Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation on the French publishing industry for children, this book focuses on the publisher Hachette to examine how it dominated the country's new context of surveillance and control. It traces the history of the French Communist Party's (PCF) efforts to prevent American 'propaganda' reaching the hands of children, and Hachette's strategic and editorial responses, covering such events as the PCF's major intervention against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the compromises and modifications to Hachette's publishing of Disney books and comics; and their translated series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, which were designed to stimulate American-style consumer culture whilst not provoking the Cold War campaigners.

Using extensive new multilingual archive material from French legal records, American Department of State archives and Hachette's own business records, Sophie Heywood reveals both the covert operations by transatlantic business partners and the American Embassy to rewrite the laws of a sovereign nation, and the publisher's long-standing power struggle with, but also influence over, French politics.

It breaks new ground in understanding the people and processes involved in self-censorship, uncovering how national policies were enacted and given meaning by the low-paid, mostly female, pieceworker-employees on the creative assembly line, and foregrounds a study of censorship and its interactions with American market power in the Western sphere. An incredibly original and important study, Children's Publishing in Cold War France illuminates how the struggle for hearts and minds shaped the expansion of the creative industries in the 'free world'.