'Readers want the victims’ stories': the writers exposing sexual abuse in France

France’s response to #MeToo was unenthusiastic but its attitude towards sex is coming under increasing scrutiny in a wave of memoirs alleging abuse

It was the fate of another girl that made Vanessa Springora realise how little things had changed. In 2018, newspapers reported that a 28-year-old man had lured an 11-year-old to his home in the Paris suburbs. Though the girl’s parents had reported rape, the charge was reduced as the girl was deemed to have consented because the man hadn’t used threats or force. “I was disgusted,” says Springora. It was then that she decided on the title of her memoir – Le Consentement (Consent).

Springora first met the prize-winning author Gabriel Matzneff at a literary dinner in 1986. She was 13 years old, and her mother, who worked in publishing, could not afford a babysitter. Matzneff, the guest of honour, was 50. Over the next year, the two embarked on a passionate affair: he fought for her mother’s blessing, helped her with her studies and wrote of their burning love in his published journals. At least, that was his version.

For years, no one really questioned Matzneff. Few bothered to comprehend the truth that lay behind his accounts of trips to the Philippines to score young boys, the different girls he brought along to media interviews , or his 1974 essay Les Moins de Seize Ans (Under 16 Years Old), in which he wrote: “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.” He was praised by presidents, granted state stipends and awarded the esteemed Renaudot literary prize in 2013, even though his books routinely sold as few as 800 copies.

But Springora’s memoir, published in France last year and in English this month, laid bare Matzneff’s paedophilia, while exploring French attitudes towards consent – including her own. “How is it possible to acknowledge having been abused,” she writes, “when it’s impossible to deny having consented, having felt desire for the very adult who was so eager to take advantage of you?”

Springora did not anticipate the book’s impact. Some early reactions from journalists, mostly men, she remembers, were dismissive. “[They] said that it was becoming ridiculous, that there was a sex scandal every week now.”

France has long had a reputation for having a more relaxed attitude towards sexuality. From the Marquis de Sade to Michel Foucault, sex has often been viewed in intellectual circles as a matter of personal freedom. Matzneff and Springora’s mother are part of the “soixante-huitards”, a generation born from the protests of May 1968 who relished the freedoms of the sexual revolution. In the 70s, intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Bernard Kouchner signed petitions calling for a lowering of the age of sexual majority to 13. And while it is illegal in France for an adult to have sex with a minor under the age of 15, there is no age of consent; if there is no evidence of threats or violence, the adult will not be charged with rape. In 2018, after an outcry over the case that disgusted Springora, ministers proposed introducing an age of consent, which has yet to pass. A recent poll estimated that one in 10 French people have been the victim of sexual abuse within the family as children.

The initial response to #MeToo in France was unenthusiastic. In 2018, 100 women, including actor Catherine Deneuve, signed a letter published in Le Monde calling the movement “puritanical”. Sandra Muller, the woman who started the French hashtag #BalanceTonPorc (“Rat on your pig”) was sued for defamation by the man she accused. Journalists and public intellectuals railed against cancel culture and online witch-hunts. “The reaction was timid,” says Dr Muriel Salmona, a psychologist, campaigner and founder of the support group Association Mémoire Traumatique et Victimologie. “Victims felt undermined.”

But a wave of books have given fresh momentum to the movement in France, exposing underage sexual abuse at the highest levels of society. In 2016, the TV presenter Flavie Flament wrote The Consolation, an autobiographical novel about the rape of a 13-year-old girl. She then accused British photographer David Hamilton of raping her in 1987, prompting other women to come forward with allegations of their own. Hamilton, then 83, denied everything, then killed himself weeks after the book was published.

In 2018, Adelaide Bon published The Little Girl on the Ice Floe, a memoir about being raped at the age of nine and subsequent years of trauma-induced memory loss. Last year, France’s figure-skating champion Sarah Abitbol revealed in her autobiography Un si long silence (Such a Long Silence) that her coach Gilles Beyer had sexually abused her when she was 15 and he was in his 30s. Beyer admitted to “intimate relations” with Abitbol and apologised, which she refused.

The rape accusations against the former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 were more pivotal in France than #MeToo, Spingora says: “It was the beginning of the inversion of domination.” “I resent the notion that #MeToo liberated women’s speech,” says Bon, who also finished her manuscript before the #MeToo movement took off. “There have always been books about it [sexual abuse], people have always spoken about it.”

