François Maspero

François Maspero (19 January 1932, in Paris – 11 April 2015, in Paris) was a French author and journalist, best known as a publisher of leftist books in the 1970s. He also worked as a translator, translating the works of Joseph Conrad, Mehdi Ben Barka, and John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, among others. His youth was marked by the cultural environment of his family, several of whom were noted scholars, and his parents' participation in the Resistance. His father, Henri Maspero, a sinologist and professor at the Collège de France, died at Buchenwald, but his mother survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp. His grandfather, Gaston Maspero, who died before his birth, was a famous Egyptologist.

François Maspero opened a book store named L'Escalier In 1983, Maspero publishing house was transformed into the publisher La Découverte, later bought by Vivendi Universal Publishing, later Editis.

After 1983 In the 1990s and 2000s François Maspero published several reportages for the French newspaper Le Monde. In 2001, for example, he produced a long narrative about a summer passed on the Algerian coast with the title "Deux ou trois choses que j’ai vues de l’Algérie". In 2009, at the 50th anniversary of the Éditions Maspero publishing house, an exposition in honor of Francois Maspero, "François Maspero et les paysages humains, " was organized by Bruno Guichard (Maison des Passages, Lyon) and Alain Léger (Librairie À plus d'un titre, Lyon) in the Musée de l'Imprimerie. In parallel to this exposition a book was edited as an exposition catalogue and Festschrift to honor live and work of Maspero. The title of the book was "François Maspero et les paysages humains" and it was edited by Bruno Guichard, Julien Hage and Alain Leger.

Maspero was criticized by Situationists such as Guy Debord, who used the term "masperize" to describe the falsification or corruption of a text, for instance by deleting segments from a quote without marking them.

Works 1984 - Le Sourire du chat, translated as Cat's Grin L'ombre d'une photographe, Gerda Taro, Le Seuil (Paris, 2006) 1990 - Les passagers du Roissy Express, with photographs by Anaïk Frantz. Seuil, Paris 1990. . English edn. Roissy Express: a journey through the Paris suburbs, trans. Paul Jones. London: Verso, 1994.

Selected books published by François Maspero Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Fernand Oury and Aïda Vasquez. Vers une pédagogie institutionnelle (Towards an Institutional Pedagogy), 1968.