Parisian Literature, Rape Culture, Pedophilia, and Feminism
The first stop after checking into my new apartment at Place de Clichy was the bookstore down the street, which was so packed with people that I immediately realized two things: French people actually read, and, second, that social distancing doesn't mean the same thing in France as it does in Canada.
Someone in line told me there was a book signing by an author. Not that I'll ever know for sure, since I couldn't move. The demographics were interesting: Almost exclusively late teens, early twenties. There had to have been close to a hundred people queued up, snaking around the shop's two-story floor plan.
French people read like nowhere else I've ever been. This was another one of those cultural features obvious to me on day one. Billboards plaster subway cars and busy intersections advertising novels, authors, and even standalone essays. There was an essay on 5G that was advertised on roofs, bus stops and news kiosks. Signage showcased the author more than their work, which gave me the impression that popular writers have real celebrity status in France. After a few months, I knew exactly who Michel Houellebecq was and could pick him out of a crowd, but couldn't tell you the title of whatever new novel he was pushing.
The outsize influence of writers in French society cannot be missed. There are streets, squares, and parks named after Sartre, Hugo, Voltaire, and de Beauvoir. There are cafés that charge five euros for an espresso shot because Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to frequent their patios. The tombs belonging to Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are more like mausoleums, literally overshadowing the neighboring graves of billionaires, government leaders, clergy, and old nobility.
Their literary appreciation is part of a larger culture of intellectualism in France. It seems to me that French people care much less than North Americans about what you do for a living, the status that your profession brings, or how much money you make. Instead, you're more likely to be judged by the measure of your intellect, including your ability to speak multiple languages and the speed at which you acquire languages, the extent of your formal and informal education, how well-spoken you are, what you do with your free time, your wit in conversation, the jokes you make, your dress, and your ability to solve riddles, brainteasers, and number sequences (I was challenged to all three at one point or another). Or at least these are the ways I felt sized up. Up to you to decide whether their measuring sticks are any better than ours.
All the same, French society is as steeped in prestige and status culture as ours. The only difference is in where the prestige derives, and the protections it provides its recipient.
There's no case more evidential than Gabriel Matzneff's, a famed French author who also happens to be an open pedophile and pedophilic sex tourist. Matzneff, now 84, has won all of the most prestigious awards for literature in France, including the Mottard Award (1987), Amic Award (2009), Prix Renaudot (2013), and Prix Cazes (2015). Most, for writing openly about his sex experiences with minors.
In Matzneff's TV interviews and memoirs he boasts about stalking girls outside Parisian high schools and his jaunts to the Philippines where he'd sleep with boys as young as eight years old. As far as I'm aware, he's remorseless and proclaims his innocence, insisting that his exploits were legal at the time. And, until very recently, he got away with it due to his celebrity in French literary circles.
The country's most distinguished publishing house, Gallimard, still markets his books.
Part of the problem is the jury system in the French award circuit. It's a somewhat incestuous old boys club (for the Prix Renaudot, all but one of the jurors is a man), in which the jurors sit for life and eventually select their own replacements from members of their circle. Unlike the Booker or Pulitzer prizes in the English-speaking world, French jurors don't recuse themselves when adjudicating candidates with whom from they're associated. They have a mafia-like code of silence regarding in-group misconduct. Some jurors, like Christian Giudicelli, are confidantes of, or close friends with, Matzneff. They're the reason Matzneff can snag top awards and publishing deals despite allegedly only selling 180 book copies per year.
I'm not going to act surprised that the French literary elite aid and abet sex criminals. The country has a chilling history regarding sex crimes and defending their perpetrators. Filmmaker Roman Polanski, for instance, has been hiding in France since 1978 after being convicted of raping a 13-year-old in the United States. Since then, the government of France has refused the US' requests for extradition. He's even been publicly defended by Frédéric Mitterrand, the French Minister of Culture.
Christophe Girard, a former Deputy Mayor of Paris and an executive at Yves Saint Laurent, has been accused of soliciting sex from a 15-year-old in Tunisia no fewer than twenty times in his mid-30s. Girard voluntarily resigned from his mayoral post in July 2020 and has to date not faced any legal consequences for his actions.
Better known is the case of French president Emmanuel Macron, whose wife, Brigitte, is 24 years his senior and with whom he started a romantic relationship while she was his high school drama teacher—he was 15 and she was 39. This is no crime on its own, but it's indicative, I think, of questionable underlying attitudes regarding what constitutes legitimate sexual or romantic partnership. As any discerning parent would, Macron's mom disapproved of the relationship and sent her son off to a different prep school in Paris in a deliberate (and failed) attempt to distance him from his teacher.
In 2018, a 30-year-old man was acquitted of raping an 11-year-old child in Paris because there was no irrefutable presumption of a lack of consent from the victim. This one's the most egregious of the bunch.
