The Book Archipelago

Faced with the tensions running through the bookshop sector today, it is time to put an end to the sanctuary myth. Rather than seeking an unattainable neutrality, let us accept the editorial radicality of each bookshop and publicly support their diversity. Here is a proposal addressed to local elected representatives: setting up, in each département, a book archipelago, a crucible for a democracy of ideas rooted in the territories.

Independent bookshops are currently going through tensions that concern the cultural sector as a whole. Several recent analyses, including one by David Piovesan published in the review AOC in March 2026, describe broken storefronts, political pressures, publishers being bought out by ideologically committed billionaires, and the economic fragility of the book trade. These analyses raise a real question but too often end on a pious wish: that bookshops continue to play their democratic role, without our knowing how, with what resources, or according to what political architecture.

I want to propose another path here. The question is not how bookshops might once again become sanctuaries set apart from politics. The point is to understand that they have never been sanctuaries, that they cannot be, and that it is precisely in the acceptance of their political dimension that we find the resource to rebuild a territorial cultural democracy.

My proposal, which I call the book archipelago, is to publicly support, in one town of each French département, the creation of neighbourhoods made up of several bookshops with radically assumed, editorially distinct lines, backed by micro-publishing and writing workshops, and connected to a cultural action policy funded by local authorities and co-built with the other cultural actors of the territory. I will explain this proposal by successively drawing on the singularity of the book as a cultural good, the need to dismantle the illusion of neutrality, the two models that inspire me (the village of Bécherel in Brittany and ABC House in Brussels), the articulation with the public library, the economic model, and finally the democratic wager that all this involves.

The book, a discursive cultural good

We first need to clarify what we are talking about when we talk about bookshops. The book trade is not a trade like any other. It shares with other businesses a commercial dimension, but it carries something else that I think is important to conceptualise.

One can legitimately argue that any commercial activity belongs to culture in the anthropological sense. A restaurant, a grocer’s, a clothing shop all take part in the cultural practices of a population and express their diversity. Food itself carries narratives, memories, identities. It is inseparable from what we are culturally.

A bookshop, however, trades in a particular kind of object. A book is what I propose to call a discursive cultural good. By this I mean an object whose cultural value lies not only in its form or its use, but in its propositional, argumentative, ideological content. In a dish, ideas are embedded in form and in gestures, without any meta level. In a book, ideas are stated, argued, developed, transmissible as such.

Marshall McLuhan is right: the medium is the message. The book-form carries a specific relation to thought, to duration, to memory, to identity. To hold a book, to leaf through it, to surround oneself with books, these are gestures that symbolically fabricate something other than scrolling through a social network. But McLuhan has to be completed on one point. Two books can share the same form and defend radically opposed theses. A far-left essay and a far-right essay propose two incommensurable discourses under an identical packaging. Content does not reduce to form, it is superimposed on it.

From this comes the political singularity of the bookshop. It does not merely sell an object, it gives access to a space where ideas are elaborated and transmitted. Consequently, the choice of what it stocks, of what it highlights, of whom it invites, is never a merely commercial or aesthetic choice. It is always, everywhere, political.

The illusion of the sanctuary bookshop

The notion of a sanctuary bookshop, frequently mobilised in the current debate, rests on a misunderstanding. A sanctuary from what, kept apart from whom? The assumption is that there could be a non-political editorial posture, a set of shelves that would not amount to a judgement. This is a fantasy.

Every shelf is a judgement. A general bookshop that does not stock Mein Kampf makes a political choice. A bookshop that piles up one essay and pushes another to the back makes a political choice. A bookshop that organises a public talk with one author rather than another makes a political choice. Conscious or unconscious, reasoned or routine, these choices build a discursive universe, and that universe is political.

There is a blind spot I wish to point out, in the space of bookshops that present themselves as plural. In the many bookshops that could be described, from their usual editorial choices, as progressive, which I regularly visit, I have never found any works critical of the French management of the Covid crisis. Such books do exist, however, written by authors of varied political sensibilities, concerned with the infringements of constitutional liberties, the suspension of democratic debate, and the stigmatisation of those citizens who did not submit to the majority injunction. The only bookshop where I saw them, with varied assortments, was in Saint-Malo, in the Intramuros citadel, a bookshop labelled as “right-wing”.

