In Lausanne, the publishing house founded by Claude Pahud has spent three decades patiently doing one thing: publishing the blind spots of Swiss history, making the social sciences readable, defending critical essays, and opening its catalogue to comics, feminism and illustrated narratives. A conversation with Claude Pahud and Isabelle Henchoz.

Some publishing houses quietly accompany an intellectual life. They are not always displayed in shop windows; they are not everywhere at once. Yet they are there, in bibliographies, on journalists’ desks, in researchers’ bags, on the tables of independent bookshops. Antipodes belongs to that family: a house whose very name already states its method. To look elsewhere, to overturn certainties, to take dominant narratives by the spine and turn them around.

Based in Lausanne, Antipodes was founded in 1995 by Claude Pahud. Today, its catalogue includes more than 250 titles, with around fifteen books published each year, mainly in the social sciences, but also in graphic novels, comics and children’s books.

In 2025, Antipodes celebrated its thirtieth anniversary: three decades spent publishing a Switzerland less smooth than the one printed in official brochures. A Switzerland crossed by feminist struggles, migration issues, political violence, colonial memories, taboos around death, social contradictions and the grey zones of neutrality.

Behind the institutional formula, however, lies a more artisanal, more fragile adventure, almost agricultural in nature. Claude Pahud says it with an image that suits him well: Antipodes is a little like a mountain farm. Without grants, without subsidies, without occasional support, “the grass grows, and there are no more cows.” A rural image, but a very real economy: independent publishing often moves forward with noble principles, but also with spreadsheets, forms, follow-up emails, tight budgets and a great deal of stamina.

A House Born from an Alternative Bookshop

The story begins in Lausanne, in the world of committed bookselling. Claude Pahud studied sociology at the University of Lausanne, then spent twelve years working at Basta, an alternative, self-managed bookshop.

Towards the end of his time there, he published a first book: Lausanne autrement, a kind of guide to what existed in the city on the left, in alternative circles, and in critical culture more broadly. He learned how to make a book, how to lay it out, how to bring it all the way to the printed object. The shock was immediate: receiving the finished book made him want to make a second. Then a third. The publishing house was born that way, almost through material contagion: paper calling to paper.

The name Antipodes also came by way of proximity and play. The Éditions d’en bas already existed. Antipodes therefore marked both a political and cultural closeness, and a difference. The word carries an anthropological resonance, a taste for shifting the gaze. Pahud had been marked by his anthropology courses at the University of Lausanne. Antipodes would therefore be a name of critical distance, not merely a label.

Isabelle Henchoz: From Medieval Letters to the Social Sciences

Alongside him, Isabelle Henchoz brings another path. She studied literature, contemporary history, medieval French and English. At one point, she imagined pursuing medieval studies in Scotland, before family circumstances kept her in Switzerland. She first entered a Lausanne publishing house, where she learned part of the trade and also understood what she wanted to do, and what she did not.

When she returned from abroad, a former professor at the University of Lausanne told her that Antipodes might be looking for someone. Claude Pahud, who had long worked alone, needed support. The encounter worked. A publishing house is often that: a line, but also a cohabitation of temperaments. The interview gives the impression of a professional understanding built over time: both know what they defend, and above all why.

A Particular Bond with Journalists

The conversation begins with a precise intuition: Antipodes has become a travelling companion for journalists. Not only for specialists in the social sciences, but also for those who cover history, politics, culture, social movements, feminist issues or Swiss memory.

Claude Pahud acknowledges that the house has gradually found a place among the media. Journalists have understood that its books allow them to approach difficult subjects, sometimes neglected elsewhere, with a solid documentary foundation. Isabelle Henchoz adds that the RTS regularly follows some of their publications, whereas the written press is more difficult to mobilise. Foreign journalists, too, sometimes rediscover books published several years earlier and use them as a basis for their own research.

This is one of the essential functions of a house like Antipodes: to create lasting resources. An article passes, a broadcast circulates, a media topic emerges and fades. A book remains in the catalogue, settles, waits for its hour. It may become relevant again ten years after publication, because public debate eventually catches up with what researchers had already established.

Money: The Nerve, the Fatigue, the Mountain

Independent publishing is no stroll through a bookshop. Claude Pahud says it plainly: at the beginning, he had a romantic vision of the business. The first book lost him money. The second allowed him to break even, not counting his working time. Then he understood that he would have to seek financial support.

