Reading: The Great National Cause of 2022

Reading is now a great national cause! Until summer 2022, initiatives to encourage reading for all ages, including for young people and students, will be implemented everywhere in France. The National Book Centre, in cooperation with the ministries of culture and education, promotes many actions in favour of books to maintain and develop the taste for reading, including the operation Nuits de la lecture (Nights of Reading) organised from January 20 to 23.

As the National Book Centre (CNL, for Centre National du Livre), “a great national cause is a way to weave and give consistency to the French policy regarding books, and to raise awareness about reading among students”. The latest barometer “The French and reading practice” commissioned by the National Book Centre and the IPSOS institute registers a decrease of the reading habit among the 15-24 years old. Even though the pleasure of reading is still “a mean to escape”, reading short formats, including on screens on social medias, is “overtaking long reading, a practice that implies a certain effort and focus”.

Spicing up the relationship with books

“By declaring the reading practice a great national cause, we are committed to boosting the relationship that younger generations have with books”. This is the big objective set by the French president in June 2021 at the launch of the operation. And this commitment has been relayed by the National Book Centre, which sharply increased meetings with authors and their diverse audience, and young people specifically.

Tools deployed by the CNL include funding of 250 writing residencies (including grants for residencies in schools), to help writers set up writing centres throughout France and meet their readers. In addition to these grants, the CNL offers a unique support to adapt libraries to the new uses of the public. The CNL is launching a major campaign, particularly on social networks, to promote the pleasure of reading. This campaign is called #Jeliscommejeveux, and aims at showing “that if you find the kind of books you like and the way of reading that suits you best, reading becomes a pleasure and a unique way to escape, to educate yourselves and to open up to others”.

Sharing the love of books, and books about love

In the same spirit, the National Book Centre is renewing the Nuits de la lecture operation from January 20 to 23. These new Nights offer thousands of physical and digital events, focused on love. Libraries, but also museums, universities, the network of French cultural establishments and French-speaking bookshops abroad, are being called upon to “honour, over the course of four evenings, the pleasure of reading and sharing love of books and books about love”.

The Nuits de la lecture were created in 2017 by the Ministry of Culture to “celebrate the pleasure of reading”, and have won over an increasingly large audience. In 2021, in spite of the health crisis, they have thus implemented more than 2,000 events in France in some thirty countries. This year, literary events centred on the theme of love will take various forms. The programme includes, for example, love readings of the Odyssey at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, archive readings on the discovery of Molière at the National Archives, events on the theme of love at the Institut du Monde Arabe, correspondence readings in libraries and bookshops, etc. All these events can be discovered on the website dedicated to the event, which even offers an anthology of the ten greatest love stories in classic literature (French or foreign) or the most beautiful love stories adapted for the screen!

To know more

- Launch of the year of reading

- Initiatives programmed during the event

- The Nuits de la lecture 

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