I am not taking a position here on the substance of these debates. My observation is that, in an apparently pluralist editorial space, there are blind spots produced by adherence to a doxa. As François Dubet analyses in Le Mépris (2025), institutions that see themselves as progressive can silently reproduce symbolic exclusion mechanisms. The breach thus left becomes the chosen terrain for forces that need no more to present themselves as the only truly dissenting voices.

My conclusion is that, rather than claiming to be a sanctuary, it would be more honest, more democratic, intellectually and democratically richer, for each bookshop to publicly assume its orientation. An ecological bookshop. A conservative bookshop. A feminist bookshop. A royalist bookshop. An anarchist bookshop. A poetry bookshop. An art bookshop. A bookshop devoted to non-Western literatures and thought. Let each one assume its line, and let diversity be produced not within each place but across the ecosystem of places.

This is the shift I want to name and propose.

The book archipelago: a proposal

I propose to local elected representatives, and especially to those who hold cultural responsibility in municipalities, intermunicipalities, departmental and regional councils, that each territory set up a book archipelago.

The image of the archipelago, dear to Édouard Glissant, says exactly what I want to name: distinct islands, with assumed identities, connected by a common sea that does not merge them into undifferentiated unity. Each island-bookshop has its own shelves, its own public, its own line. The whole produces a territorial diversity that no single place could account for.

Concretely, a book archipelago brings together, in a single neighbourhood or a single town, between five and fifteen independent bookshops, editorially differentiated, each identified by its speciality or its orientation. They are not in competition but in complementarity. Their coexistence is not neutralised by any institutional mediation. On the contrary, it is underlined by the public visibility of their differences.

Each of these bookshops is connected to a micro-publishing workshop. The aim is twofold: to allow local authors to publish outside the major circuits, and to multiply the production of ideas given form. Bookshops are no longer only relays of national publishing, they also become producers of cultural objects. Piovesan rightly writes that the editorial diversity of bookshops depends on the diversity of publishers. I extend his point: by giving each bookshop its own editorial capacity, we rebuild the very foundation of that diversity.

Each bookshop also hosts writing workshops, encounters with authors, public readings, debates, small performances, sometimes culinary or artistic workshops connected to the themes of its books. The bookshop becomes a crossroads, no longer just a point of sale. These activities are not the bookseller’s responsibility. They are funded by local authorities, and their implementation can be shared with other cultural actors of the territory, as I will detail below.

The archipelago is finally backed by a university-level training programme. I propose that each region create curricula dedicated to augmented book-trade professions: bookseller-publisher, bookseller-mediator, bookseller-facilitator. Current training prepares excellent professionals in commerce and library science. What is missing are programmes that explicitly link these skills with those of cultural action and mediation.

This architecture does not come from nowhere. Two existing experiences show us what is possible.

What Bécherel teaches us

In 1989, the Savenn Douar association launched, in a small town in Ille-et-Vilaine then facing desertification, a project considered unlikely: making this Petite Cité de caractère of 700 inhabitants the first Book Town in France. The association drew inspiration from existing models in Wales (Hay-on-Wye, 1962) and in the Belgian Ardennes (Redu, 1964). It organised a first Book Festival at Easter, bringing together regional booksellers who set up on the ground floors of the village houses.

The event met with a success beyond what its initiators had expected. Over the following years, several booksellers, second-hand dealers, bookbinders, calligraphers and publishers settled permanently in Bécherel. The village now has about a dozen permanent bookshops, or one bookseller for every fifty inhabitants, a ratio without equivalent in France. The Maison du livre, created in 2011 by the Communauté de communes du Pays de Bécherel, joined Rennes Métropole in 2014 and now coordinates the village’s activity, a member of the Fédération des Villages du livre since 2010.

