The fall of France’s sacred monsters Women are finally seeking justice

The film showed footage of the actor in North Korea in 2018, invited there on a celebratory jolly to mark the 70th anniversary of the dictatorship. Depardieu was relaxed, on good form: he could scarcely encounter a young woman without blurting out sexual comments, a kind of ongoing chatter between himself and his libido, with constant references to his genitals — “I’ve got a beam in my pants!” — her genitals, and the attributes of both. A visit to an equestrian centre sparked a stream-of-consciousness reflection on the sexual pleasure women allegedly get from riding horses, which managed to include a passing 10-year-old girl. His female interpreter, compelled to accompany this honoured Gallic guest of the regime, tried to stay smiling and polite. In North Korea even more than in most places, I imagine, she really didn’t feel she had much choice.

Depardieu was there with his friend, the author and film-maker Yann Moix, a winner of several French literary prizes who crashed into the Anglo-Saxon consciousness in 2019, aged 50, when he said that women over 50 were “too, too old” to love. Equally unbearable, romantically speaking, were “white western” women, he said: in fact, he now preferred dating young Asian women. The predictable outrage had ensued, followed by Moix’s equally predictable defence of the freedom to state one’s preferences and predilections. But compared to Depardieu, Moix was a junior league sexual troll. On the North Korean trip, sometimes he looked a bit anxious. “You picked the short straw with Gérard!” he told the interpreter, in what may have been a stab at empathy. In the end he had chosen not to screen the film he initially meant to make about their trip: it is only glimpsed here, in clips.

The Fall of the Ogre detailed a number of accusations of sexual assault against Depardieu, on film sets where other crew members had allegedly responded with laughter or turning a blind eye. “That’s Gérard!” people used to say. Another young woman, Charlotte Arnould, who had thought of him as a friend of the family, accused him of sexual assault and rape when she was 22. Questions were raised over earlier press interviews, in which Depardieu suggested he had participated in rapes in his famously delinquent youth, in Chateauroux in central France. The first remark was in Film Comment magazine, in 1978, when he said: “I had plenty of rapes, too many to count.” In 1990, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the actor to clarify whether he had indeed taken part in rape, and he replied, “Yes. But it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.” A column in The Washington Post expressed outrage, but Depardieu said he had been mistranslated, and denied raping anyone. Back then, France had shrugged its collective shoulders.

The actor’s one-time agent Jean-Louis Livi gave a telling response in the documentary. “I know Gerard Depardieu,” he said, “He is neither a rapist nor a predator. He’s a monster, yes. But he’s also a sacred monster. He’s a monument.” It’s an interesting series of statements to unpack. First, a flat and decisive denial: “He is neither a rapist nor a predator.” Then, a disarming admission: “He’s a monster, yes”. But if Depardieu is indeed a “monster”, then how did it manifest itself, precisely what kind of monster was he? No matter: a “sacred” one, apparently, too big and legendary to attack, his talent, whims and eccentricities placing him beyond restraint or criticism; a “monument” to French culture, in fact, to the very idea of France. Attack Depardieu, and you are attacking France itself.

It’s a notion which goes right to the top. When President Macron was asked about the actor, following the screening of The Fall of an Ogre, Depardieu was already under formal investigation for rape. Macron said, correctly, that the judicial process should be allowed to take its course, and Depardieu be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But then he added: “I’m a great admirer of Depardieu; he’s an immense actor…a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as a president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”

That statement of solidarity — “he makes France proud” — triggered fury in French feminists and Left-wing politicians. Yet it also missed the essential point, perhaps deliberately. No-one, even Depardieu’s accusers, has ever questioned his talent as an actor. It’s clear that he brings something exceptional to the screen, a kind of primal energy, an instinctive and restless intelligence which may indeed be partly related to the survival skills honed during his rough upbringing, spent in petty criminality and the hectic flouting of middle-class norms. The question now being asked is whether his status in French cinema should place his alleged harassment, assault and possibly even rape of women beyond social condemnation and the reach of the law.

That question doesn’t only pertain to Depardieu: it goes to the heart of the French cultural establishment. For a long time it was tacitly accepted in French culture that the celebration of male genius and creative self-expression took precedence over the sexual boundaries of women, and sometimes those of children. When #MeToo exploded in America, France stood apart for a time, wary of a spate of denunciations and cancellations. But then stories from French women themselves started to emerge. They were fuelled by a pent-up, long-held female anger at male abuses which had long operated under the cover of a seductive idea of a liberal French culture that was proudly distinct from the punitive, uptight mores of the Anglosphere. Many of them circled painful questions of age and consent.

