As soon as Michel Barnier was named France's new prime minister, critics found a skeleton in his closet. Back in 1981, the 30-year-old lawmaker joined more than 150 conservatives in the National Assembly to vote against a law decriminalizing young homosexuals, reports FRANCE 24.
That history loomed in the background as President Emmanuel Macron appointed the 73-year-old Barnier on Thursday to take over from Gabriel Attal, France's first openly gay prime minister.
At age 35, Attal had also been the youngest of 26 prime ministers who have served modern France's Fifth Republic. Barnier is the oldest.
Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was among the first to point out the new prime minister's past stance on gay rights. "What is the meaning of such a message?" he asked.
Although French Revolutionaries of 1789 abolished the crime of sodomy, French judges subsequently used public indecency laws to broadly punish tens of thousands of people for homosexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers say.
After France's 1940 defeat by Germany in World War II, the Vichy government that collaborated with the country's Nazi occupiers also introduced a law that specifically targeted homosexuality. With some adjustments, that law stayed on the books long after France's liberation in 1944, all the way until 1982.
Over four decades, it was used to convict around 10,000 people, says Régis Schlagdenhauffen, a researcher at Paris's School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences.
The Vichy law punished homosexuality by making it illegal if it involved minors younger than 21, though the age of consent for heterosexual sex was 13, researchers say.
“So a heterosexual relationship, say, between people aged 18 and 22 wasn't a problem," says Antoine Idier, a researcher of LGBTQ+ history at the Sciences-Po school of political science in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a Paris suburb.
“But the same homosexual relationship ... was considered a crime,” Idier added.
In 1945, the age of consent for heterosexual sex was raised to 15 but remained at 21 for homosexual relations until 1974, when it was lowered to 18 — still three years more than for heterosexuals.