“France is over for me, I’m leaving”: the writer Boualem Sansal announces his departure from France

Boualem Sansal does not intend to stay on French territory. “France is over for me. I have a few months left to shoot in this country and I’m getting out,” he told TF1 from Brussels. The Franco-Algerian writer enters the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium this Saturday.

The writer, imprisoned in Algeria for a year for certain positions on his native country, found freedom in November 2025. He was pardoned by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who responded favorably to a request from the German authorities. Since his release, the octogenarian has been receiving medical treatment in the Paris region for several serious pathologies. But “I hate Paris, I don’t think I’m going to stay in France,” he told AFP on Friday.

He confirmed his intention to leave the country on Saturday on TF1. “It’s not possible. I am not going to fight like Don Quixotes against the windmills now. (…) France, for me, it’s over,” he said, without saying where he will go next. “I have a few years to live, peacefully. I’m going to go, I don’t know where. Among the Belgians, if they want me, or elsewhere. »

Controversy in the Parisian publishing world

For several weeks, Boualem Sansal has been at the heart of the turmoil in the Parisian publishing world. The writer left his historic publisher, Gallimard, last month to join Grasset, a house controlled by the Hachette group of conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré. His arrival at Grasset coincided with the departure of the CEO of this house, Olivier Nora, considered by many authors as a “dismissal” decided by Vincent Bolloré.

The two leaders disagreed on the publication date of Boualem Sansal’s next book, ultimately anticipated for June. The departure of Olivier Nora caused an unprecedented upheaval in publishing, marked by the departure of many well-known Grasset signatures and a widely relayed call to extend to this sector a “conscience clause”, similar to that existing for journalists.

To AFP, Boualem Sansal said he refused to be used politically and that he was associated with Vincent Bolloré. “Why, before my arrival at Grasset, did no one say the people who are at Grasset are at Bolloré…I arrive and they say ah he’s at Bolloré », protested the writer, seeing in it “a cabal” to discredit him. “Bolloré, I never met him, I don’t know this gentleman. He doesn’t need me, I don’t need him,” he insisted.

“It gives me strength”

Yves Namur, permanent secretary of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium, recognizes that the ongoing controversy at Grasset is disrupting Saturday afternoon’s event. “Yes it makes us uncomfortable, we would have preferred to avoid the trouble,” he told AFP.

However, he puts the consequences into perspective. There have certainly been some calls to delay the reception while the controversy dies down. But only one academic warned that she would be absent on Saturday. “Without regretting his gesture of having voted” for Boualem Sansal, he underlines.

The election of the Franco-Algerian writer in this Brussels areopagus of 40 “armchairs”, ten of which reserved for foreigners, took place a few weeks before his release. The Academy then said it wanted to honor a man “who holds high the creative function of the writer”, in its eyes “inseparable from the freedom in which it is exercised”.

“It’s flattering when we come out of prison and have been reduced to zero, without status, without rights” and “it gives me strength”, reacted Boualem Sansal in his interview with AFP on Friday. The publication of “La Légende”, a book in which he recounts his detention, is scheduled for June 2, according to Grasset.