Macron’s defence of Depardieu: conspiracy theories and masculinism

SpeakingSpeaking on December 20th on public TV channel France 5, in the round-table discussion programme “C à vous”, French President Emmanuel Macron jumped to the defence of Gérard Depardieu over a string of rape and sexual violence allegations made against the actor, whose lewd behaviour towards women, and obscene comments about a young girl, were exposed in a recent documentary.

The documentary, “Gérard Depardieu: la chute de l’ogre” (the fall of the ogre), made by the France 2 public TV channel’s current affairs programme Complément d’enquête and first broadcast on December 7th, included interviews with two women who allege Depardieu sexually assaulted them, and video of Depardieu making sexist and sexual remarks to women during a 2018 trip to North Korea. The video footage came from the rushes of a film about the actor’s visit to North Korea, and which was finally never broadcast. In one scene, Depardieu appears to make lewd remarks about a young girl riding a pony at an equestrian centre.    

Macron’s defence of the actor on C à vous on December 20th came just 24 hours after his government’s highly controversial new hardline legislation on immigration, which enshrines the practice of “national preference” was approved in Parliament, thanks to support from conservative and far-right members of the chamber. The transformation of what had been initially rejected draft legislation into a law that reflected the programme of the far-right split Macron’s ruling Renaissance party and led to the resignation of the health minister.

Far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen hailed the new legislation on immigration as an “ideological victory” for her Rassemblement National party (the former Front National), while 32 leftwing local authorities announced they would boycott the new law.

It was principally to talk about the controversial adoption and content of the legislation that the French president had been headlined to appear on C à vous, but his vigorous defence of Depardieu was sufficiently shocking that it would partially eclipse the controversy of the day before – just as the Depardieu “affair” has continued to do so since. During the programme on January 20th, the French president described criticism of the actor as representing a “public court”, “hearsay”, “manhunt” and “disrespect for the presumption of innocence”, while insisting that he himself was irreproachable “in the struggle against violence towards women”. The dismissive semantics he employed have been a recurrent feature in his comments since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, including disapproval of a “denunciatory society” (2017), a “Republic of suspicion” (2018), and a “society of inquisition” (2021).

“I am a great admirer of Gérard Depardieu,” Macron told his interviewers on C à vous. “He’s a genius of his art”, he said, adding: “And I say it as president of the [French] republic but also as a citizen, he makes France proud.” That appeared as a rebuke to his culture minister Rima Abdul-Malak who had earlier said that Depardieu’s comments in the documentary “shamed France”. For Macron, Abdul-Malak had “advanced a little too much” with her announcement of the launching of a disciplinary procedure to decide whether the actor’s Légion d’honneur – France’s highest civil honour for merit – awarded in 1996, should be suspended or withdrawn. Meanwhile, speaking the next day on public radio station France Inter, Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, shot back at him: “No, we are not proud of Gérard Depardieu.”

Conspiracy theory and attacks upon the media

In a disturbing move, Emmanuel Macron relayed the idea, already put about by Depardieu’s family and the rightwing Bolloré media group (notably CNews, the Journal du dimanche, and the “Touche pas à mon poste” TV chatshow), that the France 2 documentary had doctored the 2018 recording of the actor’s comments made during his visit to North Korea. On four occasions, Macron referred to “controversies” and created doubt as to whether the documentary footage had been manipulated by journalists in order to deliberately deceive viewers. “I am wary about the context, I’ve understood that there have been controversies about reports […], about words that were out of sync with the images,” said Macron, adding that “people will have to debate this”.

While there is indeed a dispute between Yann Moix, the maker of the original 2018 film of Depardieu’s visit to North Korea, and the film’s producer who gave the rushes to Complément d’enquête, nothing has so far emerged to support the allegation that the footage was doctored. On December 22nd, the committee representing journalists from France Télévisions, the public broadcasting umbrella group that includes France 2, issued a statement expressing its “indignation” at Macron’s words. “By relaying the hypothesis of a ‘discrepancy between the words and images’ in a part of the report, Emmanuel Macron shares ‘fake news’ and legitimises the attempts to destabilise the programme,” the statement read.  “He also discredits the work of journalists by placing their professionalism in doubt.”

Meanwhile, France Télévisions announced that it had appointed a huissier de justice (a bailiff with legal power to serve as witness) to watch the rushes in question. In his report, the huissier attests to the fact that the images showing a girl aged about ten riding a pony and the lewd comments made by Depardieu are part of the exact same sequence, thus invalidating both the accusation by Depardieu’s family that it was the result of “fraudulent editing” and the doubts cast over the sequence by the French president.

Macron’s comments in defence of Depardieu resembled the tactics employed by the far-right when faced with media revelations, namely to question the work of journalists and their legitimacy to investigate issues of public interest, to the point of deploying fake theories. He also claimed that Depardieu did not have “the possibility of defending himself” against accusations in the media, and was not invited to do so – a claim that is plainly not true given that the actor has from the beginning chosen not to reply to requests for comment by journalists investigating the claims levelled against him (including journalists from Mediapart and Complément d’enquête).  

