Hachette

   Hachette is part of a French conglomerate Matra Hachette, which owns a number of businesses, including media ones, around the world. It is involved in defence and has contracts with government agencies internationally, including the UK Ministry of Defence. Matra launched the first minivan, the Espace, marketed by Renault in 1983. One of Hachette’s owners was the international banking, property and business tycoon Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who, though a French citizen, was based in Switzerland and died in 1997. In June 1996 the company merged into Lagardère SCA, a company run from Paris by its managing partner, Jean-Luc Lagardère, who has controlled Hachette since 1981.

   Hachette has a long and distinguished history in France, where the company is a household name, known for example as the publisher of France’s top paperback imprint, Livres de Poche. Louis Hachette installed the first railway newsstands in stations along France’s burgeoning railroad network in 1852, began publishing his Dictionary of the French Language in 1863, and in 1900 opened similar newsstands in the Paris metro system. Hachette’s current main businesses in the media sector deal with book publishing, print media and distribution services. Possibly because of its conglomerate background, its approach to publishing decisions tends to be strictly commercial and thus in some quarters it is seen as ruthless. Hachette-Carrère, the Paris publishing house, has a reputation of being ‘quality but not stuffy’, with an opportunistic eye to the commercial main chance. Thus in 1996 it published the ‘memoirs’ of President François Mitterrand’s labrador dog Baltique in a book called Aboitim 1. The Paris publishing division was run for nine years by the Oxford-educated old Etonian David Campbell, who went on to buy and relaunch Everyman in 1991.

   In UK publishing, the company collaborates with EMAP Magazines (see EMAP Maclaren) to publish monthlies such as Elle (first launched in 1945). It also produces a number of reference works which are at the cutting edge in that they are produced by integrating skills from the company’s other areas of operation, and offer efficient sources of information. These make use of sophisticated computer databases and electronic information banks. Such publications include Hachette Oxford Multimedia Dictionary, the Hachette Multimedia Dictionary, the Multimedia Atlas and material presented on innovative CDs. This niche in reference publishing, created through expertise in technology, places the company in a influential global position regarding the dissemination of information, as illustrated for example by its ownership of Grolier.

   MIKE STORRY