MeToo Comes to France

The MeToo movement, which originated in the United States, has not spared France; yet, for a time, this movement of denunciation met with more resistance and reticence than in Anglo-Saxon countries. France was the country of gallantry par excellence, and as a result the French were indulgent about the sexual escapades of their neighbours, especially powerful people. It’s not for nothing that in French the term “la bagatelle” designates both the sexual act and something to which no intelligent person should attach any importance.

An example is the double life of President François Mitterrand, which was an open secret in Parisian circles but was never revealed by the press until just before his death, even though Mitterrand illegally used state resources to benefit his mistress and their daughter. Even the phrase “double life” is not entirely appropriate, because Mitterrand had a multitude of “lives”: an “official” mistress and at the same time, many other secondary, tertiary or quaternary liaisons.

But this old reticence seems to have come to an end. The proliferation of high-profile cases in recent years has finally done away with this French specificity, for better or for worse.

The latest case was brought to light this year by Judith Godrèche, an actress who, in her youth, was an “icon” of a certain type of French cinema, and who today, aged fifty-one, is denouncing the sexual abuse committed against her by the film-makers who launched her career: Benoit Jacquot and Jacques Doillon.

The Godrèche case bears striking similarities to others that have hit the headlines in recent years. They point to conclusions so obvious that everyone should have drawn them long ago, if they didn’t run counter to the reigning progressive dogma.

Three cases suffice to illustrate these points: that of Godrèche, Camille Kouchner, and Vanessa Springora. All have received extensive media exposure, so that the important details have been made public. What’s more, they arose in three different professional milieux: cinema, academia, and literature, yet they feature the same perversions, the same abuses, and the same complacency towards these abuses.

In order of media coverage, let’s start with Vanessa Springora, who was born in 1972. At the age of thirteen she met the writer Gabriel Matzneff, through her mother, who worked as a press officer in publishing. Matzneff was forty-nine, a writer who typically only sold 1000 to 2000 copies per book but enjoyed a fairly good reputation with a core of devoted readers and an interesting address book with some very useful patrons and protectors.

Matzneff has never hidden the fact that he was a pederast. In 1974, he published Les moins de seize ans, an essay in which he unabashedly exposed his taste for “young people” of both sexes, between the ages of ten and sixteen, as he put it. His diary, published in 1990 under the title Mes amours décomposées, is also full of his sexual exploits with minors and his trips to Asia to find little boys.

Matzneff noticed the very young Vanessa Springora and, as he had already done with many others, set about seducing her. She quickly fell under the spell of the “great writer” and began an affair that lasted just over a year.

She quickly fell under the spell of the “great writer” and began an affair that lasted just over a year.

In early 2020, Vanessa Springora, then director of Julliard (the publisher of Les moins de seize ans) published Le consentement (Consent) in which she recounted her affair with Matzneff and its disastrous consequences for her. The public prosecutor immediately opened an investigation for rape of a minor, and Matzneff quickly lost all his support, his publishers and his livelihood. He fled to Italy, before discreetly returning to France in 2022 for health reasons. He is still the subject of several investigations.

Then there is Camille Kouchner. Born in 1975, she is the daughter of Bernard Kouchner, a doctor who made a name for himself in the humanitarian field, helping to create the NGOs Médecins du Monde and Médecins Sans Frontières, before branching off into an openly political career. He served as health minister in several Socialist governments in the 1990s, before joining President Sarkozy and becoming his foreign minister from 2007 to 2010. Camille’s mother was Évelyne Pisier, a professor of public law and an early feminist activist, well connected in Socialist government circles and a leading figure in French academia.

Kouchner and Pisier had three children: Julien and twins Camille and Antoine. After fourteen years, the marriage ended in divorce in 1984. By then, Pisier had already had an affair with the man who was to become her second husband: Olivier Duhamel.

Like Pisier, Duhamel (nine years her junior) was a professor of public law, but with an even more eminent position in society than his wife. His father had been a minister under President Georges Pompidou and his mother’s second marriage was to one of France’s most prestigious publishers, Claude Gallimard.

Duhamel already had a fine address book when he began his academic career in 1981 but Mitterrand’s election as President that year gave him a tremendous boost. Working with all the leading figures in the Socialist Party, he quickly became one of the most prominent intellectuals on the social-democratic Left. A columnist in several leading newspapers, member of the European Parliament between 1997 and 2004, lawyer, Duhamel also became, in 2016, President of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, the body in charge of managing Science-Po, the prestigious grande école through which most of France’s senior civil servants and much of the political staff of the Fifth Republic passed (often the same people). In short, for a good thirty years, Duhamel was one of the most powerful men in France in both intellectual and academic spheres.

