Book Festival in Paris: Will Netflix become the Guardian Angel of Literature?

She ultimately had to decide whether to go to the festival or participate in the protests against the government, says a young woman. She’s not the only one who turned up on the afternoon of the 17th. In October, the decision was made for “Ground Control” – a former industrial building on Gare de Lyon, converted into a hip event location. Here the mood is good: children play, fathers drink beer and young women cocktails. Far from the Place de la République, the other Paris practises in bourgeois serenity. They are books and films that attract mostly young women here to the twelfth arrondissement. The fact that screen and reading come together at this festival is due to an unusual organizer: Netflix is celebrating its first Netflix Book Festival in Paris this weekend. On the other side of the Atlantic, Netflix just fired its content chief Bela Bajaria a few days ago. The figures are stagnating, the largest job cuts in the history of the company are imminent, it is said, and the reason for this is, among other things, the quality of the program. In Paris, on the other hand, the world is healed. The book festival is actually a promo event that celebrates numerous own productions. For the fans of the successful series “Bridgerton” and “Lupin” or the scary film “Frankenstein” there are photo corners, there are trailers of “Asterix & Obelix”, and promotional material is distributed. Netflix presents itself as the stirrup holder of reading plausible is this effort all the time. Under the supervision of the ousted content director Bajaria, literary adaptations like this became an integral part of the Netflix offering. Almost 20 percent of the streams, nine billion views in total, make up the category “Netflix Books” today: literary adaptations in the broader sense. This is a business development of which the American company is proud and which at the same time enables him to act as patron of the crisis-ridden book industry. In conversation, a spokeswoman for the company cites a self-commissioned study, according to which a Netflix adaptation significantly boosted the book sales of the template. Even today, publishers would promote their books with the sticker “To watch on Netflix”. Therefore, the event in Paris is not just a book festival, but an event that celebrates the “fertile connections between books and Netflix”. This symbiosis becomes tangible in the form of a temporary library, which, with the support of the Centre national du livre – which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year – and numerous publishers, brings together hundreds of book titles. Manga, new-fashioned romances or classics by Jane Austen or Mary Shelley: Anyone who has come to read has a lot to browse. Literature as a safe space, which is well received today But really euphoric the visitors seem to be especially in the accompanying program. No one seems to be bothered that the “Book Festival” disturbs the French audience with further Anglicisms: In addition to a “Drag Quiz”, a “Book Club” by the well-known influencer Camélia El Badia should make the young audience Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” palatable. In a drawing workshop you learn to make manga, and in a reading children’s book excerpts by Roald Dahl are read. One focus is romance novels, which work well as film adaptations. While the republic is shaken by violence everywhere at the same time, a sociologist, a journalist and the influencer discuss her very personal “Safe Space”: Dark Romance novels. They are not only a “guilty pleasure”, but also an emancipatory way of processing dreams and traumas. Whether Gustave Flaubert has not already described that love for cheesy novels in "Madame Bovary", asks the moderator. But the sociologist smiles away that a man of the nineteenth century could not feel this. And so in the end the question arises whether Netflix really becomes the guardian angel of literature through its film adaptations or only the catalyst of a special romantically usable substance. The Centre national du livre is optimistic on demand: the adaptations of literary templates are “an opportunity for reading, as they introduce the audience to the books”. Perhaps in this way Netflix is just the savior in need for the recently so sharply tackled French school system? Those who start with cheesy novels could later on be all the more receptive to Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac or Victor Hugo. After all, they all wrote about failed revolutions.