Arriving at the National Assembly, the French lower house, for questioning by the parliamentary commission investigating the problems of violence within French schools, François Bayrou placed a book, clearly visible, on the desk allocated to him. Entitled La Meute (meaning “the pack”, as in a pack of wolves) and published last week, it is a revealing and unflattering investigation, into the workings of the radical-left party, La France Insoumise, to which Member of Parliament (MP) Paul Vannier, co-rapporteur of the commission, belongs.
Bayrou was setting the tone before the questioning had even begun, presenting himself as the victim of a hunting “pack”, consisting of the LFI, the commission of inquiry and the media. “It was about catching me out to force me to resign,” he said of the scandal which has snowballed since Mediapart began in February publishing its investigations into the repeated sexual assaults – including rape – and physical cruelty perpetrated against pupils at the Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram Catholic school in his political fiefdom in south-west France.
More than 200 victims have come forward, some involving events dating from the 1960s.
The future of the French prime minister, the centre-right leader of a fragile, minority government which is under constant threat of a politically fatal no confidence vote in parliament, is compromised by both the still-emerging details of the scandal and his changing versions of events, which he added to on Wednesday while attempting to extract himself from the crisis.
Bayrou has repeatedly denied knowing of the decades-long abuse by staff at the school, but is suspected of protecting the reputation of the establishment, once attended by his children and where his wife worked as a part-time catechism teacher, instead of intervening to put an end to the recurrent violence when he was a local Member of Parliament (MP) and minister of education.
Bayrou, 73, is mayor of the town of Pau, near to which the Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram school is located. A local MP from 1986 to 2012, he served as education minister from 1993 to 1997, and sat for 26 years on the council of the local Pyrénées-Atlantiques département (county), nine of them as its chairman.
For more than five hours on Wednesday, the French prime minister gave a performance that was in parts muddled, in others misleading, and aggressive overall, while sticking to his objective, namely to dismiss the suggestion that he was indeed aware and informed of the violence perpetrated within the Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram boarding school, and notably between 1996 and 1998.
Bayrou’s notably targeted Paul Vannier, who he described as “a cruel militant” whose “methods” he attacked with almost every answer he gave, while not recognising that the cross-party composition of the commission was voted in place with the unanimous approval of parliament. While obviously aware that he was summoned before the commission in order to establish whether he acted appropriately regarding the violence at the Bétharram school, he repeated a claim over and again that the hearing yesterday was the result of accusations that he “protected paedo-criminals”.
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He who for years had not a word to say for the victims of the violence at the school, declared yesterday that “If my presence as a political target allowed for these events to be made apparent, this “#MeToo” of childhood, then it will have served a purpose”. He then launched into attacks against the commission, which he described as “not objective”, against its other co-rapporteur, the MP Violette Spillebout (who is from his own centre-right camp), and against the media in general and Mediapart in particular.
Bayrou said he does not read Mediapart for reasons of “mental hygiene”, and wrongly claimed that Mediapart had reported that he gave “one million euros to Bétharram”, for which he had considered filing a suit for defamation but ultimately changed his mind. In fact, Mediapart reported that, as head of the local Pyrénées-Atlantiques département (county) council, he oversaw, between 1995 and 1999, its funding of a total of 1 million francs (equivalent today to 230,000 euros) to the Bétharram school, even though he was informed of the problems at the school. But Bayrou told the commission that his decision not to go ahead with the complaint of defamation was “in order not to serve those who are trying to drive the scandal”.
Furthermore, the article he appeared to be referring to was published by Mediapart one month after his initial announcement that he was taking legal action.
The commission questioned him about his statement in parliament on February 11th, when he told the Assembly: “I maintain that I was never informed about anything to do with violence [at the school], or a fortiori sexual violence, never.” Co-rapporteur Paul Vannier asked him: “Do you, under oath today, maintain that declaration before the commission?”
Numerous documents, individual accounts and also archives demonstrate that Bayrou, the most powerful politician in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département, could not have been unaware of problems at the Bétharram school. “I maintain the assertion that is mine,” he replied. “I had no other information as minister of education than [what was in] the press.”
