The book tells a long road north: a Haitian teacher of history and geography flees a country mired in gang violence and crosses twelve countries in a perilous first-person journey before finding haven in Canada. C’était ça ou mourir — It Was That or Die — was the debut novel of Thélyson Orélien, a Haitian-born Canadian writer, and for several weeks this autumn it was the most celebrated new fiction in France. Published in Paris by Grasset in August, it had sold about 35,000 copies, picked up a handful of literary prizes and sold translation rights into more than twenty countries, according to the Guardian.
On 21 September, the novel won the Prix du roman Fnac, the booksellers’ prize for best novel of the year. That same day, the Guardian reports, an anonymous account on X called “Balance ton Claude” — the name a jab at Claude, Anthropic’s AI agent — said it had fed the book to an AI-detection tool called Pangram, which returned the verdict that the novel was “almost entirely” written by artificial intelligence.
Alignment on the verdict was not total. Experts have questioned the reliability of AI detectors generally, and French media found other detection programmes that marked It Was That or Die as very probably the work of a human. Through the X account, essayist Samuel Fitoussi later claimed ownership of it, saying he ran it with other unidentified individuals; the newspaper Le Figaro was the venue that identified him — as one of its own columnists, the author of an essay against “wokeism” in film and television. Fitoussi explained on his own account that although he considers himself “techno-optimistic,” he acted because he fears “AI will cause the disappearance of reading and writing.”
The author answers
Orélien, 38, denies using AI, and says the accusation is racially motivated. “I’ve always loved creating and writing,” he said. “I don’t see why I would use a machine.” He told Libération that the prose’s traditional structures were Haitian and Caribbean: “The imagery, repetition and rhythm are a living language, they are mine.” His French and Canadian publishers at first offered him their full support.
Then a second, separate set of accusations arrived. Canadian outlet La Presse reported that a 2012 short story by Orélien had plagiarised passages from a book by the French author Louis Pauwels and that a 2013 opinion piece had copied from the Philippine Star newspaper. Libération, in the Guardian’s account, alleged that the award-winning short story lifted from the preface of Pauwels’s The Morning of the Magicians, first published in 1960. Orélien has not responded to the plagiarism claims and did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The academy changes its mind
As late as Wednesday, Philippe Claudel, the president of the Académie Goncourt, was publicly urging caution about the AI allegations. The plagiarism revelations appear to have changed the academy’s position. On Friday the Paris-based body, which has awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize since 1903, said it had removed Orélien’s novel from its longlist, citing both “the plagiarisms of which its author has been guilty over time and which have just been revealed” and “the convergent result of several analyses by trustworthy researchers and journalists,” which indicated the book was “in all likelihood very largely the product of artificial intelligence.”
The aim is to send a clear message... to affirm that we neither endorse nor condone in any way the creation of texts generated with the help of AI.
The removal, the academy said, was “driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt prize and the academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men.” It will say nothing more until 6 October, when it announces its shortlist; the winner follows on 4 November.
The Canadian publisher, Les Éditions du Boréal, refused to follow the Goncourt’s lead. “Unfortunately, at this stage, we are unable to confirm or deny the allegations the author is facing,” it said in a statement shared with the Guardian. “Without credible, concrete evidence, it is not our place to decide whether this book has a right to exist.” Boréal called the newer plagiarism accusations concerning, condemned the “hateful messages and personal attacks” of recent days, and reminded readers there is a person behind the book.
Orélien himself has chosen silence, of a declared sort. Speaking Thursday at the Les Correspondances literary festival in Manosque, in the south of France, he said: “There’s this desire not only to attack the book, but especially my voice … to silence me.” He would, therefore, “take a step back and wait until things have calmed down.” The novel’s title now reads like a prediction about its author, though nobody has yet established which half of the either/or applies.