Festival America gave U.S. writers a Paris-area stage to reckon with their country’s divisions—and drew French audiences to discussions of democracy, racism and inequality. The gathering took place in Vincennes in late September, before protests in France escalated into violence.
The 12th biennial Festival America ran September 24–27, bringing 60 prominent American authors with recent French translations to the suburb. Across nearly 100 sessions, writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Grisham and Barbara Kingsolver explored a country they described with a mix of grief, criticism and hope for a renewed commitment to democratic ideals.
The strongest draw was often the hardest material. “The Wounds of America,” a Saturday-night discussion with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tommy Orange and Jesmyn Ward, sold out within an hour of tickets going online. Other well-attended programs addressed the American Dream, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and violence across the country. Sessions on writing, love and family were also on the schedule, but the festival’s major conversations centered on the nation’s history and present-day troubles.
Criticism rooted in connection
Francis Geffard, Festival America’s founder and president and a publisher at Albin Michel, rejected the idea that the event put America on trial. He described it instead as an expression of French concern for a country whose history is intertwined with France’s.
“America’s past is in some ways our past. Your problems are our problems,” Geffard said. Looking at colonialism and racism in U.S. history, he argued, also prompts reflection on France’s own record: “Everything you look at always comes back to you.”
Geffard said the French bring both “love and fascination” to their view of America. That affection, he added, makes them “exigent”—using the French sense of the word, meaning demanding.
The authors shared that mix of attachment and scrutiny. At a Sunday discussion about democracy, memoirist Sasha Bonét invoked James Baldwin to explain her critical stance: “I love America so much, and like [James] Baldwin said, it’s why I am so critical of her.”
Bonét said her writing aims to expose falsehoods and recover what has been erased. American writers, she told the audience, are “on the job…. That’s why you all are here reading American literature: because there are truth-tellers coming out of America.”
Other speakers focused on the forces shaping public life. In a conversation about justice, Patrick Radden Keefe said graft and corruption had become “basically baked in,” despite once being viewed as morally repugnant across political lines.
Debut novelist Addie E. Citchens took up national division in a program titled “Where Will America Go?” She said the conflict wasn’t fundamentally between Black and white Americans, but between ordinary people and what she called “green people”: “the Epstein class. It’s them and us. And they have a vested interest in people not being unified.”
Weeks after the festival, protests in Paris turned violent amid opposition to the concentration of power among wealthy groups and the neglect of others. The timing gave the festival’s conversations about inequality a sharp resonance in France, too.
A cultural platform under strain
France’s literary festivals receive substantial public support from the government, related agencies and municipalities. Thomas Chatterton Williams, an American author who spends much of each year in France and has attended many such events, described the reach of that culture: “You get crowds all over the country for writers who are not even French…. In France, books matter.”
Festival America had also received support from the U.S. Embassy in Paris since its launch 24 years earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11. The Embassy withdrew its funding shortly after the festival program became public in late August, about a month before the event.
The festival said the financial contribution had been small, but that the support represented a cultural partnership grounded in the long-standing ties between the two countries. Its statement said it could only “deplore this striking lack of regard for American literature.”
Geffard was saddened by the loss of funding, but said the festival would continue. Its packed sessions suggest that the appetite for American writing in France remains strong—and that audiences are willing to sit with the difficult questions those writers bring.
Cherilyn Parsons is the founder and former director of Bay Area Book Festival. She lives in Paris.
