The Goncourt Machine

The Prix Goncourt is not France's richest literary award — the cheque is a symbolic ten euros — but it is by far its most powerful. A Goncourt typically brings a novel some four hundred thousand sales, often considerably more. Publishers budget the entire autumn around a single question: does this book have a chance at the prize? The rentrée littéraire — that peculiar September flood of six hundred or more new novels — is, in large part, an extended qualifying round.

The Académie Goncourt, established by Edmond de Goncourt's will and formally constituted in 1903, has ten members who serve for life and lunch at Drouant, a brasserie near the Opéra, every month from January to the November announcement. The predictability of the ritual is part of its authority. The four stages — première sélection, deuxième sélection, dernière sélection and the final vote — function as a public market, moving prices in real time. To make the second list is already to sell another twenty thousand copies.

Critics note the obvious paradoxes. The prize claims to reward the best imaginative prose of the year, in the spirit of the brothers Goncourt's own realist ambition, yet it skews toward accessible narrative, toward books that travel well and translate easily. Publishers at Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil engineer submissions; certain editors have won the prize so many times that the process resembles less a discovery than a ratification. And when the machine occasionally awards a genuinely difficult book — Alexis Jenni's L'Art français de la guerre in 2011, say — surprise is itself the story.

The Prix Goncourt is not France's richest literary award — the cheque is a symbolic ten euros — but it is by far its most powerful

What the Goncourt truly produces is not just a winner. It produces the year.

1. 1896Edmond de Goncourt's will establishes the future Académie
2. 1903Académie Goncourt formally constituted
3. 2011Alexis Jenni wins for L'Art français de la guerre, a notably substantial and ambitious novel