The Economist February 6th 2021 67
Books & artsFrance’s shameOpen secrets
I
t was achildhood wrapped in comfort,
reverie and freedom. Long summers in
the south of France at the family home,
amid almond trees and lavender, literary
friends and cousins, former Maoists and
acolytes of Fidel Castro. Dinners late into
the night, when the familia grandewould
gather to put the world to rights. Guests
went barefoot in the dried grass, and naked
in the pool. The seasonal rituals reassured;
the political dreams inspired.
Until the day that Camille Kouchner’s
twin brother, whom she calls Victor, told
her that their stepfather had visited his
bedroom in the night. “He stroked me, and
you know...” They were, she writes, 14 years
old. Victor was sworn by their stepfather to
silence. “If you talk about it, I will die,” he
implored his sister. The night-time visits
continued for two or three years. It took
nearly three decades, and her mother’s
death, before Ms Kouchner heard a lawyer
name this crime for what it was: incest.
Now aged 45, and with Victor’s permis-
sion, Ms Kouchner has told her story in an
attempt “to poison the hydra” of paralysingguilt andshame. The account istightly
written, improbably controlled, and over-
whelming. At first, as a young teenager, she
had no real idea what was going on behind
that closed bedroom door, detecting only
“unknown smells” as her stepfather left.
Her adoration of him blinded her to any
wrong she might have sensed. Besides, was
this not the lifestyle that their extended
family embraced? In their Mediterranean
home an entire room was decorated with
posters celebrating May ’68. Her stepfather
flirted with his friends’ wives. The young
were “offered” to older women. “Fucking is
our liberty,” her mother once told her.
Ms Kouchner has lobbed a grenade into
the heart of the cosy Paris left-bank intel-
lectual elite. For the stepfather in question
is Olivier Duhamel, a political scientist, lit-erary editor and broadcaster. He married
Camille’s mother, Évelyne Pisier, a law pro-
fessor and one-time lover of Castro, after
she left Bernard Kouchner, the twins’ fa-
ther and a former foreign minister and co-
founder of Médecins Sans Frontières. (Mr
Kouchner has publicly praised his daugh-
ter for having the courage to speak out.)
While decrying what he calls “personal at-
tacks” against him, Mr Duhamel has re-
signed as head of the foundation that over-
sees Sciences Po, an elite Paris university,
and from other posts. That has prompted a
cascade of other resignations, including
that of Élisabeth Guigou, a friend and So-
cialist former justice minister, who presi-
ded over an official commission—on in-
cest. She has said that she knew nothing.
Reporting by Le Monde suggests that
many in Mr Duhamel’s circle did know, but
turned away. This is deeply disturbing. It is
not just the scale of the problem that un-
settles: a French poll found that one in ten
people has been the victim of some form of
incest. It is also the complicit silence, par-
ticularly among an older generation that
tends to dismiss the #MeToo movement as
a form of bourgeois Anglo-Saxon puritan-
ism that has no place in France. “There is a
tolerance both from society and the law,
with a very serious degree of impunity,”
said Muriel Salmona, a psychiatrist specia-
lising in sexual abuse. Under French law
incest (which covers relations with step-
parents) is not a separate crime, but an ag-
gravating circumstance in cases of rape orPARIS
The silence in France over the sexual abuse of minors is at last beginning to break→Alsointhissection
68 ChaosinKarachi
69 Climate-changefiction
69 Thedeathofage
70 Proust and the peopleLa familia grande. By Camille Kouchner.
Éditions du Seuil; 205 pages; €18
Consent: A Memoir.By Vanessa Springora.
Translated by Natasha Lehrer. HarperVia;
208 pages; $27.99 and £12.99