It is an archive that risks being heavy. Two days before the release of La Familia Grande, book to be published on January 7, 2021 in which Camille Kouchner, the daughter of the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, accuses Olivier Duhamel of having had incestuous sexual relations with one of his brothers, a new stone has been added to the edifice. Indeed, while Bernard Kouchner, who once tried to "fart the face" to the supposed executioner of his son, recently gave his daughter all his support, a petition defending pedophilia signed by himself resurfaced.
Indeed, on January 26, 1977, The world published a column signed by several intellectuals who try to defend the possibility of maintaining a romantic and sexual relationship with minors. This petition, written by Gabriel Matzneff in person, will indeed be approved by Bernard Kouchner … but not only. To his name are added those of Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes or Jack Lang. But how did such a forum appear?
"This is a huge mistake. There was a smell of pedophilia behind it."
This op-ed written by Gabriel Matzneff took place as the trial of three men tried for "indecent assault without violence on minors under the age of 15" opened in Versailles, before the Yvelines Assize Court. The suspects had photographed and filmed teenagers aged twelve and thirteen, brother and sister, during different sexual games, justifying these practices by a curiosity of "see the sexuality of children". The three people will be sentenced to five years in prison. For a part of the sixty-eight intellectual sphere, this sentence is a scandal: "We consider that there is a manifest disproportion, on the one hand, between the qualification of 'crime' which justifies such severity, and the nature of the charges. "
More than forty years after signing this petition "pro-pedophilia", Bernard Kouchner returned to its content in the columns of Point January 23, 2020. As reported then Release, the latter had expressed his regret. And for good reason, a few months earlier, its signatory, Gabriel Matzneff, was at the heart of the novel The consent, written by Vanessa Springora, in which she recounts the traumatic relationship she experienced with the writer when she was only fourteen and he was fifty.
According to Bernard Kouchner, signing this forum was indeed a "bullshit" : “That was 40 years ago. It’s a huge mistake. There was a smell of pedophilia behind it, that’s clear. It was absolute bullshit. More than bullshit, a sort of oppression pursuit ", he confided, before revealing that he had never actually read it. "Matzneff's petition, I haven't even read it! Daniel Cohn-Bendit and I signed it because Jack Lang asked us to ", he added. When Bernard Kouchner is asked how such a forum could have taken place, his answer is brief: "Another time, other manners. The period was stupidly lax, permissive."
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