The list of Sylvain Tesson's supporters is growing.
The Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, defended this Sunday the choice of the writer as godfather of the Spring of Poets (March 9 to 25), after a forum which opposed it by accusing the writer of being a “ reactionary icon.”
“Sylvain Tesson is one of those writers who have the desire to share the love of words with everyone.
I am happy that the Spring of Poets celebrates throughout France this vision of poetry, open, free and popular,” declared the minister on the social network X.
🖋️ Culture is generous, it needs authors who introduce our literary heritage and our new poetic scene:
Sylvain Tesson is one of those writers who have the desire to share the love of words with everyone.
I am happy that the Spring of…
— Rachida Dati ن (@datirachida) January 21, 2024
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.
A collective of 1,200 actors from the world of culture opposed the choice of Sylvain Tesson as sponsor of this annual event in an article published Thursday by Libération.
A “trivialization of the extreme right”
The signatories, including the authors Baptiste Beaulieu and Chloé Delaume, believed that this “reinforced the trivialization and normalization of the extreme right in the political and cultural spheres, and in society as a whole”.
The petitioners accuse the 51-year-old travel writer, winner of the Renaudot Prize in 2019 for “The Snow Panther”, of being a “leading figure of
the literary extreme right
”.
He notably prefaced several novels by Jean Raspail, a monarchist and traditionalist Catholic writer, admired by identitarians, who died in 2020.
On Saturday, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, himself a writer, gave his “total support to Sylvain Tesson” on the X network. Using sharper terms than Rachida Dati, he denounced “sectarian exclusion with an adventurous pen”: “This is where we are in the France of the Enlightenment, of reason and of the free spirit”.
So this is where we are in the France of the Enlightenment, of reason and of the free spirit: a petition against a writer of great talent, the sectarian exclusion of an adventurous pen.
Full support for Sylvain #Tesson, poet of our world.
— Bruno Le Maire (@BrunoLeMaire) January 20, 2024
The LR president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse also provided “total support” in the face of what she describes as a “cabal” against the writer.
“Total support for Sylvain Tesson, immense writer and adventurer, unfairly attacked by right thinking.
This column is ridiculous and reflects the long drift of the Left towards wokism!
», Reacted again on the right, the president of LR Éric Ciotti.
Support also came from the literary world.
“The world is quite detestable and would be all the more so if we do not admit horizons other than our own”, for his part judged the 2018 Goncourt Prize, Nicolas Mathieu, with ideas anchored to the left, on Instagram.
“All my life I have admired the work of right-wing authors, reactors, even bastards, and never thought that it was necessary to align neither literature nor my tastes with my appetite for progress,” said -he continued.
“We must fear as much as evil the means we use to promote the advent of good,” concluded Nicolas Mathieu.