The Pléiade. The name resonates far beyond the world of literary history.
The Pléiade collection is truly part of French heritage. It could, in fact, be considered a lieu de mémoire, as described by Pierre Nora: an item of historical significance, an object that runs through the collective imagination and is in some part a basis of our common identity. In France, a country where literature occupies a special, almost religious, place, the Pléiadeis considered as highly as the Panthéon. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France elected in 2017, understood this fact: In the background of his official photograph, taken in the Élysée Pal-ace, are three books: Mémoires de guerre by Charles de Gaulle (open on Macron's desk), The Red and the Black by Stendhal, and The Fruits of the Earth by André Gide. All are Pléiade editions.
The Pléiade founded by Jacques Schiffrin includes the classics of world literature. Since it was established, only 224 authors have been published in this prestigious collection. The great majority of these authors were no longer alive when they made their “entrance” into the Pléiade, from Plato and Cervantes to Rimbaud and Proust. Their publication in the Pléiade resembles a kind of accolade: These authors have been brought into the temple of great literature. Only eighteen authors have been published in the Pléiade in their lifetimes, including Milan Kundera, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Eugène Ionesco, as well as Jacques Schiffrin's great friends André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Little by little, the Pléiade became a “cultural monument,” with the role of defining what is considered great literature, both from the past and the present.
Why did Jacques Schiffrin choose to give his collection the name Pléiade? According to his son André, it was his father's Russian origins that were the deciding factor: “The name did not come from either Greek mythology or from the French Renaissance, but from a group of classical Russian poets” in Pushkin's circle whom Jacques Schiffrin admired. Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, however, offer a different explanation, but one also linked to the Russian origins of the collection's founder: “Schiffrin's Pléiade was from the Russian pléiada, and according to oral tradition at Gallimard, it meant ‘to package up': The books would be beautifully produced.”
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