PARIS – Camille Kouchner, a small, confused woman who has been consumed by guilt for decades, has become the great disruption of French society. Her struggle to free herself from a painful family secret touched a nerve in France.
Me. Kouchner felt trapped for decades. ‘Feelings of guilt are like a snake’, she writes in ‘La Familia Grande’, a book whose story of incest and abuse is also the unsavory portrait of a prominent French family. It was a ‘poison’, a multi-headed ‘hydra’, that penetrated ‘all the space in my mind and my heart’. Until she felt she had no choice but to put down the unspeakable.
It was not easy. Olivier Duhamel, her stepfather and the man she accused of sexually abusing her twin brother when they were teenagers, sat on the crest of Paris’ intellectual and cultural life before quitting all his posts on the eve of the book’s publication has.
Her mother, Évelyne Pisier, a well-known author who was formerly Fidel Castro’s lover and who died in 2017, vehemently rebuked Ms Kouchner over the allegation. The ‘big family’ of the book’s title was a certain left-wing French cultural elite who chose to protect one of its own.
In short, me. Kouchner took on a lot.
“OK, Camille, you’re afraid of the consequences, but if you do not speak, how can you be whole?” Me. Kouchner, 45, said in an interview. If you do not speak, you are leaving an upside-down world. You must take the risk because you have little chance of telling those who are suffering that their suffering is not in vain. ‘
Her embrace of the ‘small chance’ led to the kind of political-cultural explosion that the French call ‘affair’. A #MeTooInceste hashtag began when tens of thousands of French victims broke a stagnant taboo. The book, published this month, has sold more than 200,000 copies. Several friends of mr. Duhamel, including Élisabeth Guigou, a former justice minister, has resigned.
President Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter to express his relief at “the courage of a sister who could no longer remain silent”. He condemned “a silence built up by criminals and successive acts of cowardice”.
“It’s really overwhelming,” she said. Kouchner, a lawyer and university lecturer, said in a quiet, almost self-deprecating voice that tended to disguise her determined bluntness. Her gaze is honest and direct. “I’m very happy about the #MeTooInceste movement, not so much because people are talking – many have done so – but because they are being listened to.”
She continued, however, her main purpose was not political, but literary, an attempt to describe her own troubled evolution. As the maternal descendant of an anti-Semitic French fascist, and on the paternal side of ancestors slaughtered in Auschwitz, she had to form her own identity from an early age. When she had her own son, she realized that she was not talking about Mr. Duhamel could not keep quiet, for fear that he would strike again.
She also had to confront her mother’s strange complicity. When asked why she wrote the book, Ms. Kouchner replied, “Because my mother is dead.”
Her mother had many sides: the playful intellectual that Ms. Kouchner worshiped; the woman who went to drink after the suicide of both her parents; the suffering parent whose sister, the actress Marie-France Pisier, also died in an apparent suicide.
She was also the feminist mother who did not say no to Cuba when Castro sent a car to pick her up; the mother who me. Kouchner’s father left, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and later the French foreign minister, because ‘he chose to save other children, not his.’
In many ways, Mrs. Kouchner’s mother is the crucial figure in the book, loved and then alienated. Her mother, at least with silence on the part of mr. Duhamel sided when she was confronted in 2008 with the charge that her second husband had sexually abused his 14-year-old stepson two decades earlier.
Towards the end of the book, the author quotes her mother in a breathtaking passage: ‘If you had spoken, I could have left. Your silence is your responsibility. If you were talking, none of this would have happened. There was no violence. Your brother was never forced. My husband did nothing. It is your brother who deceived me. ‘
So too is guilt transferred, assuming several faces. So do the buried crime. So too a long secret that determines his relentless degree of suffering.
Me. Kouchner, whose brother silenced her vows when he first told her what happened, writes that she came to the conclusion in early adulthood: ‘My guilt is a consent. I’m guilty of not stopping my stepfather because I did not realize that incest is forbidden. ‘(Under French law, a stepfather’s sexual abuse of a child qualifies as incest.)
Her guilt was exacerbated by her mother’s accusation that her silence was the real crime. Above all, there is a specific fear: in a family with multiple suicides, her mother’s willingness to take her own life can never be ruled out. She dies at the end of cancer.
“My mother reversed responsibilities, reverse roles,” she said. Kouchner said. “She has become the victim of my decision not to speak. And when I did speak, she accused me of wanting to ruin her life. I said to her, ‘Should I talk then or not? Whatever I do is wrong. ”
And Mr. Duhamel? “My mother confronted him, and I think they finally put together a story to try to acquit themselves and hide the violence from the whole affair.”
It looks like it contains no ‘affair’. Mr. Duhamel, 70, has hired a leading lawyer to defend him. He has said nothing since his resignation this month as head of the body overseeing the renowned Sciences Po University.
It became clear that Mr. Duhamel benefited from the silence of many in his circle of friends from Paris, a recurring pattern in cases where powerful men were involved. Jean Veil, a leading lawyer in Paris, and Frédéric Mion, the director of Sciences Po, both admitted that they knew about the allegations of sexual abuse, but no action against Mr. Duhamel did not.
Me. Kouchner’s brother, mentioned in the book ‘Victor’, has for the first time a case against Mr. Duhamel sued. The French public prosecutor has investigated the rape of minors and sexual aggression. An official commission investigating incest has been revived with the appointment of two new co-presidents.
“It’s just decent that he keep quiet,” she said. Kouchner on mr. Duhamel said. ‘Because in fact he kept me quiet for years. Not directly. But still he crushed us. Up until a certain moment I said, ‘Why do I keep quiet? What is this secret that is not a secret, this secret that keeps an executioner? ”
Wasn’t ‘execution’ a strong word? “Oh, he did us a lot of damage,” she said. Kouchner said. She noted that Mr. Duhamel is unlikely to be punished for France’s statute of limitations, one reason she wants an “indelible” testimony that her children and grandchildren can read.
There is much that her offspring can think about. Me. Kouchner’s call of summer days at the family property on the Côte d’Azur is powerful in the call of a false idyll: tennis, meals, Scrabble, wine, laughter – as well as naked bathing in the pool, touching under the table and mockery of civil sexual restrictions.
“It is forbidden to ban” was the motto of these family gatherings, she writes. Her grandmother explained to her how to have an orgasm on a bicycle or horse.
All the time there is a snake hiding in this family and beyond. Me. Kouchner quotes a saying of her father Bernard: “Between the strong and the weak it is freedom that oppresses and the law that liberates.” She says, “I would discover the full meaning of it.”
Constant Méheut in Paris reported.