Camille’s childhood and youth were spent among the elite of the French Left, during its golden age, the two seven-year terms of Mitterrand (1981 to 1995). In summer, many of these powerful figures gathered at Duhamel’s villa in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Côte d’Azur. They formed what Duhamel and Pisier proudly called “la familia grande”, as opposed to the “petite” family, the despicable family based on blood ties. And it was within this “big family”, in the atmosphere of total sexual freedom and contempt for “bourgeois conventions” that reigned in the Sanary villa, that Duhamel sexually abused Camille’s twin brother for several years from the late 1980s.

In 2021, Camille Kouchner published La familia grande, in which she revealed the abuse suffered by her brother at the hands of his stepfather.

In 2021, Camille Kouchner published La familia grande, in which she revealed the abuse suffered by her brother at the hands of his stepfather. The book was a bombshell. When questioned by the police, Olivier Duhamel admitted the truth of the allegations made by his stepdaughter. As the statute of limitations had expired, he could no longer be prosecuted, but he was soon forced to give up all the positions he still held and was struck off the bar. He is now ostracised by all those who, only yesterday, flocked to kiss his feet.

Finally, Judith Godrèche. Born in 1972, Godrèche began her film career at thirteen. At sixteen, she got her first role in Benoît Jacquot’s Les Mendiants (1988). In 1989, she played the lead in Jacques Doillon’s La Fille de 15 ans, a film that brought her a certain notoriety in France. At the time, Godrèche, who had left her family and dropped out of school two years earlier, was living with Jacquot, twenty-five years her senior.

During the 1990s, Godrèche prospered in the small world of French cinema. Largely protected from competition by an elaborate system of grants and subsidies, built up since the end of the Second World War but greatly strengthened during the first seven-year term of office of Mitterrand, French cinema is characterised by its overall lack of profitability, its staunchly left-wing political orientation, and the navel-gazing to the point of caricature of many of its productions. While these adjectives do not apply to all French films, they do characterise the films of Jacquot and Doillon, and many of those in which Godrèche starred at the time.

From the 2000s onwards, Godrèche’s career began to falter as she approached her forties, the cruel fate of many actresses. At the turn of the 2010s, she moved to the United States where she pursued a second- or even third-rate career. Godrèche was one of ninety-three women who, on October 31, 2017, declared that they had been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, which, in a way, proves that she had successfully integrated into Hollywood.

At the end of 2023, Godrèche began promoting Icon of French Cinema, a television mini-series inspired by her own life and in which she plays the lead role. In interviews, she started talking about her affair with Jacquot and described it as “une relation d’emprise” (a feminist expression to which we will return). On February 6, 2024, Godrèche lodged a complaint against Doillon for rape of a minor, and on February 8 against Jacquot.

Three particularly salient elements emerge from these three sordid cases. First, sexual predators such as Matzneff, Duhamel and Jacquot thrive on family breakdown. In all three cases, the pattern is the same: divorce and absent parents. Matzneff-style perverts deliberately target children from broken homes, and their predilection for attacking wounded beings, doubly vulnerable because of their age and family history, is proof of the despicable nature of their ventures.

Springora recounts how her parents constantly bickered and her mother divorced her father, whom she describes as a “tyrant” and “temperamental”, when she was six years old. From then on, she only saw her father sporadically and lived with her mother, who gradually sank into alcoholism and short-lived relationships.

Kouchner’s parents divorced when she was nine. Her mother was an icy intellectual, feminist to the core, who gave her children only the minimum amount of time and never considered their needs, as opposed to her own desires. From an early age, she exposed them to plenty of intellectual and political debates while feeding them frozen food. “Domestic chores, chores without delights”, she claimed in an attempt to justify herself. Kouchner’s father was too busy saving children on the other side of the world—preferably in front of the cameras—to look after his own. Kouchner recounts how he used to give them sleeping pills to get rid of them more quickly on the rare occasions when he had to look after them.

Godrèche’s parents divorced when she was eight. Her mother disappeared while her father, a psychoanalyst from a Polish Jewish family who had fled to Paris at the time of the war, is described by Godrèche as fragile and absent. At home, she played the role of the adult, and when she told her father, at fourteen, that she was moving in with Jacquot, he had nothing to say.

Springora, Kouchner, Godrèche: three children in need of a father, poorly protected by parents who were weak or selfish to the nth degree, leaving the door to their children’s hearts open to predatory males.

Which means that the best protection against this kind of sexual abuse is an intact, reasonably loving family with conservative views on sexuality—parents who teach their children that, yes, sex can be wonderful, but only if it is experienced within an appropriate framework, with full awareness of its moral and social implications. In short, ideally within marriage, or failing that in a relationship that comes as close to it as possible.