It is not the first time that the French president has targeted journalists, and is in fact the latest in a long list of attacks since he first came to office in 2017. But this latest example is situated within the context of a rapprochement between Macron and French media and publishing tycoon Vincent Bolloré. The two men have put aside their previously frosty relationship and in September held a secret meeting at the Elysée Palace, according to French daily Le Monde, which suggested that Bolloré sought Macron’s help over a European Commission probe into one of his recent acquisitions. On his side, Macron is all too aware of the influence on public debate wielded by Bolloré’s media empire, which is spread over television channels, radio stations and publishing houses.

The culture of rape

The terms used by Macron over the Depardieu affair also have masculinist overtones of a nature that would not displease the far-right. They evoke the imagery of the strong and brilliant white man who is impeded by so-called ‘wokeism’ and feminists obsessed with ‘cancelling’ out celebrities. That is a notion put about in France by far-right figures, and notably Éric Zemmour, the polemicist and Le Pen rival, but also by pundits on the Bolloré-owned CNews channel, and is the same which is voiced in the US by supporters of Donald Trump.  

Such reasoning contributes on a daily basis to what a number of researchers and essayists call a “culture of rape”. One of them is the militant feminist, essayist and blogger Valérie Rey-Robert, author of Une culture du viol à la française (A French culture of rape), published by Libertalia. “Men learn it on becoming men, by learning virile values,” she said in an interview with Mediapart in 2020. “They learn that violence – managed, measured, white, heterosexual – is a positive value and that it’s through this that one is a man. It is a part of the masculine construction.”

Separating ‘transgression’ and sexual assault

By stepping onto the moral ground, Macron – who said the Légion d’honneur “is not a moral order”, and that “there can continue to be transgressive people in it” – contributed to making the behaviour of Depardieu supposedly ordinary. This excuse of “schoolboy humour” and comments like “Oh it’s OK, it’s Gérard”, which Mediapart heard so often during its investigation into the accusations against Depardieu by 13 women who accuse him of sexual violence, is today adopted by the French president. Yet the controversy is not about an issue of “transgression”, but one of allegations of rape, sexual assault and harassment, and therefore about potential crimes.

Depardieu is currently formally placed under investigation in a judicial probe into his suspected “rape” and “sexual assault” of actress Charlotte Arnould, which was opened after she filed a formal complaint against him. Depardieu denies the accusations. A total of 15 other women have recounted in the media how they fell victim to sexual assaults by Depardieu (13 of them detailed their accounts to Mediapart in an investigation published in April, and two others similarly accused the actor on France Inter radio in July). Along with these are videos published by Mediapart and also Complément d’enquête showing the actor engaged in obscene comments and sexual gestures towards women.

All of which is in stark contrast to what Macron suggested were rushed conclusions about what was said in North Korea. During C à vous on December 20th, he dismissed the concordant accounts given to the media of Depardieu’s behaviour, and which have often been confirmed by third-party witnesses. “Perhaps there are victims, and oh how much I respect them, and I want them to be able to defend their rights, but there is also a presumption of innocence which exists,” he said.

“He is president of the [French] republic, he is the guarantor of institutions, his words are not any old words,” commented Anne-Cécile Mailfert, founder and head of the Fondation des femmes (women’s foundation), which funds projects supporting women’s rights and combatting violence against women. Speaking on news channel BFMTV on December 21st, she insisted that when Macron expresses his views “he produces effects”.

“When he says ‘I won’t take part in a manhunt’, he is judging the women who have filed complaints, the women who have given their accounts,” added Mailfert. “He is saying that it is them whose approach is reprehensible.”

How Macron publicly supported ministers accused of rape

It was not the first time that the French president brought up the issue of the presumption of innocence – a fundamental principle under French law of a person’s innocence unless found guilty in a court of law, and which no-one in the debate about Depardieu places in question. In the past and separate cases of three serving ministers facing rape allegations – current interior minister Gérald Darmanin, ecological transition minister from 2017-2018 Nicolas Hulot, and Damien Abad, minister in 2022 for autonomy and the handicapped – Macron chose to keep them in office in the name of the presumption of innocence (the cases against Darmanin and Hulot would finally be dropped).

But while batting such cases back to the process of the justice system, he appears unable to stop himself also lending public support to such figures instead of adopting an appropriate neutral stance. He has described Darmanin as “a political leader who is intelligent, committed, who has also been hurt by these attacks”, while explaining that he had had “a discussion” with Darmanin about the allegations against him, in “a relationship of confidence, man-to-man”.

It was the same with Hulot, who Macron described as “a man clearly hurt”, and who during a meeting between the two “has denied with much force” the accusations levelled against him, and insisting “that all that did not exist”.

In the case of Abad, and while prime minister Élisabeth Borne promised “consequences” if there were developments in the rape and attempted rape accusations brought against him by several women, Macron made clear he wanted Abad to carry on in his post. In the event, after serving as a junior minister for less than two full months, Abad was left out of government following a reshuffle after last year’s legislative elections.

So it is that in the controversy surrounding Gérard Depardieu, the president has again, in the words of Anne-Cécile Mailfert, “taken sides”. She told BFMTV that Macron “makes women appear as vengeance-seekers who, like that, will pursue men” whereas, she underlined, in reality it is Depardieu who, in the video presented by Complément d’enquête, describes himself as a “hunter”.

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• The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse