Olivier Duhamel has become yet another member of the French leftist intelligentsia to face fresh accusations for pedophilia-related crimes — crimes which members of the French political and literary elite were aware of for years but kept silent. The 70-year-old Duhamel is a public intellectual who served as the head of the body overseeing the prestigious The Paris Institute of Political Studies before his resignation. He is also well-known for his roles as a radio host and popular television commentator.
The allegations have now come to light in a book entitled “La Familia Grande” by Camille Kouchner, the biological daughter of Bernard Kouchner , who co-founded Doctors Without Borders and later went on to become a prominent Socialist Party minister and NGO activist. She wrote that Duhamel abused her twin brother who was renamed in the book as “Victor’ in order to protect his identity. The brother also released a statement to French newspaper Le Monde in which he confirmed that what his sister wrote about him, including the sexual abuse allegations, is accurate.
A public prosecutor announced that Duhamel is now under investigation for the charges of incest and rape that were laid out in the book. So why did the allegations take so long to come to light? According to Camille Kouchner , who works as a lawyer, their mother Évelyne Pisier was not happy about Camille telling her story about the sexual abuse of her brother at the hand’s Duhamel, who was Pisier’s second husband. Bernard Kouchner also knew about the claims of rape as well, but the family did not want the information to become public, partly out of their love for Duhamel. According to Camillie, Duhamel abused her twin brother when he was only 13 to 14 years old. There was no need to make so much noise about the rape, her mother allegedly told her, when there had been no rape but “just” fellatio.
Under French law, the alleged abuse would constitute incest since Duhamel was Viktor’s step-father. Bernard Kouchner defended pedophiles in the past despite his own daughter now coming forward and saying hg Two years after the 1977 pro-pedophile appeal signed by Bernard Kouchner and his leftist friends, the Libération newspaper published a petition in favor of another pedophile who had been “jailed for the crime of love”. What Libération ironically called a “crime of love” was in fact a case of sexually abusing little girls aged from 6 to 12. In March 1979, several members of the French leftist elite signed this petition where it was said that “desire and sexual games done with free consent have a place in relations between children and adults”. Libération even published an ad for a Pedophile Liberation Front constituted mainly from its own readers, and, together with part of the French left, reacted to the severe criticism of pedophilia on the part of the conservative press by comparing the fate of pedophiles to that of Jews during World War II.
Such rhetoric was also used in 1981 in France’s main gay weekly magazine, Gai Pied, where a gay man who would reject pedophiles was compared to a “negro who would denounce a Jew” (sic). Since its creation in 1979 Gai Pied actively defended pedophilia against the moralistic “Judeo-Christian society”. AP Photo/Nikolas Giakoumidis, File FILE – In this Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2013 file photo, Daniel Cohn Bendit, former co-president of the Greens/Free European Alliance Group in the European Parliament, speaks during a press conference. He has openly admitted to being a pedophile on television appearances. Pisier was a far-left feminist activist who passed away in 2017. After a love affair with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the 1960s, she married Bernard Kouchner whom she had met in communist Cuba. She had three children out of that union, including Camille and ‘Victor’ who were born in 1975. Pisier then divorced Kouchner in 1981 and soon remarried Olivier Duhamel, a political scientist and a distinguished member of the French Socialist Party nomenklatura. However, Bernerd Koucher has his own background defending those accused of pedophilia.
In 1977, Bernard Kouchner was one of the signatories of an appeal published in the left-wing daily newspapers Libération and Le Monde. In their open letter, they called on the authorities to release three men who were charged for having sexual relations with minors of both sexes. Apart from Bernard Kouchner and a second future Socialist Party minister, Jack Lang, it was signed by, among others, the renowned communists, writers and philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Louis Aragon. The other signatories of the open letter published by Le Monde and Libération claimed the children with whom the three men had sexual relations had suffered “no violence”. “If a 13-year-old girl can take the pill, what is it for?” they asked in their letter protesting about the preventive imprisonment of the three pedophiles “for kisses and caresses”.
As a matter of fact, the three men were eventually sentenced for acts of masturbation, fellatio and sodomy with children aged 12 and 13. Pedophilia outside the Catholic Church was generally not seen as a problem Camille Kouchner’s book comes a year after Vanessa Springora’s book about the pedophile relation writer Gabriel Matzneff had with her when she was 14, and he was 49. For decades, Matzneff had described his sexual relations with minors without being ever condemned by the French elite who, until very recently, seemed to pay little regard to pedophile crimes committed outside the Catholic Church. Even worse, known pedophilia of the left’s celebrities were simply ignored, as in the case of Frédéric Mitterrand , a former socialist minister and nephew of late president François Mitterrand who wrote about the paid sexual intercourses he had with “boys” in Thailand, according to his own writings published in 2005 .
The same goes for Pierre Bergé (deceased in 2017) who, as the owner of Le Monde, fought hard for “gay marriage” in France in the 2010s, as well for the legalization of the use of the services of surrogate mothers by gay men. In a book published in 2017, a former gay lover of Bergé, Fabrice Thomas, accused him and his life partner and fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent , of having organized orgies with underage boys in their Moroccan villa in Marrakech between 1984 and 1992. Pedophilia is no longer fashionable among the French left and neither is it among gay activists, but scandals from the past are slowly coming out and now raise unanimous condemnations.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the French left and part of the gay lobby saw relations with children, with no limitation of age whatsoever, as something natural and even desirable in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of 1968. Former Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a French and German binational who was at the forefront of the European Parliament’s attacks on Hungarian conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the years 2010-14, described in an autobiographical book published in 1975 ( Le Grand Bazar ), the sexual relations he had with small children in the early 1970s while working in an “autonomous” and “anti-authoritarian” kindergarten run by a far-left group in Frankfurt. Cohn-Bendit also boasted about his pedophile experiences several times on TV shows, and this did not raise any form of outrage from TV presenters at the time. This was the case for example during the French Apostrophes literary show led by presenter Bernard Pivot on April 23, 1982 ( here with English subtitles ).