In short, ideally within marriage, or failing that in a relationship that comes as close to it as possible.

Because, and this is the second point in common, we find the same “progressive” ideas about sexuality in all these stories, ideas that can be summed up as follows: sexuality is merely pleasurable gymnastics that lies beyond good and evil and it is therefore ridiculous to want to limit it by considerations of morality.

“In the 1970s,” explains Springora, “in the name of the liberation of morals and the sexual revolution, we had to defend the free enjoyment of all bodies.” Preventing youthful sexuality was therefore a form of social oppression, and compartmentalising sexuality between individuals of the same age group was a form of segregation. “During the 1980s, the environment in which I grew up was still imbued with this vision of the world.” For her mother, she adds, “il est interdit d’interdire” (it is forbidden to forbid) “was undoubtedly a mantra”.

“Is it wrong?” the Kouchner twins asked themselves after Duhamel began to sexually abuse Antoine: “Well, no, it’s not wrong, because it’s him. He’s teaching us, that’s all. We’re not uptight!” To be “uptight” was to regard sexuality as a moral matter, to assert that there are prohibitions and more or less honourable behaviour in this area. But aren’t sexual desires essentially innocent and all pleasures equally respectable? According to this inverted scale of values, being “uptight” was much worse than having to perform oral sex on your stepfather.

Kouchner recounts how a woman in her early twenties ran away from Sanary after an unknown man tried to get into her bed while she was asleep and she reported the incident to the police. “The young woman,” she wrote, “was repudiated and vilified by my stepfather and my mother, who were appalled by such vulgarity. As for me, I was told what I had to understand: the girl had exaggerated.”

Godrèche wrote:

There was not a single responsible person. I grew up in a complicit society where art was an absolute free pass. No one around me was offended when, at fifteen, I had to shoot the same scene forty-five times, bare-chested, embracing an actor twice my age.

In fact, Jacquot was notorious for getting the under-age actresses he cast in his films into bed with him; it was his stock in trade.

The corollary of this atmosphere of total sexual permissiveness in which Springora, Kouchner and Godrèche evolved, was the arrogance of the predators, their quiet certainty that they would never be seriously worried, better still, that deep down they were admired for their “freedom”, for the way in which they defied “bourgeois conventions”.

Matzneff frequented the literary and journalistic Tout-Paris, who knew perfectly well his sexual tastes and not only did not take offence but even defended him when he was attacked for his proclivities. On March 2, 1990, when he was invited (for the sixth time) on to Apostrophes (a television program which, at the time, was the literary talk of the town and which every writer dreamed of taking part in one day), to promote Mes amours décomposés, Matzneff was furiously taken to task by Denise Bombardier, a Quebec novelist, who, in essence, called a spade a spade and Matzneff a pedophile. Her literary career never recovered. Everyone who was anyone in the French literary scene immediately turned against her. “I was called a bad f*** everywhere. They told me to go back to my ice floe,” she recalls.

This objective complicity was not limited to “intellectual” circles. A long-time admirer of Matzneff, Mitterrand, now President, invited him to lunch at the Elysée Palace and even wrote an enthusiastic article about him in 1986, which appeared in a literary review of the time:

This unrepentant seducer, who defines himself as a mixture of Dorian Gray and Dracula, has always amazed me with his extreme taste for rigour and the density of his thought. The spontaneity of his judgement, expressed in a limpid style, was combined with a demand for truth that often took him beyond the limits considered to be ordinary. He pays the same attention to his life and his work.

“Beyond the limits considered to be ordinary” — how gallantly these things are said.

Summoned a few weeks later by police investigating anonymous allegations of pedophilia, Matzneff showed the officers Mitterrand’s article, like a talisman, and left the police station a free man, never to be disturbed again.

In 1995, Matzneff was made an Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture, Jacques Toubon. In 2002, at a time when his star was already in serious decline, he was granted an annual stipend for life by the Centre National du Livre, a favour rarely granted, after Christophe Girard, then deputy mayor and a councillor responsible for culture under the powerful Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, exerted the necessary pressure.

In his fiefdom in Sanary, Duhamel displayed photos of his daughter-in-law’s breasts, dived naked into the swimming pool in the midst of guests of all ages and both sexes, shamelessly flirted with his friends’ wives …

In his fiefdom in Sanary, Duhamel displayed photos of his daughter-in-law’s breasts, dived naked into the swimming pool in the midst of guests of all ages and both sexes, shamelessly flirted with his friends’ wives, and kissed a twelve-year-old girl full on the lips in public without anyone being bothered. When the Kouchner twins began discussing whether or not to reveal the abuse of Antoine, Antoine warned Camille: “You’ll see. They’ll believe me, but they won’t give a damn.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Even Pisier sided with Duhamel when Camille told her what had happened to Antoine. “I saw that you loved him, my man. I knew straight away that you’d try to steal him from me. I’m the victim here,” she explained to her stunned daughter.

