2024-01-29 07:33:24
Guest on France 2 on Sunday January 29, the writer reacted to a column signed by more than 1,200 cultural professionals opposing his appointment as sponsor of the cultural event.
Invited on France 2, this Sunday, January 29, for the release of his new book, Avec les fées, Sylvain Tesson responded to a column, published on January 19 in Releaseopposing his appointment as sponsor of the 2024 edition of the Spring of Poets.
In this text, supported by more than 1,200 cultural professionals, the signatories criticize the writer awarded a Renaudot prize for The Snow Panther in 2019, of being a “reactionary icon” and “a leading figure of the ‘literary extreme right’.
“I asked myself a question. What is my crime and who are my judges?”, reacted the author on France 2.
“They found a word which is the word of absolute conformism and which closes the debate, it is ‘extreme right’, he declared, “disappointed” that his detractors used this term in the face of the “breeding ground” that ‘”offers the French language”.
“They are poets, I thought they would use this extraordinary store of vocabulary at their disposal,” he added.
“I’m an old locomotive rather than a Formula 1”
Sylvain Tesson then listed the terms that he considers more accurate to define his positions: “I would like to admit that I like what remains rather than what collapses, which I prefer to admire than to revolt.”
“I am willing to be a retrograde, a nerdy, a rebel. You can say that I am a workhorse, that I am an old locomotive rather than a Formula 1,” he continued.
The writer also wanted to return to the reasons which pushed him to agree to be the godfather of the Spring of Poets. He specifies that he was “dazzled” as a child when he was introduced to Victor Hugo and explained that “it was perhaps better than Mickey”.
“If I can give back a little of the chance I had, going to schools… It’s not about showing my poems, I don’t have that pretension,” says Sylvain Tesson.
“Normalization of the far right”
To support their accusations, the signatories of the column highlight several prefaces written by Sylvain Tesson in novels by Jean Raspail, monarchist writer and traditionalist Catholic, admired by the far right for his controversial dystopian work Le Camp des saints, released in 1973. In this book, the author describes a submergence of Western civilization, including France, by massive immigration from the Third World.
The signatories, including Baptiste Beaulieu and Chloé Delaume, therefore believe that the appointment of the writer as godfather of the Spring of Poets would “reinforce the trivialization and normalization of the extreme right in the political and cultural spheres, and in the ‘society as a whole’.
For Sylvain Tesson, this reaction illustrates conformism and the rejection of diversity of opinion on the part of the authors at the origin of this forum. “Poetry and literature – at least that’s what I believed, poor naive – is precisely the place, the place, the homeland, perhaps the brilliance, where everything is permitted, where everything is possible, where things contradict each other, meet, collide, oppose each other… This is called freedom.”
“In the end I am a little disappointed to realize that those who should be bards prefer to become magistrates,” he concluded.
Faced with this controversy, the artistic director of Spring of Poets, Sophie Nauleau, announced her resignation on Friday. Sylvain Tesson, for his part, received the support of the new Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, since the Angoulême festival.
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