The far-right billionaire Vanson Bollore, owner of the Grassi publishing house, allocated a huge budget, along with his television channels and newspapers, to promote Boualem Sansal’s book “The Legend,” in which he recounts the days he spent in prison in Algeria. But was success on time?
Sansal was a guest on dozens of television programs and conducted many interviews, while the C News channel, owned by Bolloré, devoted an entire day to talking about the book, which was released on June 2.
Followers were waiting for record sales, but the reality was different from expectations.
According to the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, sales in the first week of the book’s publication were disappointing.
The weekly revealed that Vanson Bolloré allocated a budget of 500,000 euros to promote the book, but its sales did not exceed 15,000 copies during its first week. This is a very small number compared to the amount of propaganda allocated to it.
The weekly compared this number to the sales of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s book, entitled “Diaries of a Prisoner,” which he issued after spending ten days in detention at the beginning of the year in the case of financing his 2007 presidential campaign by the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, where he sold 90,000 copies during the first week of its release.
The weekly also indicated that sales of Sansal’s book were mainly concentrated in the upscale neighborhoods of Paris and some major French cities.
The French writer, Boualem Sansal, was arrested on November 16, 2024 upon his exit from Algiers airport, due to statements he made to a French web channel, in which he questioned Algeria’s western borders.
He was then tried and sentenced to 5 years in prison by the Casablanca Court in the capital, and was released in November 2025 under a presidential pardon in response to a request from the German President.
