With the disappearance of André Schiffrin, it was both an author committed to intellectual debate, an activist publisher of the cause of books and an ambassador of French culture in the United States who left us.
As editor of Pantheon Books for more than thirty years, French literature and the debate on French ideas owe it to him to have allowed the work of Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir or by Pierre Bourdieu on the American continent. Son of Jacques Schiffrin, the founder of La Pléiade, he was faithful throughout his life to his dual cultural affiliation which he recounts in Round trips » published in 2007 by La Fabrique.
An ardent defender of editorial diversity and the committed act of publishing authors' texts, he founded the non-profit publishing house in the early 1990s. The New Press which allowed the dissemination of the ideas of Eric Hobsbawm or Noam Chomsky, but also of the works of Jean Echenoz and Marguerite Duras.
His essays Publishing without publishers or Money and words are major contributions and lucid analyses on the role of the media and publishing in the 20th century as well as on the phenomena of concentration that hit the media and publishing world hard. These essays have inspired many independent publishers and were at the origin of the creation in the late 1990s and early 2000s of collectives of independent publishers and international networks, as in 2002 in France the International Alliance of Independent Publishers.
The publishing world is losing a torchbearer and a deeply respected figure of our contemporary era. France lost one of its most loyal and enthusiastic cultural ambassadors, who was born and died in Paris.