Hachette Livre announced the departure of Sophie de Closets on Thursday 24 March. She leaves the presidency of Fayard editions, “desirous”, officially, “to enter a new phase of his career”. Since its takeover offer (OPA) for Lagardère was submitted to the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) on February 21, Vivendi has been the first publisher of a major Hachette to drop out. A departure that shows how much she has little desire to continue working under the rule of a group of Vincent Bolloré. Others can follow.
Sophie de Closets was appointed CEO of Fayard editions in January 2014 and has successfully achieved several milestones. As the French critical edition of my camp in 2021. This program book by Adolf Hitler was presented as a means of historicizing evil and was accompanied by a very solid scientific critique. On the lookout, the daughter of journalist François de Closets published the young California poet Amanda Gorman, who stole the show from Joe Biden at the inauguration ceremony of the President of the United States.
capital disputes
The boss of Fayard, normalien and agrégé in history, distinguished himself by becoming the lucky editor of the Memoirs of Barack Obama. With Arnaud Nourry, CEO of Hachette Livre at the time, she had won the French rights to this title in New York from Penguin Random House. By convincing the former president that she could. Sale ofa promised land exploded as soon as they went on sale, in November 2020. Exactly two years after the success of Become, the testimony of the former first lady, Michelle Obama, that Fayard had sold more than half a million copies in French-speaking countries.
At Fayard, Sophie de Closets also published far-right political figures such as Philippe de Villiers. The latter included his brother, Pierre, former chief of staff of the armies, in the list of authors of the house. In a survey published on Wednesday The world told how Nicolas Sarkozy, friend of Arnaud Lagardère, and director of the Lagardère group, confirmed “to nurse” of the fate of the editor after the publication of books that did not please her. For more than two years, capital disputes within Hachette’s parent company have weighed on its employees.
Sophie de Closets acknowledges: “I have spent eighteen wonderful years” at Hatchet, “where I learned the publisher’s trade and † have been able to exercise it under exceptional circumstances. † She thanked the contributors and authors “whose trust obliges us”. The hypothesis of his arrival is not confirmed by Flammarion. The house (in the Gallimard galaxy) that Betty Mialet and Bernard Barrault welcomed exactly when they left the management of Julliard (Editis) at the end of 2019, taking their main authors with them.
