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La Lettrine · PrizesThe Prix Renaudot — founded in 1926, named after the seventeenth-century journalist Théophraste Renaudot — is deliberated by its jury in the Drouant building on the same day as the Goncourt and announced an hour after it.

Prizes

The Renaudot Is Announced in the Same Building, an Hour Later

The Prix Renaudot — founded in 1926, named after the seventeenth-century journalist Théophraste Renaudot — is deliberated by its jury in the Drouant building on the same day as the Goncourt and announced an hour after it.

Ornate corner facade with wrought-iron balconies above street signs for Rue Gaillon
The Prix Renaudot — founded in 1926, named after the seventeenth-century journalist Théophraste Renaudot — is deliberated by its jury in the Drouant building on the same day as the Goncourt and announced an hour after it.Photo: P1220155 Paris II restaurant Drouant rwk · Wikimedia Commons

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France's second prize comes out of the same lunch, from the same address, sixty minutes behind the Goncourt — and has sometimes outrun it.

A journalist's prize, founded by journalists

The Prix Renaudot was created in 1926 by a group of critics and journalists who gathered regularly at the Drouant restaurant in Paris — the same building where the Académie Goncourt awards its prize each November. The founding impulse was corrective: Renaudot's jury wanted to honour books the Goncourt had passed over, and to do so on the same day, in the same place, with an announcement timed to land one hour after the Goncourt verdict. The structure was a provocation in miniature, and it has remained unchanged for nearly a century.

Restaurant Drouant's cream awnings and iron balconies front a Paris street with potted bamboo hedges
The Prix Goncourt is awarded by ten members of the Académie Goncourt at a lunch in the private rooms of the restaurant Drouant, place Gaillon, Paris — a ritual that has held, with wartime interruptions, since Edmond de Goncourt's will funded it. The Goncourt Lunch Has Happened Every November Since 1903Photo: Façade - Restaurant Drouant - Paris · Wikimedia Commons

The prize takes its name from Théophraste Renaudot ↗, the seventeenth-century physician and publicist who founded La Gazette in 1631 — generally considered the first French newspaper. Naming a literary prize after him was a declaration of intent: this was a prize with ink in its veins, run by people who wrote for a living rather than by the kind of literary mandarins who populated the Goncourt academy.

Winners who outran the prize

The Renaudot has a serviceable record of recognising writers who mattered. In 1932, its jury gave the prize to Louis-Ferdinand Céline for Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), after the Goncourt had declined it in favour of Guy Mazeline's Les Loups — a decision that literary history has judged harshly. The episode is the Renaudot's finest hour: Céline's novel had already been rejected by Gallimard before Robert Denoël published it, and the Renaudot's recognition helped establish a book that would prove one of the defining works of twentieth-century French prose.

The interior staircase of the restaurant Drouant on place Gaillon, Paris, its wrought-iron balustrade and pale stone steps lit from above
The Académie Goncourt lunches in the private rooms upstairs at Drouant, place Gaillon; the ten members have settled the prize there since the early years of the award.Photo: Artūras Kokorevas / Pexels

Georges Perec won in 1965 for Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties), his debut novel, before he became the Oulipo writer he is now remembered as. Patrick Modiano, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972 for Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads).

Key dates

  1. 1631Théophraste Renaudot founds La Gazette, France's first newspaper
  2. 1926Prix Renaudot established by a group of Parisian critics and journalists
  3. 1932Céline wins for Voyage au bout de la nuit, the year the Goncourt went to Guy Mazeline
  4. 1965Georges Perec wins for Les Choses
  6. 2014Modiano receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

The prize carries no cash endowment worth noting, but the commercial impact of winning — or of losing the Goncourt and winning the Renaudot instead — is real. Publishers have learned that the one-two announcement structure drives sales of both books simultaneously, and the Drouant building on the Place Gaillon effectively becomes a prize factory for one afternoon each autumn. The Renaudot does not pretend to be the Goncourt. It has simply been in the same room long enough to know what the Goncourt missed.

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