Known for his Flair, the editor passed by JC Lattès, Nil, Robert Lafont and Allary, accompanied the works of many personalities, from Jacques Chirac to Jean d’Ormesson via Michel Drucker. She died on January 31, at 84 years old.
by Alain Beuve-Méry
His name, Nicole Lattès adopted it three times: the first after her love at first sight and her marriage to the publisher Jean-Claude Lattès (1941-2018), her second husband, then when he is Named at the head of Hachette delivers in 1981 and that she took the reins of JC Lattès editions. Finally, during the most delicate period of her existence, when she founded the Nile editions in 1993, named after the first two letters of her first name, followed by the initial of her married woman name, at a time when The couple was separated. After all, the Nile is not a long quiet river either, but “edition is like love, it always comes back”, she used to say.
Nicole Lattès, who died on January 31 in Paris, had two major qualities to succeed in this profession: the flair and the absence of timidity. When she left almost zero, in the Mitan of the 1990s, she has the intuition that Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris and former Prime Minister but not yet president, would be a good customer. So she put herself at the head of making him write a book, which he had no intention to do. Through advertising Jean-Michel Goudard, she makes an appointment with the Gaullist leader, quickly won by the sweet energy of this “little woman”.
a Breton childhood
of this meeting, two combat books are born, launched in 1994 and 1995: a new France, then France for all, which participate in the conquest of the Elysée by Jacques Chirac. Sold in more than 200,000 copies, the second was decorated with an apple tree on the cover, made famous by the Guignols de l’Info, on Canal+. Thanks to the slogan “Eat apples”, the program makes Chirac sympathetic and human to youth and cheesy by his rival then Edouard Balladur. The editor recurrent in 1996 with between us by Alain Juppé, publishing success, but who will not be enough to change the image of the Prime Minister, blurred by the great strikes of December 1995.
Born on February 20, 1938 in Normandy, Nicole Lattès was of Breton origin and spent her childhood and adolescence in Finistère. In this environment of the publishing that she has crossed for fifty years, she made her first classes by creating a network of book by correspondence book with you, before directing Editions Maritimes and Overseas, rue Jacob in Paris . “Without her, I do not know if I would not have become a writer,” recognizes Jean Rolin, whose first two books she published the Water Chemins (Editions Maritimes and Overse (JC Lattès, 1982), before continuing at Nil in 1999, with crosspieces. No matter if sales were modest, she knew how to detach herself from commercial concerns.
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