The Bécherel experience teaches us several things. Concentrating bookshops in one place does not harm any of them: it reinforces them all through a global attraction effect. A sparsely populated territory is not an obstacle but a resource: Bécherel has become a tourist and economic magnet benefiting hospitality, restaurants, craft workshops and local businesses. And the regular programming of cultural events, foremost among them the Easter Book Festival and the August Book Night, shapes the identity of the place and builds a loyal, wide-ranging public.

Bécherel, however, has a limit that must be named. The village is not organised around assumed ideological diversity. Its identity rests on the concentration of book-related venues, not on their political or philosophical differentiation. This is precisely where my proposal departs from the existing model. I propose transposing the idea of a geographical concentration of bookshops while adding the requirement of assumed editorial differentiation.

Imagine a town centre hosting ten bookshops: one engaged on ecological issues, one of conservative thought, one feminist, one traditionalist, one devoted to poetry, one to art, one to philosophy, one to Arab and African literatures, one to Asian thought, one for children and young adults. Every selection of shelves is owned. Every bookseller can defend their choices. And the inhabitants of the territory can wander from one bookshop to another, knowing what they are looking for and what they will encounter.

ABC House in Brussels: the book as a mediation device

A second model can feed the proposal, no longer in its commercial dimension but in that of cultural mediation. ABC House, Art Basics for Children, is a research centre in art, culture and education, housed since 2008 in a former industrial laundry of 1600 square metres near the Gare du Nord in Brussels.

Let us clarify an important distinction right away. ABC is not a bookshop. It is primarily a library, which has grown into a hybrid structure combining themed workshops (textile, wood, paper, book), a cinema-auditorium, a café-nursery, an architecture studio, a kitchen scaled to children, a vegetable garden, and a space for movement and meditation. The project was born from the book collection Gerhard Jäger had assembled for his son in the 1990s and wished to share with other families, teachers, librarians, and educators.

What strikes me as remarkable in ABC’s approach, and what directly feeds my proposal, is that books function there as mediation devices. Children, but also adults, enter a subject (architecture, food, textiles, light) through selected books, then extend the exploration through sensory and manual activities. The book is a door, not an end. It opens onto experiences that reach far beyond it, in a holistic pedagogy that articulates the intellectual, the emotional, the sensory and the motor.

This articulation can be transposed into the commercial framework of the bookshop. Each bookshop of the archipelago can design arrangements where books serve as entry points to other cultural practices: the children’s bookshop that organises cooking workshops around a tale, the ecological bookshop that hosts garden visits, the philosophy bookshop that holds a weekly café-debate, the Eastern literatures bookshop that offers meetings with local diasporas.

Books then become, as I argue in other texts, the backbone of territorial cultural policies. They articulate, without hierarchising them, diverse cultural practices: writing, reading, dialogue, visual creation, cooking, craft, political debate. What John Dewey called in Art as Experience (1934) the rooting of art in ordinary human experience takes on a concrete and territorial form here.

Bookshop and public library: complementarity, not substitution

Before turning to the economic model, I want to address an objection that strikes me as legitimate and that it would be dishonest to bypass. Someone might say: “What you are describing is exactly what public libraries already do. They are already there, rooted in the territories, already offering workshops, encounters, mediation. Rather than invent a new arrangement, why not simply strengthen libraries?”

The objection deserves a careful reply, because it does point to a real kinship between what I am proposing and what libraries do. Libraries must be strengthened, and my argument does not contradict this at all. But there is a structural difference between the library and the book archipelago that means one cannot replace the other.

The public library is a single place on a territory. It is funded by public money, managed by a public institution or a local authority, staffed by civil servants or contracted workers whose mission is to provide a universal service. That mission structurally implies a form of neutrality: the library must welcome all audiences, its collection must cover various sensibilities, currents, generations. It is a public service obligation, written into law and into the professional tradition of librarians. It is not there to embody a point of view, it is there to guarantee common access to knowledge and to reading.

The bookshop, in my proposal, works in the exact opposite way. It is private, partial, avowedly partial, in editorial competition with its neighbours rather than in obligatory complementarity. It does not render a public service, it holds a position in a plural ecosystem. Diversity is not embodied there place by place, but ecosystem by ecosystem. What the library achieves through its active neutrality, the archipelago achieves through the public staging of differences.

