by his US biographer Adam Shatz in his well-received 2024 biography of Fanon, adding additional perspectives to the standard work by David Macey. The French translation of Shatz’s book was on display at this year’s Maghreb des Livres, along with a selection of other recent books in French on Fanon bearing witness to the growing interest in this important Martinican and by adoption Algerian author.
Books on display: Browsing through the books on display at this year’s Fair, there were several intriguing new or new-ish publications on Fanon and other members of the foundational generations that caught the eye, Shatz’s new biography, for example, widely reviewed in English and now also in French translation, along with Alice Cherki’s Frantz Fanon, Portrait, now available in an inexpensive paperback edition.
Cherki, an Algerian psychoanalyst still practicing in Paris, worked with Fanon during his time at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital and has since published various memoirs.
The respected review Algérie Littérature Action (Marsa Editions), renamed A Littérature Action since its relocation to Paris from Algiers, was presenting its latest number focused on re-readings of the work of Camus, while another review, Awal, a journal of Berber studies founded by the Algerian Berber writer Mouloud Mammeri, was presenting its latest number dedicated to Mouloud Feraoun.
One of the most important of the Algerian Berber writers of the older generation, and perhaps best known for Le Fils du pauvre, a memoir of childhood in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and his journal for the years 1955 to 1962, Feraoun was assassinated by French paramilitaries in Algeria in 1962.
Other books that caught the Weekly’s eye included new books in French on Palestine and the war on Gaza by well-known French writers on the Middle East. Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), was represented by Un Historien à Gaza, a first-hand account of life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment, while journalists Alain Gresh and Edwy Plenel, appearing later in the day on a panel on developments in the Middle East, had contributed books entitled Palestine, un people qui ne veut pas mourir and Palestine, notre blessure, respectively.
More focused on France and French relations with the Maghreb were recent works by historian Benjamin Stora, born in Algeria but coming to France as a child, on Algerian history (L’Algérie en guerre, 1954-1962), francophone Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s latest novel Houris, which refers to events in Algeria in the civil-war decade of the 1990s (the so-called “Black Decade”) and won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2024, and, by a writer originally from neighbouring Tunisia, professor of literature and journalist Abdelwahab Meddeb’s posthumously published Vers l’Orient, travel notes on destinations as different as Tangiers, Cairo, and Kyoto.
Meddeb came to international attention for his book La Maladie de l’Islam, translated into English as Islam and its Discontents in 2004, but he was probably best known to French audiences for his weekly programme Cultures d’Islam on the radio station France Culture that attracted a large audience.
Other books that the Weekly made a mental note of included French anthropologist Fabien Truong’s Grands ensemble: Violence, solidarité et ressentiment dans les quartiers populaires, an investigation of one of the suburbs surrounding French cities that are home to many people of North African or African heritage and can be seen as suffering from more than their fair share of social problems, Franco-Tunisian researcher Hajer Ben Boubaker’s prize-winning Barbès Blues: Une histoire populaire de l’immigration maghrébine, a look at North African communities in the Barbes area of Paris, and Elias Sanbar’s essay-length La dernière guerre? Palestine, 7 octobre 2023-2 avril 2024.
Sanbar co-founded the Revue d’études palestiniennes (Journal of Palestine Studies) in 1981 and was the journal’s editor-in-chief for 25 years. He is the former Palestinian ambassador to the UN cultural agency UNESCO.
As is often the case at Paris events of this kind, while this year’s Maghreb des Livres will have given visitors a valuable overview of books appearing in French on the Maghreb countries and to a lesser extent on aspects of the wider Middle East, there was little from the region. While some provision had been made for various titles to be brought in from Algiers, with the Algiers publishers Casbah Editions and Samar Editions contributing books, as well as El Amir Editions (based in the French port city of Marseilles), it was hard to feel that what was available represented more than a small fraction of production.
There was little or nothing in Arabic.
Before leaving this year’s Maghreb Book Fair, the Weekly attended a panel discussion featuring Alain Gresh and Edwy Plenel, as well as French academic Agnes Levallois and journalist Beatrice Ores, on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.
A second discussion on L’Algérie en resistance, d’Abdel-Kader à Fanon featuring a range of speakers including Alice Cherki had to be abandoned after a power cut caused by the heat led to the clearing of the building.
Maghreb des Livres, 28-29 June, Paris.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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