When France's leading publisher of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, Larousse, started preparations a year ago in conjunction with its owner, the media giant Vivendi Universal, to celebrate the firm's 150th anniversary this year, it was expected that the festivities would crown the success of the marketing strategy pursued by Jean-Marie Messier and Agnès Touraine, the heads of Vivendi Universal and Vivendi Universal Publishing respectively. Then came the melt-down that saw Vivendi's share price plummet by nearly 80% from January to August 2002.
Not surprisingly, the emphasis has since shifted: what is being celebrated today is not the spearhead of a major international group, but an element of French national heritage. Larousse is now being presented as a gleaming example of that "Franco-French cultural exception" whose demise, Messier predicted earlier this year, was imminent.
The idea that Vivendi's educational and reference book division might be taken over by the Germans (Bertelsmann), the British (Pearson), the Americans (Universal) or the Italians (Rizzoli) caused an outcry in France that reached up to the highest echelons of state.
A cabinet meeting was held on August 29 after which the government's spokesman, Jean-François Copé, said, in a reference to the Vivendi crisis: "The government is closely monitoring the future of certain companies that the French rightly regard as forming part of their cultural and intellectual heritage."
Trade unions representing the staff of Larousse warned against allowing "flagship publishing companies to be engulfed by the current financial maelstrom".
"I trust the publishing division won't be sold off cheaply. It's part of our heritage," said the president of the National Publishing Union, Serge Eyrolles.
The launch of the 2003 Petit Larousse (a compact encyclopaedia) and the opening of an exhibition at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris that charts the history of the Larousse publishing house have taken place in a particularly sensitive political and financial context.
Even the founder of the company himself, Pierre Larousse (1812-75), seems to have been roped into the battle to defend France's "cultural exception". On display at the exhibition is a quote from his Grand Dictionnaire Universel du 19ème Siècle (publication of which began in 1852), in which he says: "Oh, no doubt if this work were German or merely English, the columns that we have filled with anecdotes would be packed with philosophy and travel stories; but the Grand Dictionnaire is very much a product of its own country."
The exhibition's magnificent plates of illustrations, and old Jean Mineur cinema commercials for Larousse, spark a mixture of nostalgia and curiosity in the visitor, as does the lavishly produced Larousse Insolite (Unusual Larousse) that has been published to celebrate the anniversary.
At the time when he set up his publishing house with Augustin Boyer in 1852, Pierre Larousse was a militant republican. He wanted "to teach everything to everyone", and produced a highly personal dictionary that was very much part of the society of the time. "Your success will be all the greater the more you are in tune with the century," the writer Victor Hugo wrote to Larousse. The tone of the entries was often idiosyncratic. For example: "Zero: a figure which in itself has no value, but which makes the one preceding it ten times bigger."
After Larousse's death in 1875 the business was expanded, particularly under the management of Claude Augé, who created the Petit Larousse Illustré in 1905 and started publishing a Spanish edition in 1912.
Today Larousse is an international group. "It is one of the best-known French products," says its managing director, Anémone Bérès.
Larousse's annual sales are about $150m, of which dictionaries make up 55%. The company's flagship product is the Petit Larousse: "We still devote considerable efforts to producing it," says Bérès. "It's a miraculous formula that we feel duty-bound to perpetuate. Until recently we were content to bring out a revised edition every seven or eight years. Today we introduce major revisions and innovations every year."
The 2003 Petit Larousse contains many new words, such as profileur (from the English "profiler"), mogette (a regional word for haricot bean) and teuf (backslang for fete). Personalities from the arts who are now to be found in the encyclopaedia include the singers Natalie Dessay and Barbara Hendricks, the film directors Takeshi Kitano and Lars Von Trier, the literary critic George Steiner and the golfer Tiger Woods.
At one point the Petit Larousse tended slightly to rest on its laurels. Then came the crisis that badly affected Larousse along with the rest of encyclopaedia publishing as they had to face stiff competition from the electronic media. The new millennium shook the Petit Larousse out of its torpor. The edition brought out in 2000 included a series of colour plates for the first time, and sales topped the 1m mark thanks to effective advertising. In 2002 sales have so far totalled 960,000.
Larousse is a thriving group, even though 2002 has been marked by industrial unrest sparked by the company's plans to move its various divisions into a single head office in the district of Bercy, in eastern Paris.
The group's chairman, Philippe Merlet, has expanded Larousse's international activities, notably in Poland and Italy (with Rizzoli). Although a big question mark hangs over the future of Larousse, the publishing house wears its 150 years lightly. September 3
150 Ans de Larousse, Palais de la Découverte, Paris. Closed on Monday. Until November 24
Le Monde
