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Since early February, France’s prime minister François Bayrou has been the subject of a damning series of articles by the investigative outlet Mediapart detailing allegations that he turned a blind eye to decades of allegations of physical violence, sexual abuse, and rape at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a private Catholic school. It is located just outside of Pau, where Bayrou is mayor, and where he’s built his political career for the past forty-five years.
The Mediapart revelations come less than a year after a parliamentary report revealed just how little control the state is exercising over the thousands of private Catholic schools it funds. According to the parliamentary report, most schools have their contracts tacitly renewed each year without any real confirmation that they’re fulfilling the conditions required to receive state financing. The report found that the government inspects the 7,500 private schools it funds at a rate of five per year — the equivalent of just once every 1,500 years.
The thousands of Catholic schools who get their funding from the state ostensibly commit to following a curriculum that meets public-education standards, guaranteeing equal access to education for all students irrespective of background, and ensuring freedom of conscience for students and staff. In return, they get about half of their funding from the central government but no funding from local municipalities.
These private schools are known as being “under contract.” According to 2022 figures, two million French children were educated in them, some 17 percent of the country’s students. Of these, 96 percent go to Catholic schools. Secular, Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim schools under contract account for less than 80,000 students.
The report, headed up by La France Insoumise (LFI) MP Paul Vannier and also Christopher Weissberg — a legislator from Emmanuel Macron’s own Renaissance party — came in the wake of another series of articles from Mediapart starting in 2022 detailing widespread sexism, racism, homophobia, and an authoritarian culture of discipline at Stanislas, one of France’s toniest Catholic high schools.
Vannier and Weissberg found that a “climate of confidence reigns” between the state and the private schools under contract. Schools go years without being inspected, and the government neglects its duty to do so because of the time it takes, a lack of political will to do so, and worries about the difficulties that will come from having to deal with irregularities or fraud discovered during inspections.
Even when inspections do happen, they can miss widespread abuse.
In 1996, reports of physical violence at Notre-Dame de Bétharram spilled over into national headlines. But when an inspector checked the establishment that same year, their conclusion was that it “isn’t an establishment where students are abused.”
At the time, Bayrou was minister of National Education, a role he held from the end of March 1993 to the beginning of June 1997. He was also president of the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques’ general council, a position that includes a duty to ensure the safety of children.
The case that spurred Bayrou to order the inspection started with a fourteen-year-old child breaking a glass. As punishment, an overseer slapped him hard enough that he lost forty percent of his hearing. The child was later sent outside by the river in his underwear to spend a cold winter’s night as punishment for another infraction. He fled and contacted his father, who brought him to a hospital in Pau. By the time he got there, the boy was hypothermic, reported France Radio.
When Mediapart’s story detailing evidence that Bayrou had been warned repeatedly about conditions at the school first came out, the prime minister made no comment about it until he was confronted by Vannier on the floor of the National Assembly. Vannier accused Bayrou of being part of an omertà — a conspiracy of official silence.
“I was never informed of either violence or sexual violence. . . . When the first lawsuit was filed, I had already quit the Ministry of National Education months ago,” Bayrou told Vannier angrily, accusing him of using the story to try to take him down.
But Mediapart’s reporting contradicted Bayrou’s narrative. The outlet talked to at least three people on the record who said Bayrou had spoken with them contemporaneously about more than one case of physical and sexual violence. And Bayrou was informed enough about the 1996 case of physical violence to launch an official inspection, the results of which he claimed to local press at the time were “favorable and positive.”
Later the inspector behind that check admitted that his findings “didn’t hold water.” The inspector also explained that he’d never met with a math teacher, Françoise Gulling, who tried to blow the whistle about physical violence at the school. Gulling told Mediapart she’d tried to alert Élisabeth Bayrou, the prime minister’s wife, about the physical abuse. Élisabeth taught catechism at the school, and Gulling said the two women had once listened to a child beg for mercy while being beaten in another room.
In the inspector’s report, Gulling’s warnings about the conditions in the school were dismissed as the complaints of a troublemaker who was trying to take the school down for its “old-fashioned” methods. Gulling said she also told Bayrou about the physical abuse in person at the time, but he downplayed her warnings and claimed that she was exaggerating.
In 1998, another disturbing case made local headlines. Father Pierre Silviet-Carricart, a priest who was a director at the school, was accused by a student of rape. According to Christian Mirande, the judge who investigated the case, the accusation was “solid.” The first victim told a story of being orally raped by Carricart the morning the priest brought him the news that his father had died. Mirande thought the priest should be detained, but he was released in murky circumstances and fled to the Vatican. In 2000, when a second victim came forward accusing Carricart of taking advantage of his background from a troubled family to abuse him during holidays and other trips, Mirande ordered Carricart to return to the country to face charges. Instead, Carricart killed himself, throwing himself into the river Tiber.
