Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control.

Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process.

Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.

• Publication date: 20 August 2026
• Page count: 248
• Dimensions: Height 232 mm; Width 152 mm; Thickness 16 mm
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 9781350361607