Publishing, the Rules of the Trade

Le Grand secret

Claude Gubler, Michel Gonod, Plon, éd. originale, 1996, Coll. Bfm - Limoges

Le Grand Secret (1996) by Claude Gubler, François Mitterrand’s doctor, sparked off two successive affairs. Firstly, the withdrawal from sales of the book which revealed that the President, suffering from cancer since 1981, had dissimulated his condition. The Mitterrand family prevented the book’s diffusion by obtaining a summary judgement. Then, on the grounds of breach of privacy, they succeeded in having the book banned, the author condemned to a four-month suspended sentence and the publisher, Plon, condemned to pay damages. In April 1997, after the court sentence, the Ordre des médecins struck C. Gluber off the professional list for breach of confidentiality. The second affair was provoked by the manager of a cybercafé who, considering that the banning of a book was an attack on freedom of expression, diffused a digital version on the Internet as soon as the book had been banned. No legal proceedings were brought against him. In May 2004, at the European Court of Human Rights, C. Gubler and the publisher obtained the annulment of the ban on the grounds that such a serious measure could only be justified, several months after the events, either by ‘an urgent social need’ or by the need to protect medical confidentiality. Le Grand Secret was reprinted in 2005.