A final point in common is that Springora, Kouchner and Godrèche only pressed charges when the statute of limitations had expired (in the case of Kouchner, we might add that she also waited until her mother had died). It is possible that this is merely an unfortunate coincidence, but anyone who has taken an interest in the many similar cases that have hit the headlines in recent years will find it hard not to have noticed that victims often only initiate legal action when there is virtually no chance of bringing the (alleged) aggressor to justice.

To explain this very slow maturation of the complaint, feminists invoke the supposed characteristics of “traumatic memory” and the time needed to free oneself from the “hold” (emprise) that the aggressor allegedly exerted over his victims. There is no need to discuss these highly debatable notions of “traumatic memory” and “hold”: it will suffice to point out that, when the time taken for psychological maturation is closely aligned with legal expiry dates, it is reasonable to suspect that the law has something to do with these delays.

In my opinion, there are three main reasons why a complaint is only lodged when it has little or no chance of success.

The first is that the victims do not necessarily want the alleged perpetrator to end up in prison because of the ambivalence of their feelings towards him and, more broadly, the ambivalence of their opinions about what happened to them.

The victim may well have felt affection, admiration, love, even desire, towards the abuser at the time that he took advantage of her, as well as embarrassment, reticence, fear, anxiety, and a confused but persistent feeling that something was wrong. Springora explains that, for a long time after her affair with Matzneff, she was unable to see herself as a victim: “How can you admit that you’ve been abused when you can’t deny that you consented? When, in this case, you felt desire for this adult who was quick to take advantage of it?” Before adding, quite rightly: “It wasn’t my own attraction that needed to be questioned, but his.”

Anyone who has loved and lost, who has experienced the joys and heartbreaks of passion, in short, anyone who has lived a little and is honest about what they have experienced, knows that this conjunction of the positive and the negative is not beyond the possibilities of the human soul. With time, reflection and experience, the negative can clearly take precedence over the positive, without necessarily making it disappear. More concretely, the certainty that you have been genuinely victimised, that this person has knowingly done you wrong and is therefore, in a sense, guilty, can very well coexist with a residue of affection, admiration, recognition and so on. One may therefore want the person’s guilt to be known and recognised (and by extension to be recognised as a victim in one’s own right) without wanting him to be punished by the law.

It is precisely this all-too-human ambivalence that the all-too-convenient notion of “emprise” is designed to erase. It assumes that, at the time the offence was committed, the victim had no will of their own, was a puppet whose emotional strings were pulled by the abuser. “L’emprise” allows us to assert that our apparent consent was not real and that the core of our personality remained intact: deep down we never had any control over what happened to us. We are pure victims. Our honour is safe, you might say.

We are pure victims. Our honour is safe, you might say.

The second reason is that a trial is adversarial and, in criminal cases, subject to the presumption of innocence. The plaintiff has to prove their case and is necessarily subject to counter-attacks from the accused seeking to cast doubt on the claims and evidence. A trial is therefore an ordeal, particularly when the crime is sexual and forces you to expose in public what is most intimate. When, in addition, the victim is aware of the ambivalence of her feelings at the time of the crime, and perhaps even today, it is understandable that she does not want to face it.

The third reason is similar to the second, but not identical: if you want to punish your abuser, it can be far more effective and far less costly to subject him to trial by media rather than a court of law, especially if the accused is a public figure and has a lot to lose. Trial by media offers no guarantee of respect for the rights of the defendant, and that is the whole point: it loses its bite if the accused can explain himself before an impartial court.

These three motivations, which are unequally legitimate, may well coexist to varying degrees, or alternate in the mind of the person lodging the complaint. There will therefore be no trial, as the statute of limitations has expired.

The trial of the progressive ideals that paved the way for the abuses which Springora, Kouchner, Godrèche and so many other anonymous people suffered will not take place for a different reason: the guilty parties still hold sway and continue their destructive work. “Sexual liberation” is still celebrated as a blessing, feminism holds a tight grip on public authorities and the so-called “traditional” family continues to be attacked and undermined from all sides.

A few years ago, for example, President Emmanuel Macron calmly explained to someone who was concerned about his plan to open up medically assisted procreation to lesbian couples (a plan that has since come to fruition): “I understand. Your problem is that you believe that a dad is necessarily a male. All the psychoanalysts will tell you otherwise.”

Could there be a more openly constructivist profession of faith? Could there be a more direct denial of the importance of the biological foundations of the family and the difference between the sexes? What clearer way of affirming that you are firmly on the side of la familia grande?

Laurent Lemasson is a French journalist