To this day, Antipodes still relies heavily on such backing. It comes from several sources: cities, cantons, the Loterie Romande, universities, the Swiss National Science Foundation, private foundations. Social science books often depend on support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, while comics have opened other institutional doors, particularly with the City of Lausanne, the Canton of Vaud and the Loterie Romande.

But looking for money takes time. A great deal of time. Claude Pahud describes a paradox familiar to all cultural structures: one has to seek money in order to work, yet that search prevents one from devoting all one’s time to editorial work. One would like to make books; instead, one spends days financing the possibility of making them.

Antipodes also explores private foundations, of which Switzerland has many. Crowdfunding has sometimes been used, though sparingly. Claude Pahud cites the case of a book based on chronicles published on a blog, difficult to finance otherwise. But he immediately adds that one cannot solicit one’s circle too often. Independent publishing also lives from this modesty: asking without exhausting, convincing without harassing.

A Critical Line: Dismantling Swiss Mythologies

The central word quickly returns: critique. Antipodes wants to publish books that interrogate society, history and dominant narratives. This is not an ornament; it is the starting line.

Claude Pahud links this orientation to his studies, his time at Basta and his meeting with the historian Ulrich Jost. Jost entrusted him with a collection of critical history. In the interview, Pahud pays him a strong tribute: Jost, he says, “cleaned up official Swiss history,” particularly by working against the illusions of neutrality and national mythology.

Isabelle Henchoz confirms the importance of this figure. She had him as a professor, describes his courses as fascinating, and recalls that he trained a whole generation of critical historians. Jost’s name serves here as a landmark: Antipodes inherits a university tradition that refuses the postcard version of Switzerland.

This ambition can be found in many works in the catalogue. The house publishes research on Switzerland’s relationship with slavery, economic ties with problematic regimes, migration policies, social movements and political violence. The book Le choix de la violence en politique, by Carole Villiger, is presented by Antipodes as a work that sheds light on the history of political violence in Switzerland beyond the demonised figure of the “terrorist” or the romanticised figure of the “revolutionary.”

The editorial line says something simple: Switzerland is not merely a clean, prosperous and neutral setting. It is a historical society, with its conflicts, responsibilities, silences and blind spots.

Swiss History: Behind the Postcard

One of the strengths of the interview is that it shows how little Swiss history is known beyond Switzerland, particularly in France. Isabelle Henchoz puts it precisely: Switzerland likes to cultivate a smooth image, while France still often operates according to a very Franco-French universalism. French research is often perceived as valid for the whole Francophone world; Swiss, Belgian, Togolese or Maghrebi research is perceived as “local.”

Antipodes therefore occupies a strange position: publishing in French, but from a Francophone space pushed to the margins by Paris. The catalogue may interest France, but it arrives with a Swiss label that sometimes triggers folkloric reflexes: banks, skiing, chocolate, neutrality. Isabelle Henchoz recalls Parisian fairs where visitors first approached Switzerland through clichés. The team eventually decided to play along: a fully Swiss stand, small chocolates, Monopoly banknotes hidden in the books. Taking the cliché by surprise in order to be able to speak seriously afterwards.

The same difficulty appears in relations with the French press. Claude Pahud recalls eventually posting a message on the Antipodes website saying, in essence, that the house would no longer send review copies to Le Monde and Libération, given the absence of coverage. Libération, he says, never really responded; Le Monde, at best, offered a brief mention. Even with a distributor in France, FMSH Diffusion, linked to the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’Homme, the battle remains difficult: one must convince bookshops that a Swiss book can interest a French readership.

Paper Against Digital Disappearance

Another issue runs through the interview: the printed book. Isabelle Henchoz insists on this point when speaking about the social sciences. Institutions increasingly encourage digital publication, particularly for reasons of access and academic dissemination. She does not deny the importance of digital formats for research. But she defends the role of the printed book as a vehicle for circulation beyond the university.

A published book, available in bookshops, presented at fairs, kept in the catalogue, can reach a public that digital academic publishing does not necessarily touch. The issue is less nostalgic than political: to bring research out of the academic enclosure.

Antipodes therefore works on texts to make them more accessible. This does not mean simplifying them to the point of emptying them, but reducing certain obstacles: lightening the critical apparatus, clarifying the writing, balancing scientific rigour with readability. Claude Pahud nevertheless recalls an obvious truth: complex subjects remain complex. One can open the door; one cannot turn every piece of research into a slogan.