But #MeToo may have been crucial for readers. Bon’s book has sold 40,000 copies and been translated into seven languages; Consent has sold 200,000 copies and has published in more than 22 languages. Caroline Laurent, an editor at publisher JC Lattes who wrote an op-ed in support of Springora’s book, isn’t surprised by their success. “In the #MeToo era, readers want the victims’ stories,” she says. “Not those of their tormentors. All these stories hold up a mirror to our civilisation and force us to look at ourselves with lucidity and courage, in order to make things better.”

Springora has received hundreds of letters from women and men who wanted to share their experiences, many for the first time. “I became, inadvertently, the ambassador for all those silences,” she says. “They gave me a glimpse of the extent of the malaise in which France finds itself.” Bon also received emails, letters, messages and texts after her book was published. “I was even stopped in the street,” she says.

The stories show no signs of slowing. In January, Camille Kouchner, a law professor and daughter of former foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, published her memoir, La Familia Grande. In it, she accused her stepfather, Olivier Duhamel, president of the board governing the elite university Sciences Po and a ubiquitous media personality, of sexually abusing her twin brother when they were 14. Duhamel, who has since described the accusations as “personal attacks”, resigned, as did two other directors at Sciences Po. While discussing the case on television, popular philosopher Alain Finkielkraut asked, “Was there some form of reciprocity?” and was promptly fired as a commentator. He has since sued the network for defamation.

Over the next few days, #metooinceste went viral as people shared their own experiences. “There had been a steady increase since 2017,” says Salmona. “But then it exploded.” She says visits to the association’s website have gone up more than 300%.

These books have started a unprecedented conversation about shame and consent. “A tweet is an axe, a guillotine,” says Laurent. “A book has time, depth. It helps recover the full complexity of people and situations.” And the nature of trauma; Bon, who explores the science of dissociative amnesia in The Little Girl on the Ice Floe, says: “I wanted to transform the reader so that when he finished he’d never be able to listen to a female victim again and say, ‘It wasn’t that bad.’”

And as public outrage grows, French legislation looks as if it might slowly catch up. The senate looks ready to ratify France’s first age of consent, and to extend the statute of limitations to allow more time for victims to file charges.

The Matzneff scandal has also forced the literary establishment to look inwards. In Consent, Springora reserves her greatest criticism for those who gave him intellectual legitimacy: those who published him and gave him prizes.

In France, the world of literature is a closed shop. Many prizes are won by a small selection of Parisian publishing houses, who in turn supply the writers and editors who form the award juries. Dissenting voices are mostly rare. “It’s a milieu that is very close-knit and homogenous,” says Martin Page, founder of publisher Monstrograph.

But, in the wake of Consent, Matzneff was dropped by his three publishers and lost his state stipend. And, while the statute of limitations has run out in Springora’s case, Matzneff has since been charged with promoting the sexual abuse of children. His trial is set to begin in September.

“Books for a long time have been the privilege of the powerful,” Bon says. “That’s why it’s so extraordinary to have recourse to books and literature because now, however much they might fight back, they will always be trapped in a prison of words.”

The fight is not over. Matzneff was edited at Gallimard by Christian Giudicelli, who also travelled with him to the Philippines; Matzneff told the New York Times that Giudicelli had hidden photos and letters from Springora from investigators for him in the 1980s. Giudicelli, who was named a person of interest by investigators last year in Matzneff’s case, remains a permanent member on the Renaudot prize jury – won by Matzneff in 2013. “It tells you how much this milieu is still dominated by people who want nothing to change,” says Page.

Springora and Kouchner are from that world, which may have helped them to speak up and be heard. In Consent, Springora writes of how no adults stepped in – parents, teachers, friends, doctors or editors – to stop Matzneff. In La Familia Grande, Kouchner – whose own father signed a petition calling for the decriminalisation of sex with 13-year-olds in the 1970s – writes: “Many knew and most of them acted as if nothing were wrong.” But Page predicts other stories will come to light as the intellectual and cultural elites start to change: “There’s a new generation of women editors and agents who are activists. They are politicised and they are angry.”

• Consent, translated by Natasha Lehrer, is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.

Contributor

Fleur Macdonald

The GuardianTramp

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