PARIS — A report into child abuse across France unveiled Wednesday found that French Prime Minister François Bayrou “failed to act” to stop abuse at a private school in the 1990s
A report into child abuse across France unveiled Wednesday found that Bayrou, who was education minister at the time, “failed to act” to stop “physical and sexual violence against the students” at a private school near his hometown of Pau.
The monthslong parliamentary inquiry investigated violence at schools in general, but the most eagerly anticipated findings concerned the allegations of abuse at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school, which some of Bayrou’s children attended.
While the allegations first surfaced about three decades ago, the case came into the spotlight last year, when prosecutors announced they would investigate dozens of new accusations stemming from a book written by a former student.
The report’s authors alleged Bayrou did not do enough to prevent “physical and sexual violence against the students.”
Bayrou’s own daughter said earlier this year that she had suffered abuse at a sister school and had not informed her father.
The current prime minister and former education minister initially claimed to have been completely unaware of the allegations. He later admitted to learning about them through press reports, maintaining he was unaware of their full extent. However, his defense suffered a blow after testimony from an investigator and a judge involved in the case alleged that Bayrou had been aware of the details of the allegations.
Appearing before the investigative panel in May, Bayrou decried the panel’s line of questioning as politically motivated and insisted he had “never hidden anything.”
Bayrou’s office did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment following the report’s publication Wednesday.
The report includes gruesome accounts of violence and degrading punishments inflicted against students. It concludes that, for decades, “Bétharram was the setting for an onslaught of violence that cannot be reduced to isolated incidents.”
The scandal has dogged the prime minister since early in his tenure, dragging his polling ratings to historic lows.
“When people think of Bayrou, they don’t think about his actions as prime minister. They think about Bétharram,” Fréderic Dabi, the head of the polling institute Ifop, said last month.
An Ifop survey published last month found that 80 percent of French voters surveyed last month said they were unhappy with Bayrou’s performance — a figure the pollster described as a record.
The inquiry’s co-chairs, hard-left lawmaker Paul Vannier and centrist MP Violette Spillebout — a member of Bayrou’s own coalition — heard a total of 135 people during their probe.
They found that French schools “operate on a model that belongs to the past,” which overemphasizes “learning to submit to authority” and notes that the risk of violence is “accentuated” in Catholic schools, where there is “a tendency to manage matters internally.”
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