France’s latest literary scandal is really about who still reads

France still likes to treat its literary season as if the republic were being judged by a shortlist. That habit has now collided with a more modern anxiety. Thélyson Orélien, a Haitian-born Canadian writer, has been accused of using artificial intelligence in his breakout novel, It Was Either That or Die, and the row has quickly widened into something less elegant than a debate about style. It now involves plagiarism allegations, accusations of racism, and a rather embarrassing question for the industry: how confident is anyone that the tools meant to detect machine-written text actually work?

The book itself has not vanished from the argument, which is awkward for those who would prefer a clean moral lesson. It has sold 40,000 copies since publication, making it a genuine bestseller and, in the old publishing sense, a success worth protecting. Yet success has become part of the suspicion rather than a defence against it. Once ChatGPT arrived commercially four years ago, book sales collapsed dramatically, and the industry has spent much of the time since trying to look as though this were merely a temporary disturbance rather than a structural problem.

Pangram, the AI verification tool now drawn into the affair, is supposed to help settle whether a text is human or machine-made. Instead, it has become another object of doubt. That is the peculiar charm of these disputes: they promise certainty and deliver more uncertainty, usually with a side order of self-importance. If the detector is unreliable, then the accusation wobbles. If the accusation wobbles, the whole spectacle starts to look less like a verdict than a mood.

The larger issue is not Orélien alone, nor even the question of plagiarism, which publishing circles have always managed to treat as both scandal and sport. It is whether the written word still occupies the same place in ordinary life. Most people only started reading and writing in anything like a broad social sense in the past century. That may sound like a durable achievement, but habits can be thinner than they appear. Future generations will still read street signs and subtitles on videos. The more awkward question is whether they will stop long enough to engage with a book as something more than a device for passing time.

That is why the Orélien affair has travelled beyond one author and one novel. It has become a proxy battle over attention, trust and the shrinking authority of literature itself. France, which still likes to imagine that prize season reveals something about civilisation, has found instead a dispute that says rather more about fragility: of publishing, of detection tools, and of the reading habits that once gave books their standing. The guests brought in to discuss it — Aysegül SERT, Stephen CLARKE and William MARX of the Collège de France — were invited for a literary controversy. They ended up in a conversation about whether literature can still command enough attention to be worth defending.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com