A Pedophile Writer Is on Trial. So Are the French Elites.
For decades, Gabriel Matzneff wrote openly of his pedophilia, protected by powerful people in publishing, journalism, politics and business. Now cast out, he attacks their “cowardice” in a rare interview.
By Norimitsu Onishi Feb. 11, 2020
PARIS —
Gabriel Matzneff, the French writer under investigation for his promotion of pedophilia, was holed up this month inside a luxury hotel room on the Italian Riviera, unable to relax, unable to sleep, unable to write.
He was alone and in hiding, abandoned by the same powerful people in publishing, journalism, politics and business who had protected him weeks earlier. He went outside only for solitary walks behind dark sunglasses, and was startled when I tracked him down in a cafe mentioned in his books.
“I feel like the living dead, a dead man walking, walking on the lungomare,” he said, referring in Italian to the seafront promenade, in a long conversation, after some persuading.
Hiding is new for Mr. Matzneff. For decades, he was celebrated for writing and talking openly about stalking teenage girls outside schools in Paris and having sexual contact with 8-year-old boys in the Philippines.
He was invited to the Élysée Palace by President François Mitterrand and socialized with the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. He benefited from the largess of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, the business tycoon ************ Bergé.
But Mr. Matzneff has been summoned to appear in a Paris court on Wednesday, accused of actively promoting pedophilia through his books. Mr. Matzneff could face up to five years in prison, yet the case is also an implicit indictment of an elite that furthered his career and swatted away isolated voices calling for his arrest.
In a widening investigation, prosecutors announced Tuesday morning that the police would start seeking witnesses to find other possible victims of Mr. Matzneff.
The support of Mr. Matzneff reflected an enduring French contradiction: a nation that is deeply egalitarian yet with an elite that often distinguishes itself from ordinary people through a different code of morality, a different set of rules, or at least believing it necessary to defend those who did.
A decade ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was forced out as the leader of the International Monetary Fund after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper. A supporter dismissed it as “trussing a domestic,” a comment that recalled France’s feudal past.
“We’re in a very egalitarian society where there is a pocket of resistance that actually behaves like an aristocracy,” said ************ Verdrager, a sociologist who has studied pedophilia.
Mr. Matzneff appealed to the elite’s traditional appreciation of the transgressive figure. Graying leftist intellectuals saw in his books the enduring free spirit of the May ’68 countercultural revolution. A new generation of right-leaning literary figures came to regard him as a symbol of anti-political correctness.
But now Mr. Matzneff and his backers are being held to account by a new movement: the freeing of female voices long suppressed by powerful men.
The reckoning came last month with the publication of “Le Consentement” (“Consent”) by Vanessa Springora, the first testimony by one of the writer’s underage victims.
Vanessa Springora has published an account of being seduced by Mr. Matzneff when she was 14. “My goal actually was to lock him up in a book, to catch him in his own trap,” she said.Olivier Dion
Though the book held no new revelations about Mr. Matzneff’s sexual history, it triggered an abrupt cultural shift in France.
“This is the #MeToo of the French publishing world,” said François Busnel, the host of “La Grande Librairie,” France’s most important television literary program. “A voice has been set free in an environment, the French literary environment, which is male chauvinist, quite misogynistic, and which stays silent — omertà.”
Mr. Matzneff’s fall, if late in coming, was swift. His three publishers dropped him. The head of the National Book Center said that Mr. Matzneff would lose a prestigious, seldom-awarded lifetime stipend. The Culture Ministry is re-examining two state honors conferred on him in the mid-1990s. He lost his column in the magazine Le Point. Prosecutors opened an investigation.
The statute of limitations is believed to have expired in the case involving Ms. Springora. But, in addition to the charge of promoting pedophilia, Mr. Matzneff could face criminal charges for more recent sex acts with minors in France or abroad.
From his hiding place on the Italian Riviera, Mr. Matzneff rejected the accusations of wrongdoing.
“Who are they to judge?” he said. “These associations of the virtuous, how do they sleep, what do they do in bed and who do they sleep with, and their secret, repressed desires?”
The Writer as Icon
Mr. Matzneff’s story is one, many have said, that could happen “only in France.”
From Voltaire to Hugo to Zola to Sartre, the writer has been regarded as sacred in France. In Paris, countless streets named for writers serve as a physical reminder of their outsize influence. Every Wednesday, a major network devotes 90 live minutes of prime time to discussing books on “La Grande Librairie.”
Although not one of France’s greatest writers, Mr. Matzneff still benefited fully from this tradition. He wrote nearly 50 novels, essay collections and diaries that never would have made it to bookstores in an industry more concerned with the bottom line.