But that was not what he had said in parliament. His recognition now of having been aware of the physical and sexual violence at the school from the articles published on the subject at the time, is new – he has previously maintained he was “never informed”. He did so in an article published by weekly news magazine Le Point on February 13th, again on March 12th 2024 in the daily Le Monde, and on March 29th 2024 in the daily Le Parisien. Above all, it was also what he told parliament on February 11th this year, and when he insisted before the Assembly the following day that he had “never” been “made aware of anything whatsoever”. When, on February 15th, he met with an association of past victims of abuse at the school in an attempt to defuse the fast-growing scandal, he told them firmly that his account was “the strict truth”. But he made a clear U-turn by not following that line on Wednesday before the commission.
While Bayrou previously denied having been informed of physical violence at the school, on Wednesday said that he had ordered a report in 1996 into an incident when a pupil at the school was slapped so hard by a member of staff he suffered a split eardrum. He denied knowing the school’s mathematics teacher Françoise Gullung, who has stated that she alerted him to the problems at the school, but he this week admitted that he might have met her. He now says he knew of the problems of sexual violence at the school from press reports, but previously said he was unaware of them. While he denied ever discussing the subject of the rape of a ten-year-old boy perpetrated by the school’s director, Father Pierre Silviet-Carricart, with the magistrate in charge of the case, he finally admitted doing so.
“I never benefitted from any privileged information,” said Bayrou, who firmly denied the suggestion that he obtained officially confidential information from the magistrate during their meeting at the latter's home in 1998, or that he intervened in the case in Silviet-Carricart’s favour. The priest, who was placed under investigation over the rape and imprisoned, was soon released from detention on the order of a public prosecutor and, astonishingly for someone placed under investigation, allowed to leave France and take up quarters at the Vatican. Testifying before the commission, Bayrou explained that, after some 30 years since those events, he had “no recollection from the time”, and “no document” either.
Bayrou denigrates whistleblowing teacher
While Bayrou suggested that the memory of those several witnesses who challenged his own version of events (his contradictors include a magistrate, gendarmerie officers and a teacher) must be defective, his own recollections – which he often claimed were fuzzy – became clear when employed to discredit them.
“What did you do to follow up the two alerts [you received] from Ms Gullung?” asked co-rapporteur Paul Vannier. In what was an astonishing response, the prime minister turned on Françoise Gullung, a former mathematics teacher at Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram between 1994 and 1996, who he said was a story-teller, questioning her mental health while mispronouncing her name on several occasions, and who he accused of lying on two occasions in her testimony before the parliamentary commission. He said she lied when she said that she knew Father Silviet-Carricart, which other witnesses have confirmed and which would not be unusual given he was director of the school. The other lie, according to Bayrou, was when she said she had warned him of the violence perpetrated at the school.
In 1995, Marc Lacoste, a pupil at Bétharram, was slapped by a school class monitor so hard that his eardrum was perforated (he later lost his hearing as a result). Gullung said she sent a letter to Bayrou, then education minister, detailing the violence, and subsequently spoke to him in person during an awards ceremony on March 17th 1995. “He minimised [the matter], saying that I was no doubt exaggerating a little,” she said in an interview published in July 2024 by weekly news magazine Le Point.
Bayrou told the commission: “Under oath, I am saying that she informed me of nothing, and I will present the proof.” For the first time, the prime minister recognised that he could have met her, have said “Bonjour” to her, but he told the commission that she could not have alerted his attention to a complaint by the father of the pupil because it was filed nine months after the date Gullung said she spoke to him.
However, Gullung never claimed to have spoken to Bayrou about the filing of a complaint. Speaking under oath to the commission, and when interviewed by Mediapart, the teacher said she spoke to Bayrou about physical violence at the school, not about a complaint. In the Commission’s minutes of her testimony, she said she told him: “Mr Bayrou, the situation at Bétharram is really serious. Action must be taken,” and that “He simply replied to me ‘It’s exaggerated’”. Former pupils have confirmed her version of the exchange, and the spokesman for the association of victims of abuse at the school, Alain Esquerre, has cited her account in his book about the scandal (and which Bayrou had also placed on his table at Wednesday’s hearing).
