Facing a parliamentary inquiry and testifying under oath on Wednesday, François Bayrou, the embattled French prime minister, said he had never been personally informed of physical and sexual violence at a private Catholic school with which he had close ties in his region of southwest France.
Since early last year, 200 legal complaints have been filed accusing priests and staff members at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school of physical abuse, sexual assaults and rape between 1957 and 2004. The accusations have multiplied in recent months and placed Mr. Bayrou under growing pressure to quit.
Mr. Bayrou, a centrist politician who was education minister between 1993 and 1997, insisted on Wednesday that he had learned of the violence only through the press. It is not disputed that in 1996, he ordered an inspection of the school after a supervisor was found guilty of assaulting a 14-year-old male student.
Mr. Bayrou’s contention that he knew of the violence only through news coverage differed from his declaration to the National Assembly in February when, speaking of the school, he said: “I have evidently never, never ever, been informed of anything when it comes to violence, let alone sexual violence.”
Three of Mr. Bayrou’s children attended the school, and last month, his daughter, Hélène Perlant, told Paris Match magazine that a priest linked to the Bétharram school beat her during a summer camp when she was 14, but that she had never told her father.
The parliamentary hearing was stormy, interspersed with interruptions, accusations and counteraccusations. Mr. Bayrou, who is mayor of Pau, a town near the school, in addition to being prime minister, bristled and at times seemed confused. He suggested that the whole “scandal” was a cynical maneuver against him by political enemies.
“I have never lied, I have never hidden anything,” he said, telling a member of the parliamentary commission, Paul Vannier of the far-left France Unbowed party, that lying “is a word that I detest and that you choose to use so often.” For the past four months, Mr. Bayrou said, he has been “sullied, defamed and dragged into the mud.”
Mr. Vannier has accused Mr. Bayrou of “lying to lawmakers to hide your knowledge of violence against children.”
Mr. Bayrou dismissed as false claims by a former teacher at the school that she had tried to warn him about the violence in the mid-1990s by mail and in person.
In February, prosecutors announced they would investigate new allegations of physical violence and sexual abuse from former students at the Bétharram school. A parliamentary inquiry into violence in schools was established in the same month under the leadership of Fatiha Keloua Hachi, a Socialist lawmaker who directed the questioning of the prime minister.
Mr. Bayrou, who heads a minority government that would fall if the far right and far left together supported a no-confidence vote, has seen his popularity plunge. It is now as low as 27 percent, according to the respected IFOP pollster. On Tuesday, in a TV interview that lasted more than three hours, President Emmanuel Macron said he continued to trust his prime minister.
“I was the minister of education, I was a lawmaker from that district, and I never heard about violence of such gravity,” said Mr. Bayrou, who is an observant Catholic. “You heard about slaps, and there were some. But never did I hear about serious violence or sexual violence.”
The outcry over the abuse at Bétharram comes amid a broader reckoning in France with sexual abuse — in the movie industry, in the media, in families, in the Catholic Church — that victims say is long overdue. But Mr. Bayrou appeared frustrated that he was being criticized for his handling of decades-old cases.
“Thirty years ago, in schools, and particularly in these kinds of schools, were the methods a bit rough? Surely yes,” he said. “Would they be accepted today? Surely no,” he added, drawing condemnation from lawmakers who accused him of trying to minimize the abuse.
“Any physical abuse of a child, or even of an adult, is against the law, whether it’s 1996 or 2025,” Ms. Keloua Hachi said.
Mr. Bayrou shot back: “You are perfectly right, but I’m not the one who inflicted the physical abuse!”
The last of Mr. Bayrou’s children who attended the school left in 2002, and his wife taught catechism there for a period that is disputed, but that the prime minister estimated to be nine months. As a local and national politician, and through family ties, his links to the school are deep.
In her Paris Match interview, Ms. Perlant said that “Bétharram was organized like a sect or a totalitarian regime, putting psychological pressure on students and teachers so they remained silent.”
Mr. Bayrou has seemed an increasingly isolated figure of late. He faces strong opposition to his proposals for cuts of $44.7 billion in the 2026 budget to address a spiraling deficit, and Mr. Macron was not impressed by his unusual recent proposal to put the budget to a referendum. An increasingly unstable France has had four prime ministers in the past year.
Aurelien Breeden and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
The post French Prime Minister Defiant in School Sexual Violence Inquiry appeared first on New York Times.
