Gyp and Flammarion: A Marriage of Love or Convenience?

Why publish an auteur maudit? This essay addresses the question through a study of relations between the major commercial publisher Ernest Flammarion and the prolific yet notorious popular novelist, Gyp. Cut off by two other firms over the anti-semitic content of her work, Gyp found in Flammarion, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, a publisher for her incendiary Israël and three equally virulent novels. Flammarion's decision to publish Gyp was based on a cluster of interrelated commercial, strategic, and ideological concerns, these last being often, it will be argued, the most subtle and complex an author-publisher relations.