French publishers dutifully accepted even diaries that sometimes overlapped and amounted to little beyond bookkeeping. But those works also hold meticulous details about the individuals who helped him and the teenage girls he seduced, including Ms. Springora.
Last month, suddenly emboldened, prosecutors raided the headquarters of Gallimard, a prestigious publishing house, to seize copies of the books. In the case scheduled to start on Wednesday, Mr. Matzneff’s publishers and promoters could also be held to account — with the books as evidence.
“We know of emotionally troubled men who justified pedophilia after reading Matzneff’s books,” said Méhana Mouhou, a lawyer for l’Ange Bleu, the anti-pedophilia organization that has brought the case.
Mr. Matzneff disappeared in late December, just before the publication of Ms. Springora’s memoir. As the scandal exploded in Paris, I pored through his diaries and books. When a brief interview he gave to a French television network hinted at his whereabouts, I went to the Italian Riviera and found Mr. Matzneff — a creature of habit, his diaries made clear — in his favorite cafe.
Initially startled, defensive and angry, the writer admitted that he was “very, very lonely” and began to open up.
Asking that his exact location not be revealed, Mr. Matzneff spoke for three and a half hours.
He expressed bewilderment at the sudden cultural shift in France and his precipitous downfall. He showed no remorse for his past actions and did not renounce any of his writings.
He also confirmed the passages in his books that describe the support he received from powerful individuals, and provided fresh details. He was bitter and angry that former supporters have remained silent, distanced themselves or turned against him.
“They’re showing their cowardice,” he said. “We can say caution, but it’s more than caution from people I considered friends.”
A Powerful Network
Mr. Matzneff’s friends did more than celebrate his work. They also, unwittingly and otherwise, helped shield him from the authorities.
In 1986, Parisian police officers summoned Mr. Matzneff, who was 50 at the time, for questioning after receiving anonymous letters stating that he was staying in his apartment with Ms. Springora, then 14.
But when he went to the station, Mr. Matzneff had a talisman in his pocket: an article praising him by President François Mitterrand.
Mr. Matzneff had drawn Mr. Mitterrand’s attention two decades earlier after the publication of his first book, an essay collection titled “Le Défi,” (“The Challenge”).
“He liked it so much that he gave it to his sons who were 15, 16,” Mr. Matzneff recalled, “and he invited me over for lunch.”
Mr. Mitterrand socialized with the up-and-coming author and remained an admirer, even after Mr. Matzneff published a full-throated defense of pedophilia in 1974 titled “Les Moins de Seize Ans” (“Under 16 Years Old”).
After he became president in 1981, Mr. Mitterrand invited Mr. Matzneff for lunch at the presidential palace at least once, in 1984, according to the François Mitterrand Institute.
The president also wrote a laudatory article for a small literary magazine, Matulu, that devoted a special issue in July 1986 to Mr. Matzneff. Describing Mr. Matzneff as an “impenitent seducer,” Mr. Mitterrand wrote that the author “has always amazed me with his extreme taste for rigor and with the depth of his thinking.”
Mr. Mitterrand wrote an article praising Mr. Matzneff that was published in the magazine Matulu in July 1986.
The article was published only a few weeks before the Paris police began investigating the tips against Mr. Matzneff.
“Probably, I’d perhaps cut out the article into my wallet,” Mr. Matzneff said.
Ms. Springora recalls in her book: “In case of arrest, he thinks it has the power to save him.”
In fact, it did, Mr. Matzneff recalled. When detectives saw it, he said, they dismissed the anonymous tips they had received as the work of a literary rival.
“One of the detectives had told me, ‘They’re forms of envy, these anonymous letters, it’s no doubt envy,’” he said.
Beyond the article by Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Matzneff had more direct help.
First, the prizewinning writer, and a friend, Christian Giudicelli, agreed to hide incriminating letters and photographs of Ms. Springora, Mr. Matzneff wrote.
Then, when they needed a safer place to stay, Mr. Matzneff and the teenager moved to a hotel. The bills were paid by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, and arranged by his close aide, Christophe Girard, according to Mr. Matzneff.
The new living arrangement allowed the writer to convalesce from an eye surgery, but also to “evade the visits of the juvenile squad, which he calls ‘persecutions,’” Ms. Springora wrote.
Mr. Matzneff recalled Mr. Girard telling him that “‘we’ll take care of everything, meals, everything.’”
He added: “And that lasted, I think, about two years.”
“‘For us, it’s a drop in the ocean, it’s nothing, and we love you,’” Mr. Girard said, according to Mr. Matzneff.
Mr. Girard declined interview requests.
