Childrens Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the age of Surveillance and Control

(Hardback)

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Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to examine how it dominated the countrys new context of surveillance and control. It traces the history of the French Communist Partys (PCF) efforts to prevent American propaganda reaching the hands of children, and Hachettes strategic and editorial responses, covering such events as the PCFs major intervention against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the compromises and modifications to Hachettes publishing of Disney books and comics; and their translated series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, which were designed to stimulate American-style consumer culture whilst not provoking the Cold War campaigners. Using extensive new multilingual archive material from French legal records, American Department of State archives and Hachettes own business records, Sophie Heywood reveals both the covert operations by transatlantic business partners and the American Embassy to rewrite the laws of a sovereign nation, and the publishers long-standing power struggle with, but also influence over, French politics. It breaks new ground in understanding the people and processes involved in self-censorship, uncovering how national policies were enacted and given meaning by the low-paid, mostly female, pieceworker-employees on the creative assembly line, and foregrounds a study of censorship and its interactions with American market power in the Western sphere. An incredibly original and important study, Childrens Publishing in Cold War France illuminates how the struggle for hearts and minds shaped the expansion of the creative industries in the free world. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.

Author Bio

Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French and a founding co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in the history of comparative childrens literature and publishing. Her first monograph was a literary and publishing history of iconic French childrens author, the Comtesse de Sgur (2011). She has published numerous articles and book chapters in English and French in internationally rated history journals, international childrens literature publications. Her research has been funded by prestigious grant bodies including the Carnegie Trust, the Institute for Historical Research and the Leverhulme Trust.