These two principles are complementary because they respond to distinct democratic needs. We need places where one accesses the common, and places where one experiences difference. We need institutions that guarantee universal access, and commercial venues that assume a position. Neither replaces the other; either without the other leaves a gap.

I even believe in a rich articulation: the library can be the civic heart of the archipelago, the reference place where all audiences meet regardless of distinction, where one finds what one would not find in any of the bookshops taken in isolation. The bookshops can be the living organs around this heart, each carrying its line and inviting its publics. And library and bookshops can cooperate: shared programmes, articulated mediation arrangements, mutual orientation of audiences, lending and selling conceived as complementary gestures. Strengthen libraries, yes; but at the same time deploy around them an archipelago that gives them a private, plural, owned counterpoint.

Economic model: a collective investment, not a destructive trade-off

There remains the question that elected representatives will inevitably ask: how much would this cost, and how would it relate to existing public cultural spending?

The economic data on the independent bookshop sector, documented by the Xerfi institute for the Syndicat de la librairie française, are instructive. An independent bookshop has, on average, a turnover of 600,000 euros, employs four full-time equivalents, and has a profitability ranging, depending on its size, between -0.2% and 1% of turnover. Small bookshops, those with turnovers under 300,000 euros, often show a negative operating surplus. It is one of the least profitable retail sectors in France.

This fragility is structural. It is tied to the 1981 law on the single book price, which protects editorial diversity at the cost of a reduced commercial margin, and to the competition from large cultural retailers and online commerce. It therefore cannot be overcome by a simple increase in activity. It calls for targeted public support, on the express condition that this support not weigh on the commerce itself but be earmarked for the cultural action dimension. It is not for booksellers to subsidise on their margin the readings, debates and workshops that animate a town centre. Such expenses fall within the prerogatives of local authorities.

Let us turn to the comparison. I chose to make it with theatre because theatre is the most visible territorial cultural facility in the French landscape, but I want to say straightaway that the same reasoning would hold for other facilities: subsidised arthouse cinemas, contemporary music venues (SMAC), contemporary art centres, municipal museums, cultural third places, metropolitan media libraries. A Centre dramatique national operates on an average annual budget of 3 to 5 million euros, of which about 57% comes from the State. A Scène nationale receives a minimum State subsidy of 500,000 euros, for total budgets ranging between 2 and 6 million euros depending on the structure. France has about 78 Scènes nationales and around forty CDNs. The other territorial cultural facilities operate at similar orders of magnitude, sometimes higher for museums, always much more modest for third places.

Let us put the figures side by side. Suppose an archipelago of ten bookshops is set up in a town. Each bookshop operates on an autonomous commercial model (costs covered by turnover) but receives public support dedicated to the cultural action dimension: workshop facilitation, author events, micro-publishing, programming. This support can be estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 euros per bookshop per year, depending on the scope of activities. For ten bookshops, that amounts to annual support of 300,000 to 500,000 euros. Add initial investment costs (acquisition or renovation of premises, fitting out), which can run between 1 and 3 million euros, amortisable over twenty to thirty years, or an annual charge of 50,000 to 150,000 euros. The complete annual cost of a ten-bookshop archipelago for local authorities therefore stands between 350,000 and 650,000 euros.

I want to insist on what must not be concluded from this comparison. It is not a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The book archipelago is not meant to replace theatre, or cinema, or live music venues, or museums. I am not arguing for a budgetary migration that would weaken other cultural facilities. I am arguing for a collective investment that will ultimately benefit the entire cultural sector of the territory.

This confidence rests on a simple observation. The attractiveness that a book archipelago brings to a territory does not benefit only the bookshops, it benefits all the neighbouring cultural facilities. People who travel to visit the archipelago also visit the theatre, the cinema, the concert hall, the museum. They extend their visit, they discover programmes they would not have discovered otherwise, they form an enlarged audience for the whole cultural fabric. Bécherel has produced this spillover effect across a whole region. An archipelago set up in a medium-sized town would produce it at the scale of its territory.