Mirande told Mediapart that Bayrou came over to his house in 1998 asking about the case. Despite Mirande telling Bayrou that the accusations were credible, Bayrou didn’t believe Carricart was capable of committing the crimes. After Carricart killed himself, Bayrou’s wife attended his funeral.
Alain Hontangs, a police officer who investigated the case for Mirande, also told the news station TF1 that Carricart’s interrogation was delayed by Bayrou trying to intervene in the case. The prime minister denies that. Mirande didn’t remember that allegation, but he called Hontangs his most trusted investigator.
In 2023, former students of the school formed an organization and started sharing stories with each other, leading to a blizzard of lawsuits.
Daniel Flouch, a student at the school from 1958 to 1963, told La République des Pyrénées last week about a day in December 1963, when a priest called him to his office. The priest called Flouch over to his desk, pulled his zipper down, and masturbated him. Then he asked Daniel to do the same thing for him.
“I was frozen, it was like I was under his control. . . . It was all done without a word,” Flouch said. “I was nothing but a student in the face of an institution, a young man in front of a priest.”
Abuse like what Flouch experienced seems to have continued for decades.
The Pau court started receiving a flood of letters from victims at the beginning of February last year, and the court opened an investigation on July 16.
By the end of January this year, the court had received 112 letters from victims detailing rape, sexual assault, and physical violence committed between 1955 and 2004. The court interviewed ninety-seven victims, and seventy-seven were ready to go forward with pressing charges. They accused eleven people of the crimes, though eight of them are already dead.
This February 19, three men were arrested by the Pau court under suspicion of assault, sexual abuse, and rape committed between 1957 and 2004.
A press release from the Pau court reported that between 1978 and 1989, one of the men was suspected of violence against fifty-five victims under fifteen, sexual assault against eighteen victims under fifteen, and rape against one victim under fifteen. Another man was suspected of rape in 1986, 1991, and 1994. The third was suspected of sexually assaulting one victim between 1957 and 1962.
All three of the men were initially released by the court because the crimes aren’t within the statute of limitations anymore. One man remains under investigation on suspicion that some of his alleged crimes happened more recently.
On February 27, forty-nine victims marched to the Pau court to meet with the prosecutor and bring forty new complaints against the school, bringing the total number of complaints to 152. Eighteen of the new complaints were of a sexual nature.
The story continues to dog Bayrou.
At the Salon de l’Agriculture farming show in Paris last week, Bayrou’s security team pushed a journalist away from him after he asked a question about Bétharram.
And on February 21, Bayrou was sued by a victim for failing to report the crime while having an official responsibility to do so.
“You’ve made the irresponsible choice of denial and silence,” Vannier told Bayrou in the National Assembly after he refused to answer more questions on February 18. “Your story already changed three times.”
“By lying, in your role as a member of the government, you’ve transformed one of the most serious child abuse cases that our country has ever known into an official lie and a matter of state,” Vannier continued, calling for Bayrou to resign. “By lying to the representatives of the nation, to the victims, and to the French people, you’ve disqualified yourself. A liar cannot govern France.”
On February 26, Hontangs, the police detective who worked on the case, told Mediapart that he would testify in front of an administrative investigation if one was opened and said there were people still around who would be able to corroborate his testimony “100 percent.”
Meanwhile, the government and its allies in the media have tried to push back on the story by claiming that it’s a plot by La France Insoumise and Mediapart to bring down the government.
“LFI wants to transform the Bétharram affair into the Bayrou affair, because they want to impeach Macron,” Le Canard enchaîné reported Patrick Mignola, a minister from Bayrou’s government, saying.
Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a former first secretary for the Parti Socialiste, has also been shopping around another counternarrative.
“Why didn’t he say anything at the time either?” Cambadélis has been reported asking, pointing to the fact that La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was subminister of professional education for just under two years between 2000 and 2002.
But with a lack of clarity from Bayrou and constantly shifting stories from the prime minister’s office, others have been less boisterous in their defense.
“He hasn’t told us anything to help him defend him!” Bruno Fuchs, the president of the Commission on Foreign Affairs and a spokesperson for Macron’s party, complained in the halls of the National Assembly. “He’s still terribly imprecise on the dates and the chronology of the events and on his interventions.”
Vannier is now calling for a parliamentary commission into how the state can prevent further violence and abuse in schools — a vote will be held on launching on who heads it this Wednesday. The first subject would be figuring out why Bétharram received so few inspections over the years, despite so many accusations.
Great Job Marlon Ettinger & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