On this point, he tells the story of a Geneva journalist reacting to a book he had received: “Your book is brain juice.” The phrase is harsh, but almost affectionate. Everything depends, perhaps, on the quality of the juice.

Essays: The Blind Spot of Support Systems

The interview also highlights a structural problem: non-academic but rigorous essays are difficult to finance. They do not always fall under academic support, journalistic schemes or conventional cultural subsidies. They fall between categories, precisely where reality is often most interesting.

Isabelle Henchoz mentions D’un loup à l’autre, by Camille Krafft, published in 2024. Antipodes presents this book as a work on the farming world, animal death, biodiversity, hunters beyond clichés, the governance of the living, scientists and the ravages of fake news.

The house has also published a text explaining that this kind of rigorous long-form journalistic inquiry does not necessarily receive support intended for journalism, because such support targets media outlets rather than publishers.

This is an important gap. The books that nourish public debate are not all theses, nor press reports, nor novels. Many are hybrid forms: long investigations, documented essays, field narratives. Antipodes seeks precisely to occupy that space.

Comics: Another Language for the Social Sciences

Antipodes has not abandoned the social sciences. But the house has broadened its vocabulary. It now publishes comics, graphic novels and children’s books, always linked to its central concerns. This development responds to a desire to widen the audience, but also to the pleasure of treating familiar themes through other forms.

The major turning point is called Le siècle d’Emma. Written by Éric Burnand and illustrated by Fanny Vaucher, the album tells, through a Swiss family, the upheavals of the twentieth century. It moves through the General Strike, the rise of Nazism, Italian immigration, feminist and anti-nuclear protest, and the scandal of the secret files.

Claude Pahud explains that the planned print run was 1,500 copies. The team moved to 2,000, already optimistic. Everything sold out in two weeks. Then came reprints of 5,000, then another 5,000, then another 5,000. In the interview, he says the album reached 17,000 printed copies.

The success was also symbolic. Le siècle d’Emma received the 2020 Delémont’BD Prize for Best Swiss Comic Album.

For Antipodes, it was a turning point. Suddenly, a book no longer merely helped keep the house afloat. It opened new perspectives, provided financial breathing room and confirmed that a demanding historical project could reach a broad audience if the form was right.

The Century of Emma, then Jane’s Circle

After Emma came Le cercle de Jane, following a similar intergenerational path but going back to the nineteenth century. According to Claude Pahud, the album has done very well, though its success was less spectacular. Emma spoke more directly to contemporary readers, with its feminist, anti-nuclear and social struggles of the twentieth century. Jane, set further back in time, perhaps asks for a different kind of entry.

The lesson remains the same: comics can treat history without flattening it. They give it faces, gestures, rhythm. They allow readers to feel what an essay sometimes explains more heavily. At Antipodes, comics are therefore not a commercial escape route. They are another form of critical transmission.

One Hundred Women Who Made Lausanne: Repairing Local Memory

Another important success: 100 femmes qui ont fait Lausanne, published with the City of Lausanne and illustrated by Hélène Becquelin. The book tells the stories of one hundred Lausanne women, with the ambition of making visible women who had been forgotten or marginalised by official history.

Claude Pahud speaks of a kind of stele. The word is beautiful: the book erects a monument, but a portable one. A memory one can hold in one’s hands. Hélène Becquelin’s drawings give the project visual unity; the short texts make it accessible to a broad readership.

The interview also recalls that a comparable work exists in Geneva: Sans elles, devoted to the feminisation of Geneva’s collective memory. Isabelle Henchoz cites it as a very fine album. The comparison places Antipodes within a broader movement: cities re-examining their street names, monuments and absences.

Feminisms, Gender, MeToo: A More Visible Readership

Antipodes has long defended feminist and gender issues. But the interview suggests that the context has changed. MeToo, feminist mobilisations and debates on equality have broadened the readership, including in France.

Isabelle Henchoz cites a forthcoming project: a monthly menstrual agenda published by the association Plans Méduses, with feminist and queer advice around the body, naturopathy and sport. She recounts presenting the object to French sales representatives, three men more accustomed to selling specialised university works. Their reaction was encouraging: genuine interest, openness, the identification of feminist bookshops that might be interested. The scene says something about a shift. Some subjects that might have seemed marginal fifteen years ago now find their place within the book trade.