Attractiveness also builds systems with other sectors. It supports hospitality, restaurants, local businesses, transport, craft workshops. It revitalises town centres and deserted neighbourhoods, whereas a large isolated cultural facility, without this ecosystem, often struggles to do so. Public investment in an archipelago is recovered economically through induced tax revenues and through the reduction of social costs linked to commercial desertification.

We must, however, answer honestly the hypothesis of a real budgetary constraint. If a local authority cannot mobilise new funds, it will have to make choices. In that case, I believe it is legitimate to question existing budgets, not to cut them but to rebalance them. A large theatre whose books would reveal that it effectively reaches a few thousand people, often the same ones, while 95% of inhabitants never set foot inside, can legitimately be invited to share part of its allocation with an archipelago which, for those 95%, offers a daily and free entry into living culture. That would be an avowed arbitration, not a sabotage. And in a second phase, that theatre would itself benefit from the enlargement of audiences the archipelago would make possible.

I want to go further and open up a path I know to be very rich: co-production. Booksellers are not necessarily professionals of cultural action. Rather than asking them to take on a job that is not theirs, rather than injecting funds directly into each bookshop so it can recruit or train mediation staff, partnerships can be built with the cultural actors already present in the territory. The town’s theatre designs a season of public readings with one bookshop. The arthouse cinema programmes, with another bookshop, a cycle around adapted books. The contemporary music venue invents, with the poetry bookshop, slam evenings. The museum articulates its exhibitions with the art bookshop’s selections. The third place hosts the archipelago’s writing workshops. The media library plays the role of civic hub and coordinates shared programmes.

This co-production model turns the archipelago into a catalyst for the existing cultural fabric. It limits the risk of budgetary duplication, it mobilises skills already present, it creates connections where the French cultural landscape suffers from professional silos. Rather than being an additional budget piled on top of existing ones, the archipelago becomes a device for connection, circulation, cooperation. Public investment then concentrates on two items: real estate and cooperation engineering. The content itself is produced jointly by the actors of the territory.

Rebuilding democracy without fear of the other

Beyond the economic model, the book archipelago commits to a political wager, which is that of trusting the diversity of ideas, including ideas that are not ours.

I will be told that publicly supporting a bookshop holding, for example, far-right positions would put democracy at risk. In my eyes it is the opposite that is true. Political parties of all persuasions today receive public funding, through the reimbursement of election campaigns and parliamentary allowances. No one considers that such funding threatens the Republic. On the contrary, it is considered that the institutional recognition of the diversity of sensibilities is a condition of democratic functioning.

The same reasoning can apply to places of the book. A town with a left-leaning political balance could support a conservative bookshop in its archipelago, just as a right-leaning town could support a radical ecological or libertarian bookshop. This cross-support is not a concession, it is a mutual recognition. It says: we see your difference, we give it its symbolic place, we do not drive it out of the public space.

This recognition has documented psychological effects. Axel Honneth, in his theory of recognition, has shown that a subject recognised in their identity does not need to assert that identity violently. It is non-recognition that produces resentment and, in the long run, aggressive radicalisation. Alice Miller, from a different psychoanalytic perspective, reaches analogous conclusions: children whose singularity is recognised do not need to demonstrate it by destroying that of others. The symbolic violence currently deployed around bookshops (broken storefronts, tags, harassment) proceeds precisely from this absence of mutual recognition. Each side feels threatened in its cultural identity and seeks to destroy the symbol of the one that threatens it. If each identity had its own symbol, publicly supported and visibly installed in the urban landscape, the need to destroy the symbol of the other would fade away.

I add a remark that may seem peripheral but seems essential to me. The book archipelago must include bookshops connected to non-Western languages and cultures: Arab literatures, African literatures, Asian thought, Central European or American cultures. Their presence in the territorial public space signifies that the French Republic recognises the cultural plurality of the people who live there. It is one of the direct implications of cultural rights as formulated in the Fribourg Declaration (2007) and the Faro Convention (2005).

