Politicians, intellectuals and celebrities: #MeToo is gaining momentum in France

PARIS.- When Sandra muller launched the campaign on social media #MeToo in France In 2017, tens of thousands of women responded to her call to “expose your pig” or “#balancetonporc”.

But the backlash was overwhelming. Some of the country’s most prominent women, led by Catherine Deneuve, denounced the movement in a letter that came to define France’s initial response to #MeToo. In 2019, Muller lost a libel case against a former TV executive he unmasked on Twitter, making France appear safe from global forces that challenge male domination.

Last week, Muller won his appeal. Although he did not present any new facts, the The damning appeal court ruling revealed how things have changed over the past two years.

“Before the sentence, I thought there was something moving”Muller said in a phone interview from New York, where he now lives. “Now I feel like there has been a leap forward.”

Since the beginning of the year, A number of powerful men from some of France’s most important fields – politics, sports, media, academia and the arts – have faced direct and public accusations of sexual abuse. It is a change of course compared to a few years of silence above all. At the same time, in the face of these high profile cases and a change in public opinion, French lawmakers rush to set 15 as the age of sexual consent, barely three years after rejecting this law.

The recent accusations have not only led to official inquiries, job losses for some powerful men and total ban from public life for others. They also resulted in rethinking French masculinity and the archetype of the French as irresistible seducers, as part of a broader questioning of many aspects of French society and in the midst of a conservative backlash against ideas of gender, race and postcolonialism supposedly imported from American universities.

“Things go so fast that sometimes my head turns,” said Caroline De Haas, a feminist activist who founded #WeAllAll, an anti-sexual violence group in 2018. She described herself as “super optimistic”.

Haas said France was going through a late reaction to #MeToo after a period of “maturation” in which many French people have begun to understand the social dimensions of sexual violence and the concept of consent.

This was especially the case, Haas said, after last year’s testimony from Adèle Haenel, the first high-profile actress to speak out against the abuse, and Vanessa Springora, whose memoir, The Consent, documented the abuse of the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff. .

“The start of 2021 has been like an earthquake aftershock,” Haas said. “What is very clear is that in France today, we do not have at all the same reaction as four or five years ago to testimonies of sexual violence against people we know”.

Last month, Pierre Ménès, one of the best-known sports journalists on French television, was suspended indefinitely by his employer after the publication of “I am not a whore, I am a journalist”, a documentary denouncing sexism in sports journalism.

Just a few years ago, few people criticized him for behaviors they no longer dare to defend in public, such as forcibly kissing women on the mouth on television and lifting the skirt of journalist Marie Portolano, producer. of the documentary, in front of him. a study in 2016.

“The world has changed, it’s #MeToo, nothing can be done, nothing can be said,” Menès said in a television interview after the documentary premiered. He said he didn’t remember the incident with the skirt, adding that he hadn’t felt like him at the time due to a physical illness.

The list of other powerful men is long and growing. There is Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, France’s most famous news anchor, investigated for the rape of a young woman and who defended himself on television by saying that he belonged to a generation for whom “the seduction was important ”and included “kiss on the neck”. He denied the rape allegations.

There is Georges Tron, a former minister, acquitted in 2018 of a charge of raping an employee, but who was sentenced in February to five years in prison by a decision of the court of appeal which, according to The world, reflected that society “has unquestionably changed its conception of consent”.

This Gérard Depardieu, France’s biggest movie star, and Gerald Darmanin, the powerful interior minister, also investigated rape cases that were reopened last year. Both said they were innocent.

Olivier Duhamel, a leading intellectual, and Richard Berry, a famous actor, were recently investigated after being accused of incest by members of their family. Berry has denied the allegations; Duhamel has not commented on the allegations made against him.

Claude Lévêque, an internationally renowned artist, is the subject of an investigation for rape of minors and was publicly accused for the first time in January by a former victim. He denied the allegations.

Dominique Boutonnat, film producer whose president Emmanuel Macron appointed president of the National Film Center last year, was investigated in February for attempted rape and sexual assault on his godson and said he was innocent.

“This recent wave in France is a delayed reaction to the Matzneff case,” said Francis Szpiner, the lawyer representing Muller, adding that the fall of the pedophile writer and Duhamel has made it clear that powerful men in France do not were not “untouchable”.

In 2017, immediately after the #MeToo revelations involving Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, journalist Muller launched #balancetonporc in France. In a Twitter post, he recounted how, at a Cannes TV festival, an executive told him: “You have big breasts. You’re my kind of woman. I will make you cum all night long. “

Executive Eric Brion did not deny making the comments. But since the two didn’t work together, Brion argued that the comments did not constitute sexual harassment and he sued Muller for libel. A 2019 judgment ordering Muller to pay 15,000 euros in damages, or roughly $ 17,650, was overturned last week.

In 2019, the court said Muller had “overstepped the acceptable limits of free speech as his comments were demoted to a personal attack.” This time, the judges considered that Muller had acted in good faith, adding that “the movements #balancetonporc and #MeToo had attracted a lot of attention, had been acclaimed by various officials and personalities and had contributed positively to women talking freely”.

Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, a prominent feminist philosopher, said it was significant that the men currently studied were leaders in various fields. The revelations surrounding them have undermined the myths of the French as great seducers and a refined romantic culture in which “we, the French, in our game of seduction, know how to interpret non-verbal signs and we have this art of seduction, a harmonious trade between the sexes”, he says.

“These are men who sort of embody the old patriarchal order of things, men with power and men who have used and abused their power to sexually exploit the bodies of others, be they young people. women or men, “said Froidevaux-Metterie, adding:” We are perhaps experiencing the first real upheaval of this system.

Some conservative intellectuals consider that the growing list of leading men accused is proof of the contamination of French society by American ideas about gender, race, religion and postcolonialism.

Pierre-André Taguieff, historian and one of the main critics of American influence, said in an email that “neo-feminist and neo-anti-racist ideologues denounce universalism, in particular French republican universalism, as a fraud, a deceptive mask of imperialism, sexism and racism ”.

Although Taguieff has not commented on details of recent cases, he said this new wave of #MeToo represents “misandrist and androphobic sexism that encourages a witch hunt of white men selected on the basis of their fame or their fame, in order to feed social envy and resentment towards white / male elites ”. Taguieff recently helped found the Observatory of Decolonialism, a group leading the charge against what he describes as America’s intellectual threat.

France’s initial reaction to #MeToo was to dismiss it as an American distortion of feminism.Just as French conservatives are now trying to dismiss ideas about race and racism as irrelevant American concepts, said Raphaël Liogier, a French sociologist who teaches at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence and was recently a visiting professor at Columbia.

When Deneuve and other women denounced #MeToo in 2017 as a product of “puritanism” and a threat to “sexual freedom,” conservatives retaliated by claiming that American women were sexually repressed and were in fact less free than men. French, she said. Liogier.

“So in fact in France our line of defense was to say, ‘It’s not us, it’s the Americans,'” he said, adding: “Today this line of defense is ‘collapsed “.

The New York Times

The New York Times

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