PARIS — France’s publishers are usually cloistered in newspapers’ genteel book sections or discussed with near reverence on television literary programs. But for the past 12 months, they have been under the harsh spotlight of muckraking online investigators and of police blotters.
The Paris headquarters of the publisher of Proust and Céline was raided in February by police officers seeking documents incriminating a pedophile writer, Gabriel Matzneff. A powerful editor was caught in a scheme that handed Mr. Matzneff a prestigious literary prize, awarded by a jury that included the 2008 Nobel laureate in literature, an “immortal” member of the French Academy and some of France’s best-selling writers.
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