For two weeks now, in the world of culture but also in the media, the controversy has been in full swing around the appointment of Sylvain Tesson as godfather of the 2024 edition of the Spring of Poets. This poetry festival takes place each year through dozens of events in cultural centers, bookstores, schools and even media libraries throughout France. At the beginning of January, it was announced that the far-right writer was nominated as godfather of the Spring of Poets which will be held in March 2024.
Following the announcement of his appointment, the debate swelled after a forum in Release signed by poets, writers and public service workers. The text denounces the fact “that a cultural event to which we are in fact inextricably linked in a symbolic way, created in order to counter preconceived ideas and to make manifest the extreme vitality of poetry is embodied by a writer established as an icon reactionary”.
This stand was followed by a counter-offensive in The Point, bringing together figures ranging from Luc Ferry to Eric Naullan, with a forum which denounces “ideological terrorism” and a “moral dictatorship” on the part of the “wokists”. Other personalities ranging from the socialist left to the far right have also given their support to the writer, such as Michael DelafossePS mayor of Montpellier, who denounced an attempt at “cancel culture” on
But in recent days, it is the government itself which has provided its support to Sylvain Tesson through the new Minister of Culture Rachida Dati. On busy attacking our salaries, immediately qualified Tesson a “writer of great talent” and an “adventurous pen”.
This defense of Tesson completely erases a central aspect of the character, now well known: his ultra-reactionary ideology. In French reactions, François Kruge, showed how Sylvain Tesson’s youth was marked by his first steps on Radio Courtoisie, a historic radio station of the far-right, and the financing of his first major trip by an association of OAS alumni. As he grew up, the great explorer continued his journey under the guidance of a mentor: Jean Raspail. A royalist and literary figure of the far-right, he wrote Le Camp des Saints in 1973, a xenophobic best-seller of the far-right which recounts “the end of the white world, under the invasion of millions and millions of starving, “underdeveloped” men who constitute three-quarters of humanity.”
Tesson’s proximity to the far-right which is also embodied in his links with far-right theorists. His father, Phillipe Tesson, was a faithful friend of Dominique Venner, one of the inspirations of the New Right. These positions on the great replacement last November or his sexist outings in his works are also explicit as to the ideology that “the adventurer” defends.
When the government legitimizes Tesson as a figure of the festival, it is thus an ultra-reactionary political support, in the continuity of its borrowings from the program of the extreme right in the immigration law, or the outings on “demographic rearmament”], inseparable from the identitarian and racist ideology of the decline of the West. Faced with this normalization of the ideas of the extreme right and those who promote them, we must support the cultural actors who are mobilizing against the appointment of Sylvain Tesson at the head of a festival which will take place in public cultural sites, but above all by the fight in the streets against the government’s racist and xenophobic laws which seek to divide us.
