There is an infinitely reductive way of commemorating Eric Hazan, simply by saluting him as a courageous publisher and defender of the radical left, an unyielding supporter of the rights of the Palestinians and a man who, against the grain of his times, so believed in revolution that he devoted a book to the first measures to be taken on the morning after.

He was certainly all these things, but we first need to register the essential point: in an age when the word ‘publishing’ conjures up empires of businessmen for whom everything is a commodity, even the most nauseating ideas, he was first and foremost a great publisher. This was not simply a matter of competence. It was much more a question of personality. And Eric was an exceptional personality: possessed of a mind curious about everything, a scientist by training and neurosurgeon in a previous life, but also a connoisseur of the arts and lover of literature; a city-dweller, sensitive to the living history of every stone in the street; an open and welcoming man with a radiant smile and eloquent handshake, eager to communicate his passions, to share his discoveries and convince others – without preaching – of what he considered to be the exigences of justice.

I learnt from our first contact, just as La Fabrique was starting up, that he was no ordinary publisher. He had attended a few sessions of my seminar on aesthetics and wanted to better understand what I was doing and where it was heading. I sent him a short interview I’d done for a magazine published by friends of mine. A few days later, he told me that it was a book and that he was going to publish it. Which he did so effectively that this little volume, barely visible on a bookshelf, found its way around the world. I thereby discovered something surprising: a great publisher is one who can recognize you have written a book when you don’t know it yourself.  

Thus began a long collaboration punctuated by books whose titles alone prove that he was so much more than a publisher of revolutionary firebrands. Were that the case, what business would he have with exploring territories as remote from immediate political action as the landscape of eighteenth-century England, the dissolution of the traditional threads of narrative in the novels of Flaubert, Conrad or Virginia Woolf, the interweaving of time in the films of Dziga Vertov, John Ford or Pedro Costa, or the conception of the spectator implied by this or that installation of contemporary art? What, moreover, would lead him to publish a complete edition stretching to over a thousand pages of Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire? And to immerse himself in Balzac’s Paris? It’s not only that he was interested in everything and his engagement with humanist culture was far broader and deeper than so many of the ‘clercs’ who smirk at militant commitments of his kind. It was because he fought for a world of the widest and richest experience, and did not separate the work of knowledge and the emotions of art from the passion of justice. This man – indignant against all oppression – loved, more than sloganeers, those who seek, invent and create.

Changing the world was for him not a programme for the future but a daily task of adjusting our vision and finding the right words. And he understood that revolt is itself a means of discovery. In the work of the most radical authors he published, whether on feminism, decolonialism or pipeline sabotage, he discerned not only a cry of anger against the reign of injustice but also a project of research, a singular expression of the world we live in, and a new way of shedding light on it. Hence, he was careful to ensure that the most provocative titles appeared in booksellers’ windows adorned in such a way that made them precious objects.

Is this why he chose the name La Fabrique? For connoisseurs of workers’ history, the name recalls Echo de la fabrique, the newspaper of the Lyonnais canuts during their revolt of the 1830s. No doubt it was important for it to evoke the memory of the great days of 1848 and the Commune. But the word ‘fabrique’ also associated this tradition of struggle with a whole conception of the publisher’s work: a radical departure from the logic of profit and its associated strictures of management; an artisanal love of craftsmanship that neglected no aspect of book production; but also an idea of the fraternal workshop where men and women would bring the product of their labours which, as they intertwined, would be transformed into something else: a shared wealth of experience, of knowledge and insight, the sense of a collective capacity to build a world different from the one that our masters and their intellectual lackeys present to us as the only, inescapable reality.

Offering alternative cartographies of what is visible, of what takes place and what matters in our world: this is the concern that brought him together with so many authors of such different interests, ideas and sensibilities, all of which he respected equally without attempting to corral them into a common line. Because this great publisher was above all a free man who could only breathe in an atmosphere of freedom.

Was it the thinning of this atmosphere that, alongside his illness, darkened his final days? Never have the causes for which he fought been so mockingly besmirched in theory, so blithely trampled underfoot in practice, as they are today. For a long time, Eric saw in the very ignominy of the powers that govern us a reason to hope for the coming revolution. Their world, he thought, is so decrepit that the slightest blow here or there is bound to bring about its collapse. This is the logic, perhaps a little too cursory, of good craftsmen and sons of the Enlightenment. They believe that rot causes buildings to crumble. Unfortunately, it is more like the glue holding the system together. And this imposes a long and painstaking task on those who first and foremost need air that is more breathable and more conducive to the preparation of other tomorrows. It is, in any case, a task for which his uncompromising resistance to baseness in every form will long serve as an example.

This article was originally published in French in Libération.

Read on: Eric Hazan, ‘Faces of Paris’, NLR 62.