Jacques Rancière on Eric Hazan at Sidecar – Grand Éditeur

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.

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This article was originally published in French in Libération.

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