Fear of the other is one of the most active drivers of contemporary French political life. It was powerfully consolidated by the Covid-19 crisis, which, under a health pretext, legitimised a generalised mistrust of our fellow human beings. We collectively need arrangements that deconstruct this fear and recreate spaces where difference can exist without threatening. Bookshops, because they are the symbolic and concrete place of ideas, are particularly well suited to this office. Deploying a book archipelago is to say to a territory: here, the diversity of ideas is welcomed, respected, organised, not feared.

Getting started

I come to the operational dimension. This proposal is addressed directly to local elected representatives who have the competences needed to implement it :

• First step: identify, in each département, a municipality, a town centre, an urban neighbourhood that could host a first archipelago. The criteria may vary: a medium-sized town losing local shops, a rural town centre seeking revitalisation, a working-class neighbourhood in need of rooted cultural activity. Bécherel has shown that a sparsely populated territory is not an obstacle. Metropolises, meanwhile, could even host several archipelagos spread across their neighbourhoods.
• Second step: launch a call for expressions of interest from independent booksellers, associations, collectives and small publishers. The aim is to identify actors who can together form the diversity of the archipelago. Selection must rest on the assumed differentiation of editorial lines, not on their conformity to a dominant line. The elected representative does not choose the content; they guarantee the plurality of the ecosystem.
• Third step: put in place a two-part public support scheme: initial investment for real estate and fitting out, and a multi-year agreement for cultural action. This agreement guarantees the editorial freedom of the booksellers and sets, in return, specific obligations regarding public activities. It also defines the framework for co-productions with the other cultural facilities of the territory.
• Fourth step: create or strengthen university programmes dedicated to augmented book-trade professions, articulating commerce, publishing, cultural mediation and public action. The INSEAC could contribute to their design.
• Fifth step, finally: network the archipelagos created at regional, national and European level, to share practices, document experiences, support transitions. In time, we can imagine one archipelago per département (about a hundred in metropolitan and overseas France), and many more in densely populated urban territories. The objection that there can be only one Book Village in France does not hold: French regions are sufficiently distant from one another, and life basins sufficiently autonomous, to each accommodate their own archipelago.

Hypothesis: the book as backbone of cultural policies

To conclude, I want to come back to what seems to me the deepest stake of this proposal. It is not only about supporting the book sector, fragile and precious as it is. It is about making the book the backbone of territorial cultural policies, and making that backbone a place of cooperation between all cultural actors.

Our cultural policies today rest mostly on heavy, expensive facilities which, as Marjorie Glas has shown in Quand l’art chasse le populaire (2023), largely serve the reproduction of cultivated classes rather than democratic emancipation. These facilities are not to be removed. They are to be reconnected to the real practices of inhabitants, and the book archipelago can be one of the modalities of that reconnection. Not by competing with them, but by irrigating them.

A bookshop is a light facility. It is also a place of experience, in the sense that Dewey gives to the word: a space where culture is not received but lived, where thought circulates through reading, dialogue, writing, encounter. It puts into practice what cultural rights call the right of each person to participate in the cultural life of their choice. And if it is articulated with a strong public library and a cultural ecosystem in co-production, it becomes the living node of a territorial fabric that nothing else can produce today.

By supporting book archipelagos in every département, local authorities would together perform several gestures :

• Rebuild declining town centres and neighbourhoods by reintroducing viable economic activity and cultural vitality.
• Offer inhabitants places of cultural practice at a human scale, accessible, plural, close by.
• Materialise in public space the diversity of ideas and cultures.
• And weave, through cooperation between the archipelago and other cultural facilities, a virtuous system that strengthens each rather than impoverishing any.

This is not a utopia. It is a technical and political proposal whose building blocks already exist, in Bécherel, in Brussels, in the work of cultural rights researchers, in the practices of many booksellers who are trying to reinvent their trade today, and in the skills already present in territorial cultural facilities. It is a matter of assembling them into a coherent project, carried by elected representatives who hold the democratic responsibility of making culture effective for all.

We do not have to fear the diversity of ideas. We have to fear their disappearance under the domination of a single line of thought, whatever it may be. The book archipelago is, I believe, one of the most promising tools to rebuild, from today onwards, the conditions of an effective cultural democracy in our territories.