Decitre Closes Its Last Five Bookshops After No Buyer Comes Forward

Decitre, the Lyon bookshop chain that dates back to 1907, no longer has a single shop open. Its last five stores, in Annecy, Chambéry, Écully, Levallois-Perret and the Lyon Part-Dieu shopping center, shut for good on October 31. A search for a buyer had drawn no offers at all, as ActuaLitté reported, quoting the company's own explanation.

The chain told customers the news on October 30. In its message it thanked its teams for keeping the shops going and for sharing their love of books, and thanked customers for their loyalty, Lyon Capitale reported. The local paper notes that the brand was born in Lyon, grew across the region and opened in Paris from 2016.

A short search for a buyer

Decitre belongs to Nosoli, the group that also owns the northern French chain Le Furet du Nord. Nosoli had already shut five shops in 2024 as it tried to cut costs. This year, with things getting worse faster than it expected, the group asked to be placed in receivership, and the commercial court of Lille Métropole agreed on June 1, according to ActuaLitté.

Interest from buyers stayed thin all summer, with book sales slowing sharply. In July, the department store owner Société des Grands Magasins said it might take over the Le Furet du Nord shop in Reims and the Decitre shop in Grenoble, both inside its BHV stores. That came to nothing, and the company later sought receivership for its own flagship BHV store in Paris.

In early October Nosoli began looking for buyers in earnest. On the block were the last Decitre shops plus two other units, Decitre Interactive and La Générale du Livre. Back then the group said it would rather put its money into Le Furet du Nord and its shops.

The rest of the business

Decitre Interactive is the tech side of the group. It runs the chain's websites, the management software and the U Culture site, as well as the book business of the Auchan supermarket chain. It also runs ORB, a bibliographic database that online sellers, bookshops and libraries use to look up titles. ActuaLitté said it had asked Nosoli what happens next for Decitre Interactive and La Générale du Livre, which sells books to local authorities and works councils and distributes to bookshops and newsagents, and had not yet heard back.

Some of the shutdown is already visible online. U Culture stopped taking orders on October 15, its warehouse closed on October 31, and the site is due to go dark on November 15. The Decitre website was still up when ActuaLitté checked, but home delivery was marked as temporarily unavailable and adding books to the cart no longer seemed to work.

Part of a harder year for French bookselling

Decitre isn't the only French bookseller in court. Gibert, the Paris chain, is in receivership too, and a commercial court pushed its next hearing to December. For publishers and authors in the Lyon area and the Alps, it means fewer shelves and fewer signings in a region where Decitre had been on the high street for generations.

Photo: The former Decitre shops on Place Bellecour in Lyon, August 2026. Photo by Romainbehar, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.