It is somewhat tragicomic to see Boualem Sansal, a fierce critic of shareholders who constantly denigrate those who would prefer the “victimhood tyranny of wokism” to strict patriotism, announce his departure from France solely on the grounds of not being loved enough. This Saturday, April 25, while speaking on LCI, the writer Boualem Sansal announced his decision to leave the country with eloquence, as a great man of letters: “France is over for me, I have a few months left in this country and then I’m out”.
To Le Figaro later in the weekend, the 81-year-old writer, imprisoned for a year in Algeria for an opinion offense before being released in November 2025 through French diplomatic efforts, explained his intentions. “Why stay in France with all these attacks I endure day and night? he wonders. I need to escape. It’s worse than the dictatorship in Algeria. They are imposing a dictatorship of thought on me, because they want to silence me. They want to scare me.”
“They”? “The French are adorable. I feel like I have almost unanimous support, he continues. But it’s the problem of a handful of thought oligarchs, little office dictators”. An author so stifled that he was almost unanimously elected to the French Academy in January, thereby becoming an “immortal”.
New literary recruit of Vincent Bolloré
Wherever he goes, “to Belgium, to Switzerland”, as he informed the media, Boualem Sansal will depart with a publishing deal worth a million euros from Vincent Bolloré to publish his next book at Grasset. This decision was made after leaving Gallimard recently, due to a disagreement with its director Olivier Nora, who was dismissed by the owner over the publication date of the book. According to recent reports in Le Monde, the amount involved is astronomical.
In exchange for this deal, the author agreed to leave his longtime publisher Gallimard to join the realm of the far-right billionaire. According to this same newspaper, this was due to a question from Antoine Gallimard about when Sansal would vacate the apartment he had been temporarily and graciously lent in the 7th arrondissement of Paris since his return to France. Ingratitude, inflated ego. The signature of a great.
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