A judge, a gendarme, and now his own daughter. For nearly three months, France's prime minister François Bayrou has sworn he knew nothing of the physical violence and sexual abuse that took place at Notre-Dame de Bétharram private Catholic school in south-west France. He also denied ever having met Judge Mirande, the magistrate tasked with leading the 1998 probe into former headteacher Father Pierre Silviet-Carricart over allegations he raped a child. The priest was held in custody and then, quite unexpectedly, freed a few days later. Father Carricart was subsequently discreetly spirited away to the Vatican and took his own life two years later, just after a second rape complaint was filed.
Appearing on Mediapart's 'À l’air libre' broadcast on Thursday alongside Alain Esquerre, who spoke about his book on the scandal Le Silence de Bétharram, Bayrou's daughter Hélène Perlant - herself a former pupil at Bétharram and a victim of physical abuse during a scout camp – contradicted the prime minister’s denials. She said her father did indeed meet with Judge Mirande to talk about the ongoing case, which was subject to the rules of judicial confidentiality.
“He doesn’t remember it, I think, but I was there the night he came back from Judge Mirande’s. It was just the two of us, alone,” Hélène Perlant revealed. She said François Bayrou told her at the time: “Please don’t repeat this, I’ve sworn to keep judicial confidentiality. Do you think this [editor's note, the accusations concerning Father Carricart] could be true?”
She added: “And he told me, ‘He’s in prison - let him stay there!’”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
François Bayrou had initially denied meeting Judge Mirande and claimed he was unaware of the sexual abuse case. “Sexual violence? I was never informed of it,” swore the politician on February 15th. At the time of the Carricart case in 1998 Bayrou was president of the local Pyrénées-Atlantiques département - county - council.
Then, faced with witness accounts and written proof, the prime minister eventually conceded that he had indeed crossed paths with the judge, but claimed the encounter involved a brief, unrelated chat. “Judge Mirande is my neighbour, so we passed each other on the path,” he admitted. Then, three days later in the National Assembly, he sought to qualify his comments. “Did we perhaps speak about the matter? No doubt, yes. We may have spoken about the atmosphere, about the school, but never the case,” insisted Bayrou. “A magistrate is forbidden from sharing even the slightest detail of a case he's handling. That’s a central tenet of the Criminal Code. Christian Mirande is a judge of absolute integrity and he never divulged a single aspect of the case.”
His daughter now says otherwise. According to her account, François Bayrou did speak about the case at the time, and even “swore to Judge Mirande he would not breach the confidentiality of the investigation”. Her version fits with sworn testimony from the magistrate himself before the ongoing parliamentary inquiry into state oversight of schools, an inquiry prompted by the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school scandal.
“When he came to see me, it appeared to me he was trying to find out what was going on,” the judge told the inquiry. “He expressed deep concern, especially about his son, who was a pupil at Bétharram.” He added: “What struck me most was that he just couldn’t believe what had taken place. I remember very clearly that he kept repeating: ‘It’s unbelievable, it’s unbelievable.’”
Hélène Perlant, however, refuses to condemn her father. She speaks instead of a “collective denial” and insists François Bayrou “never wanted to cover anything up”. “I think his head had been filled with nonsense,” she said, referring to the famous names and former pupils of the private Catholic school who had defended Bétharram at the time, claiming the accusations were “utter rubbish”.
A change of tune
Asked by Mediapart about these latest comments, the prime minister’s office formally admitted for the first time that François Bayrou did speak to Judge Mirande about the case. “As both Judge Christian Mirande and François Bayrou have already said more than once, they did indeed meet at the time, as they are neighbours. The Mediapart interview offers a helpful detail on the timing [editor's note, of that meeting]: after Father Carricart’s time in custody and once the local press had begun to report on it. So it's only natural that they spoke about the case.”
His office added: “The words recalled by his daughter - ‘He’s in prison, let him stay there’ - show, for those who might have doubted it, that François Bayrou was in no way indulgent towards Father Carricart, as some would have people believe.”
In reality, François Bayrou had at first denied that any such meeting took place at all. “I didn’t know Father Carricart, save perhaps by sight. I had no knowledge of the affair at that time, I’d never heard of any rape claims,” he told Le Monde in March 2024. On February 15th in Pau, the prime minister's political fiefdom in south-west France, he finally admitted to a chance meeting with the magistrate and stressed, more than once, that Father Carricart had already been “freed” when he came across Judge Mirande, implying that the confidentiality of the case had never been breached.
In a bid to downplay Hélène Perlant’s account, the prime minister’s entourage argues that the “timing also shows there was no interference by François Bayrou, nor any breach of confidentiality, since the case was already public knowledge”.
In truth, others still say differently. Gendarme Alain Hontangs, who led the probe into Father Carricart, told TF1 television news, Mediapart and then the inquiry commission under oath that Judge Mirande had told him of an “intervention” by François Bayrou just after the suspect’s period in custody. This was on May 28th 1998 when the priest was in the process of appearing before the investigating judge, pending being placed under formal investigation over the allagations. His account was backed up by a fellow officer, who also spoke to Mediapart.
Though François Bayrou kept claiming he knew nothing of the abuse at Bétharram, he had nonetheless admitted that his daughter once told him of people being slapped at the school. “Only one of my daughters recalls a case of slaps handed out by a supervisor,” he told local newspaper La République des Pyrénées in March 2024. “One of my daughters spoke to me about slaps and things like that, yes, but sexual abuse, never,” he said again on February 15th in Pau. On Mediapart’s programme, Hélène Perlant rejected this declaration too. “That's a bit cheeky, because I never said a thing,” she said. “Absolutely not…”
He doesn't hide away from it, he’s a Catholic.
Did François Bayrou keep quiet about the abuse? “I don’t want to get into the psychology,” said Hélène Perlant. “He doesn't hide away from it, he’s a Catholic. In other words, when it comes to the church, he’s quite willing to admit that there have been rapes, no problem there. Just as there have been rapes by schoolteachers. But I think the step that I want to him to take now... Fourteen priests, fourteen rapists, we’ve got to reach a point where we can see collectively that saying there’s a problem in the church, one that’s bound up with the church itself, is not an attack on the church. And we can face it. Without speaking directly about him [editor's note, François Bayrou], I think the kind of man he represents was caught in the middle of all this and that, in the end, he may not have had that much information to go on.”
Another guest on the 'À l’air libre' broadcast was Paul Vannier, an MP from the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, who is co-rapporteur on the parliamentary inquiry, and who responded to the comments made by the prime minister’s daughter. “She tells us her father asked her to keep a kind of secret, clearly aware that he’d broken the rule of confidentiality surrounding an ongoing case by going to see this judge,” said the MP. “Also, François Bayrou always denied knowing anything about the physical or sexual abuse, and then recently on February 15th, in the town hall at Pau, he said his daughter may have informed him about slaps, and only about slaps. Yet Hélène Perlant has no memory of ever having said any such thing.”
Paul Vannier continued: “Once more, we see a contradiction between a victim’s words and those of François Bayrou, and that adds to the frequent contradictions in the declarations made on many occasions by François Bayrou. Today that raises a question that goes beyond the inquiry: what value can we place on the word of France's prime minister?”
“As an MP, I’m calling for the prime minister’s resignation, on the grounds that he has lied, on several occasions, to the National Assembly and then to the victims of Bétharram,” Vannier added on the social platform X on Friday. François Bayrou is due to appear before the parliamentary inquiry on May 14th.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter