The Academie Goncourt struck a novel from its longlist on Friday, four days after an anonymous account with 92 followers declared it the work of a machine. The evidence was a single commercial detector. AFP ran the same passages through its own tool and got “very likely written by a human.” Seven other detectors disagreed with each other.
The book stayed struck. The Goncourt cited the plagiarism findings alongside the detector, but the claim by an anonymous account with a contested tool was clearly targeting the author.
The author is Thelyson Orelien, 38, born in Gonaives, Haiti, resident in Montreal since 2010. His first novel, C’etait ca ou mourir, follows a teacher fleeing gang violence to Canada. It won the Prix du Roman Fnac on Monday 21 September. The accusation from “Balance ton Claude” landed the same day. By Thursday his Quebec publisher had suspended promotion, a book fair had withdrawn his guest of honour title, and two newspapers had found borrowed passages in columns and a short story he wrote in 2012 and 2014. By Friday the Goncourt had acted “to preserve the integrity of the prize” and its mission of crowning “literature written by women and men.”
On Thursday Le Figaro identified the attack account’s operator as one of its own columnists, Samuel Fitoussi, author of Woke Fiction. He had denied involvement to AFP several times that week. He had also been among the first to repost the anonymous accusation from his own named account, boosting himself. On Friday he confirmed a “collective project” whose other members remain unnamed. Asked about the racial dimension, he called the question conspiracist. The president of the Academie Goncourt had already told franceinfo why he thought the timing mattered: a Haitian, Canadian, Black, francophone foreigner, in a season when passions run high.
Fitoussi’s stated motive is fear, that AI will end human writing. Yet he is an associate member of Frst, a Paris fund that finances AI startups and that began life as Otium Ventures under the Catholic billionaire Pierre-Edouard Sterin. The detector he relied on, Pangram, raised $9 million in July in a round led by Menlo Ventures, an investor in Anthropic, whose assistant gave the account its name.
Black authors in the French and English worlds have been asked to prove they wrote their own books for 250 years.
Phillis Wheatley was examined by eighteen Boston men in 1772, Governor Thomas Hutchinson among them, before a London publisher would print her poems. Their signed certificate that she had written them opens the 1773 edition. Bakary Diallo, a Senegalese rifleman, published Force-Bonte in Paris in 1926 and was assumed for decades to have had it written by his French patrons. Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi (1954) was attributed in 2002 by the scholar Adele King to two Belgians in Paris, his landlord and a reader at his publisher. Yambo Ouologuem won the Renaudot in 1968 for Le Devoir de violence, faced plagiarism charges from 1971, and published nothing after 1972.
A white author gets the opposite treatment. Michel Houellebecq copied Wikipedia passages into La Carte et le Territoire, admitted it, called it collage, and won the 2010 Goncourt anyway.
Orelien is compiling a dossier with his editor to prove he wrote his own book, like Wheatley stood before eighteen examiners in Boston over 250 years ago.
The information warfare against Black authors hasn’t changed much.