Consent was, in fact, the title of the 2020 memoir by Vanessa Springora, a prominent French writer and editor, who said that she had been abused as a teenager between the ages of 14 and 16 by the well-known author Gabriel Matzneff, then aged 50. He first began having sex with her when she was 14, after they met at a dinner party, and thereafter she became his “girlfriend” or his “muse”. Matzneff was open about his preferences for very young girls and boys: in 1974 he published a pamphlet called “The Under-16s” which included lines such as “to sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure”. In another book, in the Eighties, he detailed his sexual experiences in the Philippines with boys aged between eight and 14. For decades, such unabashed revelations did nothing to threaten Matzneff’s apparently secure place within the cultural establishment.

Reputational risk, where it existed, seemed not to await those who pursued children for sex, but those who challenged them. When, in 1990, Matzneff appeared on a French literary chat show, the host quizzed him playfully about his penchant for very young girls, and the author began to expand confidently upon his theme. There was one strongly dissenting voice, however: a French-Canadian novelist called Denise Bombardier, who attacked his behaviour “an abuse of power”, remarking that “literature cannot serve as an alibi”. For this, she was roundly derided by a number of French intellectuals: the late author and critic Phillippe Sollers called her a “bitch”. Her publisher explicitly warned her that “your future as a writer in France will be compromised”; Le Monde, she said later, never afterwards published another article about her books.

The late Bombardier has been vindicated by history, but the elderly Matzneff cuts a disgraced figure: his books have been pulled from shops, and he was stripped of the state aid given to writers. He might be forgiven a degree of confusion at his current pariah status, however, if only because at one time his world-view had so many friends. When he wrote a letter to Le Monde in 1977, arguing that under-age children should be permitted in law to consent to sex with adults, it was co-signed by such luminaries as Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

As Springora did with publishing, Judith Godrèche has now placed a stick of gelignite under the French film industry. At the age of 14, she said, she became the “girlfriend” of the then 39-year-old arthouse director Benoit Jacquot, with whom she stayed until the age of 20. She describes a strange relationship: she was never actually attracted to him, she said, and yet she became his “child-wife”, initially over-awed by his aura of worldly success, his encompassing control, and, she alleged, his domestic violence. The odd thing was, she says, that none of the adults around her seemed to treat it as at all abnormal. In fact, she attracted another adult predator, she alleged, in a situation tolerated by Jacquot: when the film director Jacques Doillon was directing her, at 15, in a film called La Fille de 15 Ans Godrèche says he sexually assaulted her on two occasions, once at the home he shared with the English actress Jane Birkin.

A common theme is of children who felt confused and abandoned by the code of the grown-ups around them. In 2021 Camille Kouchner published a book which revealed that her step-father had regularly sexually abused her twin brother when he was just 14 years old. Her step-father was Olivier Duhamel, a prominent intellectual and politician. Her mother, Evelyne Pisier, was a star of the French Left: a well-known feminist and political scientist who had a four-year affair with Fidel Castro. The family was stylish, wealthy and well-connected: its members prided themselves on not being “prudes”. Boundaries were so far sunk under the concept of “freedom” that the twins at first didn’t know how to process their stepfather’s behaviour. Camille’s brother told her, “I don’t know if we should be angry”. When they finally told their mother, she supported her husband.

Each set of allegations is specific to its case, and the individuals concerned: it is important not to conflate them. But nonetheless there are certain themes common to the culture in which French women have been steeped. The career of Serge Gainsbourg, the famously louche balladeer whom President Mitterrand called “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire” is a case in point. While no-one has suggested that Gainsbourg crossed a line privately, his public persona knowingly toyed with the transgressive charge associated with under-age sex: Lemon Incest, which he sang with his then 12-year-old daughter Charlotte, was an ambiguous paean to father-daughter love; his album “The Ballad of Melody Nelson” is about the adult narrator’s sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. France seemed to agree that Gainsbourg was shocking, charming, sexy, a great seducer. Certainly, his talent was undeniable. But by the end, his provocations looked increasingly crass: a drunken Gainsbourg on a French chat show, pawing the hair of a young, startled Whitney Houston while mumbling “I want to ferk yeu”.

For men such as Matzneff and Jacquot, however, it is not simply that society affected not to look. It did look, and it approved. In fashionable Parisian circles, the ability to seduce and parade the very young was a status-enhancer, signalling a man’s cultural power. Crashing through barriers in plain sight was the sign of a bohemian risk-taker, sanctioned by the spirit of rebellion.

Now the erstwhile objects of that quest for sexual freedom have grown up, and are interrogating who owned the freedom in the first place. They are often women in their forties and fifties, bent on protecting a younger generation, asking why they received no protection from adults themselves. They are pointing out that the concept of sexual freedom, so prized both by strands of the French Revolution and the soixante-huitards, is not owned equally, but heavily subject to status and context. The “freedom” of the child was never remotely equivalent to the freedom of the adult, nor that of the star equivalent to that of the extra on set, paid by the day. That may not invalidate art, but it does place boundaries on the artist. At Cannes, and elsewhere, France’s age of the sacred monster is coming to an end.

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Jenny McCartney is a journalist, commentator and author of the novel The Ghost Factory.

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