Claude Pahud broadens the observation to France, which he describes as having long lagged behind on gender issues. According to him, Antipodes’ books on these themes now manage to find their place more easily.

Taboos Differ by Country: The Example of Exit

The case of the book on Exit and assisted suicide shows that taboos are not the same on both sides of the border. Claude Pahud remembers a presentation to French representatives: a deathly silence, discomfort, concern about whether such a book could be offered in bookshops. In Switzerland, the subject has long existed in public debate. In France, it remains more combustible, even though the debate on end-of-life issues has advanced considerably.

Antipodes published La mort appréciée. L’assistance au suicide en Suisse, a work documenting practices and controversies around Exit.

Here again, the house plays its role: making available investigations into subjects that societies do not always dare to face.

Migration, Childhood, Political Violence: Books Born of Affinity

When asked how projects are born, Isabelle Henchoz answers: through affinities. Antipodes has a catalogue, a line, a reputation; authors come to the house because they recognise that line. It is not permanent commissioning, nor a systematic hunt for subjects. It is a kind of magnetism.

Carole Villiger’s book on political violence illustrates this well. The author was working on the subject, Isabelle Henchoz knew her, and publishing with Antipodes made sense. The house already had roots in the social sciences, political movements and critical history. The book finds its public because the subject remains burning: political violence, long associated with other countries, also exists in Swiss history.

The same logic applies to books on migration or childhood. Antipodes has published many works in the social sciences on these issues; a graphic novel such as L’enfant du placard therefore naturally fits into this editorial landscape.

Prizes: Symbolic Validation and Bookshop Effect

Awards matter. Not out of vanity, but because they validate the work for different audiences.

Claude Pahud mentions the Töpffer/Torrance Prize, discussed in the interview as a form of symbolic recognition for Antipodes’ work in the social sciences and history. For a house publishing academic research, recognition by learned or professional institutions also acts as a form of endorsement. It reassures authors, libraries, researchers and booksellers.

The Delémont’BD prize awarded to Le siècle d’Emma had a more directly commercial effect: bookshops that rarely ordered from Antipodes suddenly became interested; even kiosks requested the book. A prize then becomes an accelerator of visibility. A sticker, a mention, a place on a shortlist: sometimes that small beacon on the cover is enough to push a book beyond its natural circle.

A Local House, but Not a Provincial One

Antipodes is deeply rooted in Lausanne. Its first book was about Lausanne. Its catalogue often returns to French-speaking Switzerland, Geneva, Vaud, cities, urban margins and local politics. But this territorial anchoring is not provincial.

On the contrary, it allows the house to start from the close at hand in order to touch the general. Slavery, neutrality, money, migration, political violence, feminist struggles, voluntary death, transformations in the farming world: all these subjects are rooted in Switzerland, but they overflow its borders.

That may be the singularity of Antipodes: to make the local not a retreat, but a method of inquiry. One looks closely at a territory in order to better understand the structures that cross it. Lausanne becomes a lens. Switzerland, a laboratory. The catalogue, a counter-map.

Thirty Years On: Holding, Broadening, Transmitting

Thirty years later, Antipodes still faces the same tensions: financing without betraying itself, making accessible without over-simplifying, defending print in a digital world, existing in France without becoming French, publishing Swiss books without being trapped in Swiss folklore, broadening its readership without abandoning rigour.

Yet the house has changed symbolic scale. It is no longer merely a small critical social-science publisher. It has become a reference in French-speaking Switzerland, a workshop of memory, a place where researchers, journalists, illustrators, scriptwriters, essayists and activists can find an editorial form.

Claude Pahud and Isabelle Henchoz do not tell a smooth success story. Rather, they describe an organised resistance, with its subsidy applications, intuitions, enthusiasms, fatigue, surprises, unexpected bestsellers and difficult books to defend.

Antipodes is thirty years old. This is not merely the age of a publishing house. It is the age of a catalogue that has patiently documented what Switzerland sometimes prefers to forget: its myths, its silences, its injustices, its struggles, its margins and its voices.

And in a media landscape often in a hurry, perhaps this is the most precious role an editor can play: to slow reality down so that, at last, we can read it.

Text : David Glaser

Link to photo source