If you're wondering how this is possible, it first has to be understood that, in France, there's no precise age of consent. As fucked up as it sounds, French courts do not recognize a presumption of coercion simply because a minor is involved. France introduced a statute in 2019 that set an “age of sexual majority” at 15, but did not establish an age below which a minor cannot be deemed to give consent. Therefore, sex with a person under the age of majority in France is punishable in its own right but does not necessarily constitute statutory rape or sexual assault, whereas sex with under-16s constitutes statutory rape point blank in virtually all other developed countries.
I'm realizing now this probably needs a content warning.
I think I've sufficiently hammered my point home, but I'll sum up by saying that I think the blasé French attitude to sexual predation stems from radical activist movements in post-war France. There was a time when Paris was truly a hotbed of extreme social theory that seeped into civil society, one which recast any form of traditional moral order as the enemy of an emancipated post-capitalist state. The movement peaked in May 1968, when students and trade unionists came within striking (pun?) distance of successfully staging a revolution. Weeks of violent street protests and wildcat strikes forced then-president Charles de Gaulle to temporarily flee France and govern from Germany. Shortly after, prominent French intellectuals—spanning existentialists and post-structuralists—publicly petitioned against the age of consent laws in France, a campaign that persisted for years. Rather than fringe intellectuals, these were mainstream authors, academics, and writers, including then-household names like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For them, any form of sexual morality established by the state was seen as bourgeois or repressive.
The radical social elements of May 1968 still linger in French society, including the then-emancipatory idea that children should be considered fully-realized sexual beings. Restrictions thereto were retrograde, relics of the bourgeois order. It is fucked up in every conceivable way that open pedophilia and child sex abuse were cloaked by the discourse of liberation, a testament to how easily claims to justice can corrupt, and how the abstract defense of any “right” is so often the ignorant infringement of another more important one.
Moral orders and traditions serve crucial civic functions. They and their institutions contain the collective wisdom of generations. All it takes is a couple of months of student occupations and protests to do them away and, like that, fifty years later we're still contending with the unintended aftereffects in French courts and crisis centers.
All this to say: a legacy of post-war radicalism in France left legal gaps that made room for sexual predation to which French elites, at least until now, have been shockingly apathetic. The downstream effect is that France is now home to a different kind of rape culture. One that excuses and relativizes sexual predation against minors, and one that for decades has propped up apologism and limp wristed calls for tolerance from celebrities, intellectuals, writers, actors, and government ministers.
It doesn't help that #MeToo was slow to take hold in France. At the start of the global MeToo movement in 2017, a public letter signed by 100 leading women in French society criticized the excesses of a movement characterised as puritanical, fundamentalist, and Victorian. In keeping with the republic's universalist values, French feminism is more concerned with proving a woman's equality to man than the American strategy of denouncing the most powerful among the superstructure. Not sure if this is the most effective strategy. In some ways, French feminism is too tightly in lockstep with de Beauvoir's and other 50s-era women's lib theoreticians. Many of the older generations of French feminists, including Catherine Deneuve, insist that a woman's responsibility to consent and exert agency trumps their right to not be made uncomfortable by men in the workplace (in the case of harassment) or in the streets (in the case of catcalling). I wish these same feminists would extend that same thoughtful consideration of consent to the children who've been victims of adult sexual abuse. Theirs is too shy a brand of feminism, distancing itself from an American version that, for them, is a little too Robespierre.
The good news is that Matzneff, now well into his 80s, is finally facing some form of justice. One of his victims, Vanessa Springora, published a book entitled Le Consentement (Consent) early last year. In it, she details the sexual relationship she had with Matzneff when she was 13 and he was 50. The memoir caused a public outcry, only 30 years overdue. After the scandal came to light, French investigators opened a case on Matzneff. The investigation has now stalled since the writer fled to Italy, where he'll likely hide out in disgrace for the remainder of his life.
For decades, Matzneff's accolades and connections as an author and literary elite sheltered him from judgment. Now, thanks to a powerful written testimony by one defiant victim, the Matzneff scandal has the feeling of Weinstein's. It's almost poetic that the writer was eventually exposed by a book, something that covered him up for so long.
Nice article Liam. I had wondered about the harmful manifestations of the sexual liberalism in France, especially towards children. I see you place the blame predominantly on post-war radicalism. I wonder if this claim is too strong? I’d think it at least goes back to the French Revolution and probably before. Marquis de Sade, reaching majority around 1800, is the prototype of the author you bring up in the article. In general, pedophilia is not a new phenomenon, and it manifests both in liberal and conservative institutions (such as the Catholic Church). The question regarding it’s sustenance in modern France is interesting nonetheless.
Excellent article. Thank you!