France passed a law in 1981 that the rest of the world never noticed. Jack Lang pushed it through quietly, and French bookshops have never been the same since.

Supermarkets, Amazon, big-box retailers: all of them are legally prevented from discounting books by more than five per cent. The government looked at a bookshop and said: this is a cultural institution, and we are going to protect it as one.

That law is at the heart of Ce n'est pas une Librairie, Part Two — in last Saturday's paid edition of le Bulletin 16.16.a.