Dynasties are one answer. But Paris isn’t only about dynasties. There’s another kind of bookshop story happening right now, and it’s just as radical.
It starts with a law.
The law nobody talks about
Here is the thing about France that the rest of the world tends to miss, partly because France itself doesn’t shout about it. In 1981, the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, pushed through a piece of legislation so quietly audacious that its consequences are still reverberating forty-odd years later.
The Loi Lang capped book discounts at five per cent. Supermarkets, big-box retailers, Amazon: all of them are legally prevented from undercutting the independent bookseller on the corner. Three-for-two deals, so beloved in the UK, are simply illegal in France. The government looked at a librairie and said, in effect: this is not a hardware store. This is not a commodity. This is a cultural institution, and we are going to protect it as one.
The result, if you want a single statistic to carry: France has around 3,500 independent bookshops. The UK, similar in population, has roughly 1,063. The USA, with five times France’s population, has around 2,500. France, in other words, has approximately as many independent bookshops as Britain and America combined. And the number is rising, not falling: 142 new ones opened in France in 2022 alone.
Not just surviving, many of them. Thriving. Inventing. Because the Loi Lang didn’t just protect bookshops from closure. It gave them the breathing room to ask a harder question: what does a bookshop have to become, in this moment, to genuinely justify its existence?
The people in this piece have been working on that question for years. Their answers are all different. All of them stopped me in my tracks.
This piece is part of the MyFrenchLife™ French Culture Deep-Dive Collection, exclusively for Annual Subscribers and Mighty Supporters. The France worth knowing about takes a little longer to tell.