Her appointment in 2022 at the head of Fayard had led to the departure of several authors from the publishing house (Virginie Grimaldi, Jacques Attali…), today it is she who must leave her employer, coerced and forced. The number one French publisher Hachette Livre announced on Tuesday that it had fired Isabelle Saporta, who was head of Éditions Fayard, due to “strategic disputes”.
“Hachette Livre regrets the strategic differences which led it to terminate the functions of Isabelle Saporta as CEO of Éditions Fayard”, indicated the group, at the end of a procedure launched because of Ms. Saporta’s refusal to give in the Fayard brand to another Hachette house (Vivendi group), which must be managed by an editor with whom she has political disagreements.
A subsidiary of Lagardère, of which billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s Vivendi group took control in November, Hachette Livre (parent company of Fayard editions) wants the brand to be shared with Mazarine editions, entrusted to Lise Boëll.
Isabelle Saporta feared the extreme right-wing of the publishing house
Fayard and Hachette Livre have been in conflict for several weeks over the Fayard brand, one of the oldest in publishing in France, of which Isabelle Saporta has been CEO since June 2022.
She has been an author there since 2011, then external editor and literary director before taking charge.
The management of Fayard believed that the political line of authors that Mazarine intended to bring in, thanks to its new leader Lise Boëll, marked on the right, would harm its image. According to L’Obs, one of these authors is the president of the National Rally Jordan Bardella.
Fayard employees took up the cause of their management, in a letter sent on March 7 to the CEO of Hachette Livre Arnaud Lagardère and Stéphanie Ferran.
“The uncertainties about the future of the Fayard and Mazarine brands and that of our CEO are already having very concrete effects on our daily lives in the company and on our relationships with our external partners, in particular the authors,” they wrote. in this letter.
The employees demanded “the complete separation of the Fayard and Mazarine brands”. According to them, the association of the two was “damaging to the identity of Fayard and blurs its perception by our customers (booksellers and readers) and our authors”.