François Maspero

François Maspero (19 January 1932 – 11 April 2015) was a French author and journalist, best known as a publisher of leftist books in the 1970s. He has also worked as a translator, translating the works of Joseph Conrad and John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, among others. He was awarded the Prix Décembre in 1990 for Les Passagers du Roissy-Express.

François Maspero was born in 1932. His youth was marked by the cultural environment of his family, several of whom were noted scholars, and his parents' participation in the Resistance. His father, Henri Maspero, a sinologist and professor at the Collège de France, died at Buchenwald, but his mother managed to return alive from Ravensbrück. His grandfather, Gaston Maspero, who died before his birth, was a famous Egyptologist.

François Maspero opened a book store in the Latin Quarter in 1955, at the age of 23. In 1959, in the middle of the Algerian War, he and Marie-Thérèse Maugis formed the Maspero publishing house. They later were joined by Jean-Philippe Bernigaud and Fanchita Gonzalez Batlle, and then by Émile Copfermann. Their first two collections, "Cahiers libres" and "Textes à l'appui", focused on the Algerian War from an anti-colonialist perspective, and on contestation of the French Communist Party's unreformed Stalinism. Maspero published Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), censored by the French authorities, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Fanon's L'An V de la Révolution algérienne. Maspero published other testimonies on Algeria, including investigations of the use of torture by the French Army, also censored. Besides facing lawsuits as a result of his courageous publishing decisions, Maspero was also the target of bomb attacks.

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