Jean-Baptiste Passé is Managing Director of
La Procure.
To forget the echo of bullets in Vienna, I reread Zweig.
In the magnificent pages he devotes to
Le monde d'hier
à Paris, the bookstore, a crossroads of ideas and the arts, holds a magnificent place.
Both symbol and place of expression of French genius, our boutiques are delightfully indispensable.
But, and at the risk of reading only works relating to the war, it is Marc Bloch that I am thinking of today.
Will the
strange defeat
be repeated?
Are we so blind that we know we're going to lose everything?
The black flight of crows on our plains is replaced by the charge of imperialist hawks.
And this time the administration encourages us to do so.
No bookstores but series!
Amazon and Netflix will kill the bookstore and pursue the irremediable digital moron factory.
We can't do it!
To read also:
Shops, essential products or not ...: "Bureaucracy in its worst light"
If in March, through our representatives and in a radically different context, we made a semantic error, today he agreed to affirm that the book is indeed a product of first necessity and that its diversity, generosity of its proposal, its availability in all our city centers and its existential and civic fertility are absolutely essential.
Let us recognize that important aids were granted to us and that the support system for the first wave was prompt, skillful and proportionate.
Let us also recognize the seriousness of the health situation and the need for a proactive response.
Finally, I add the recent compensatory measure which now allows us to offer shipping costs in the event of shipment of orders.
This new forced closure of our bookstores comes at the worst time of the year (...) a few weeks before Christmas
But this new forced closure of our bookstores comes at the worst time of the year, a few days before the fall price announcements and a few weeks before Christmas when sales increase considerably.
And especially after our strategic and economic depths have been widely tested.
Alternative solutions, order pick-up or shipping services work, but our ambition is more than being just warehouses.
It also seems necessary to explore here the differences between our business and that of digital platforms.
If our nature is comparable - we sell printed books - the essence of our businesses diverges profoundly.
If Amazon attacked the book market it is without passion, by simple commercial opportunism where the abundant production of books accumulated year after year would favor a mathematical logistician.
To conquer its significant market share, Amazon offers free services on anything and everything thanks to speculative American stock market investments.
It is the dumping for more than twenty years which suggests the bearable gratuitousness!
But which company can truly deliver its customers at a loss?
To read also:
"It is not for the State to fix the border between essential and superfluous products"
Let us also evoke the working conditions many times denounced by employees, the massive and predatory use of subcontractors often precarious self-entrepreneurs, or tax evasion posed as a paradigm.
Without forgetting the territorial competition during the installation of a new warehouse: it has been proven many times that a job created here destroys three to four jobs elsewhere.
Without forgetting the copious use of environmentally friendly packaging boxes.
And then more philosophically, Amazon does not advise books, read none but uses its algorithms to lock its users in panurgical tunnels of thought.
The engine of the machine always offers the same books, the same authors.
This cold and mechanical reproduction fueled by the theft of personal data ultimately deprives the possibility of otherness and then that of the freedom to think.
It is also the illusion of immediacy, of exhaustiveness.
We must respond to "
everything, immediately
".
While this injunction is contrary to the timing and the fruitfulness of reading.
And if this siren can be attractive to the consumer, it must frighten the citizen.
There is also the beauty of chance.
Leave with a book that we did not know existed but which could perhaps change ours ...
We represent two contradictory views of the world.
Through our activity as booksellers, we strive to defend the human bond, embodied advice, reading as an invitation to interiority.
We contribute to the editorial vitality of houses.
We read and discern the books that matter and bring out new authors ... By vocation, we bring these places to life, apart from in the city centers.
We welcome everyone in their singularity, in their reading journey, in their search for meaning or entertainment.
We leave room for the intelligence of the human relationship, for the emotion and the aestheticism of the language.
In addition to the poetry of encounters - which becomes magic when it is with an author - there is also the beauty of chance.
Leave with a book that we did not know existed but which could perhaps change ours ...
Read also:
Reconfinement: other strategies were possible
Today we are ready, determined and impatient to welcome our customers in the best sanitary conditions.
The bookstore is not a source of contamination, nor are other businesses kept open, and we have been equipped for several months with masks and gel.
Today we are ready to give to read the latest published novelties or the great classics that help us understand our human condition.
Because in these times when hope can sometimes leave us, what better way than to dive back into Kessel -Kessel!
- and to exalt ourselves with the spirit of resistance and the embodiment of joy?
What better way than to travel with him across the Atlantic, to see Palmyra, to snort in the Afghan steppes?
To drink more than reason, to sing, to love each other?
In short, by the book, to live intensely what the situation prevents us.
Except to advocate the naked life, that of the body which forgets its soul, nobody can judge that this is dispensable.