When I open the
Le Monde
application
on my mobile in recent days, I always get the same advertising: “Buy books at your independent bookstore.
Support her ”.
Not only happens with
Le Monde
.
Le
Nouvel Observateur
and
Telerama
have also given free advertising space to independent French booksellers, who are furious.
And it is that since last October 30, France has experienced a second confinement that has made the spirits of small merchants twitch.
They see how the business escapes them, when it does not collapse, at the gates of the Christmas campaign and to make matters worse for the benefit of large distributors, physical and virtual.
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Neighborhood bookstores have had to lower the blind since the last weekend of October while they watched helplessly as the superstores and hypermarkets on the outskirts sold, without restriction, books and DVDs.
Finally, the French government has decided that hypermarkets sell only "essential products" such as food, hygiene and childcare but not books, games or DVDs to avoid unfair competition in the circumstances.
Small merchants always have the option of proposing the
click and collect
: the customer ordering the book online and stopping by the bookstore simply to pick up their order.
During the first confinement it was argued that the bookstores could not open their doors to the public because they were not prepared to guarantee the barrier gestures and the respect of the security protocol required by the state of health alarm.
Since March they have been updated and yet today they are not allowed to welcome the public.
France has promoted a suburban lifestyle, the American way, and so it goes
Behind all this specific controversy lies the conception of what a book is, what we consider to be a “basic good” and what model of society (and city) we prioritize.
And this was the aim of the 250 signatories -writers, publishers and booksellers- of an open platform addressed to the President of the Republic and published in
Le Monde
last October 30.
It is entitled
Open all bookstores, like all libraries, is to choose culture
.
The collective text reads, for example, that "a book is not a product like any other: it is a good that must be defended by the nation, in all circumstances and in all places."
Switzerland and Belgium, with as much or more restrictive measures, have allowed bookstores to open.
Why not France?
The France that sees itself as
the country of lights and culture
has become, in much of the territory in reality, a country of polygons in the suburbs and dormitory cities all linked by roundabouts, where bookstores shine ... for its absence.
If you want a book, you have no choice but to buy it at the hypermarket unless you are willing to get in the car and travel miles to get yourself a treasure.
The reality is that a quarter of the bookstores in France are in Paris and its outskirts.
In just two neighborhoods in Paris there are more than 100 bookstores.
I am lucky enough to live in a small city that still has a couple of independent bookstores - one generalist and the other specialized in children's and youth literature - as well as two small second-hand book stores and two Christian bookstores.
I am a regular customer of all of them and I visit them regularly not only because I like to read, and my husband and my children also, but as a true volunteer militant act: because I want them not to close the doors, neither during confinement nor, what would be even worse, that they cast the final bolt after him.
I want my city to have a small business, which I can go on foot, by bike or by public transport.
I want there to be small establishments to better distribute the cake: for everyone to eat their fill without anyone getting stuffed or hungry.
Where is it written that the big fish always has to end up eating the little one?
This Parisian bookstore plays a pun on the Mona Lisa painting.
"Mona Lisait" means "Mona read" (c) ActuaLitté via Flickr / Creative Commons
The way I see it, France has not yet understood that since the end of World War II it has promoted a suburban lifestyle, the American way, and that's how it is doing.
The average Frenchman who succeeds in life leaves the city sooner rather than later to go into exile on the outskirts, sheltered in his house with a garden and orchard.
Who cares about the closing of the small establishments in the urban center, where the average citizen never sets foot?
Unfortunately, the closure only worries the booksellers, publishers and some citizens of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, who imagine that France is still the country of Culture, with a capital C, as they were taught in school a few decades ago. Books are no longer, as in other times, valuable goods even if they are sold in a bookstore. And that's how it decides what the French government decides.