AFP, published on Thursday, January 12, 2023 at 2:13 p.m.
Prince Harry’s memoir, with very harsh revelations for the British monarchy, got off to a flying start with more than 1.4 million copies sold in English on the first day and new print runs in France, the publishers said on Thursday.
According to Penguin Random House, “Spare” (“Le Suppléant” in French), these sales in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, in all formats and in all forms (digital, audio, etc.), are without precedent for an essay published by this publishing giant. The latter did not give figures for the other 15 languages in which the book was published.
The French edition, which had been launched with a circulation of 210,000 copies, is the subject of a new circulation of 130,000 additional copies, Fayard editions told AFP. The publisher reports a demand from booksellers about 20% higher than that of the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs in 2020, “A Promised Land”.
In this book published on Tuesday, four months after the death of Elizabeth II and four months before the coronation of Charles III, the prince, exiled since 2020 in California, paints a critical portrait of his relatives, settling accounts sometimes more than twenty years old. years.
No one emerges unscathed from the “Substitute”: neither himself, in his adolescence marked by drugs and alcohol, and who recounts himself with shamelessness, nor his father King Charles III, nor his brother William, the most attacked , nor her mother-in-law and now queen consort Camilla, or her sister-in-law Kate.
His “beloved brother and best enemy” is the most criticized of all. Presented as angry, William would never have loved his wife Meghan whom he considered “badly brought up and aggressive”, and would have during an argument in 2019 thrown Harry to the ground in the dog bowl.
Harry describes a long rivalry between William “the heir” and him “the alternate”. “I was the shadow, the lining, the plan B”.
– Popularity at half mast –
Buckingham Palace has remained silent for now. For the first time since the release of the memoirs, Charles III and William appeared in public on Thursday, respectively in Scotland and in the North West of England, displaying relaxed faces and without a word on the work.
The press reported, citing anonymous sources, the dissatisfaction of the Windsors, several tabloids assuring Thursday that Harry and his wife Meghan were now not welcome at the coronation of the king on May 6, an event with a global audience which risks to be clouded by royal divisions.
“The family expects Harry and Meghan to find an excuse not to come”, assures a source to the Daily Mail, while according to The Sun, some members of the monarchy fear that future private conversations will end up from new in the public square.
Despite the book’s strong sales, the prince’s popularity has waned in the UK, where he is often portrayed as a spoiled brat who wants the perks of royalty without the inconvenience.
Only 24% of Britons have a favorable opinion of the Duke of Sussex, according to a new YouGov study carried out after the memoir was released. With his wife Meghan, they are now even more unpopular than Prince Andrew, brother of Charles III dismissed from the monarchy after a sex scandal.
Only 21% of Britons think Harry’s main motivation is to tell his side of his story, as he claims, while 41% think it’s the money.