Following the assault on pupil Marc Lacoste, an inspection of the school was ordered by the education administration, and the inspector who wrote up the report has admitted that it was botched. Delivered to Bayrou, then education minister, in April 1996, it minimised the violence practised at the school, but it nevertheless did mention serious acts of physical abuse. “Did I read it attentively? Certainly not,” Bayrou told the commission, adding that he must have only read the conclusions, despite it being just three pages-long and about the school where he would send his children.
For François Bayrou, everyone is mistaken
Bayrou was next questioned about the sexual abuse he has claimed he was not aware of. In 1998, the school’s director, Father Pierre Silviet-Carricart, was placed under investigation and imprisoned by judge Christian Mirande for the rape of a ten-year-old boarding pupil at Bétharram. The child had just been given the news that his father had died.
Silviet-Carricart committed suicide in early 2000 shortly before he was due for further questioning by Judge Mirande after the opening of a second investigation into his alleged rape of another young boy. The priest died from drowning in the river Tiber, and his body was buried close to Pau. Bayrou’s wife Élisabeth attended the funeral.
Bayrou has previously denied meeting Mirande to talk about the first case in 1998, before he then said he bumped into the magistrate in the street – the two men live in the same village – after which he finally admitted that they agreed to a meeting.
Bayrou was asked why he had claimed they simply bumped into each other. “Because when I usually meet Judge Mirande, it’s on a path. Is that important?” replied Bayrou, while insisting that the official obligatory confidentiality of the case file was not breached, while his daughter, speaking in a recent edition of Mediapart’s regular studio discussion programme, “A l’air libre”, said it had been. “I think that she lost herself a little in the vocabulary,” commented Bayrou.
During the more than five hours of the hearing on Wednesday, the prime minister appeared to suggest everyone, except himself, was wrong about events. The gendarmerie officer who, under oath, said Bayrou intervened in the rape case in favour of Silviet-Carricart, must be lying, the teacher who said she had warned him of the violence at the school was telling fibs, while the judge who said his meeting at his home with Bayrou to discuss “patent and established facts” lasted around two hours was mistaken.
“Mr Prime minister, since 5pm [editor’s note, when the hearing began] you have brought serious accusations against the commission, and against one of the rapporteurs,” said commission member Colette Capdevielle, a socialist MP for a constituency in the south-west Basque country. “You place yourself as a victim, you accuse Ms Gullung of being mad, you accuse senior gendarmerie officers of lying. You try to turn the situation around, you criticise, you threaten, you give orders with a lot of arrogance.”
Minimising the violence
With every reply, Bayrou took his time, let the clock turn and clouded the issues put to him. After having repeated on several occasions his concern for the victims of the abuse at Bétharram, he had little to put forward in terms of dealing with violence in educational establishments, other than describing the response to the problem in Germany as a model, and that “a high commissioner, or I don’t know what” should be put in place, along with “two working groups”, “one made up of scientists and the other of victims” in order to advise “an independent authority that would be invented for all that”.
Above all, he minimised the physical violence perpetrated at Bétharram, underlining it happened in the context of the 1990s. “Did there exist, 30 years ago, and singularly in these establishments, methods that were a bit harsh? Assuredly yes,” he said. “Would they be accepted today ? Assuredly not.” At the time, it was known that slaps on pupils by staff were so violent that they could perforate an eardrum; in 1996, the press reported four such cases.
During the hearing, Bayrou was questioned about the slap he himself was filmed giving a child who was rifling through his pockets during a presidential election campaign walkabout in 2002. “Not a slap, a tap, that of a father,” he said, adding that TV channels exaggerated the importance of the event. “For me, that is not violence. It’s an educational gesture,” he said of the incident.
At the end of the hearing, he accused the MPs present of targeting not the political figure that he is, but instead the parent of a pupil of the school that he was. Bayrou never once referred to the fact that he was the best-informed person in his region, he who served as chairman of the council of the département and in charge of overseeing the services for the protection of children, a local MP, and education minister from 1993 to 1997.
MP Alexis Corbière, who sits on the commission, once a member of the LFI party, now aligned to the Greens, asked the prime minister: “And yet, when an article in 1996 mentions very serious events in an establishment where you school your own children, you say ‘saw nothing, read nothing, did not intervene’? Listening to you, you’re responsible for nothing. How do you explain your failings in your responsibilities? Because they were yours, to protect children.” During his more than five hours before the commission, the French prime minister offered no explanation to the question.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse