Flap over French writer’s sexual past a cautionary tale
Gabriel Matzneff is not a good man, but it’s taken France a long time to realize it. Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times reported an astonishing story last week. It begins:
“The French writer Gabriel Matzneff never hid the fact that he engaged in sex with girls and boys in their early teens or even younger. He wrote countless books detailing his insatiable pursuits and appeared on television boasting about them. ‘Under 16 Years Old,’ was the title of an early book that left no ambiguity.”
Matzneff, 83, spent decades as a French literary darling. His work was supported by leading newspapers and literary publications. He’d appear on highbrow TV shows where he’d regale audiences with the sublime pleasures of having sex with children in France and on sex tours in Asia.
His overdue comeuppance is the result of a memoir by one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, who was seduced by a then50-something Matzneff when she was 14. “He was not a good man,” Springora writes. “He was in fact what we’re taught to dread since childhood: an ogre.”
How could a country that prides itself on being so enlightened celebrate an ogre? After all, we’re not talking about a Jeffrey Epstein, as horrible as he was. The well-connected billionaire spent vast sums to keep his sexual abuses somewhat secret. Matzneff not only confessed to his crimes, his confessions were celebrated as literary contributions.
The answer stems in part from the fact that Matzneff was a “Child of ‘68” — a product of the left-wing “May 68” movement that shook France in the 1960s. These radicals subscribed to the idea that anything smacking of traditionalism or bourgeois morality was backward. Conventional sexual morality was part of the same rotten edifice as imperialism and racism. True liberation meant not just freedom from, say, capitalism, but also from the old-fashioned view that sex with kids was wrong.
Sociologist Pierre Verdrager, the author of “L’Enfant Interdit,” or “Forbidden Child,” which chronicled the politics of pedophilia in 1970s France, told Onishi: “There was an aristocracy of sexuality, an elite that was united in putting forth new attitudes and behavior toward sex. And they were also grounded in an extreme prejudice toward ordinary people, whom they regarded as idiots and fools.”
America, so backwardly bourgeois in the eyes of these aristocrats, doesn’t have France’s problems, but it is hardly immune to such dynamics. Director Roman Polanski, who fled the U.S. rather than face sentencing for rape, is routinely defended by Hollywood royalty in part because of a similar aristocratic attitude.
Matzneff is a good example of what happens when people who share a selfstyled radical worldview capture the commanding heights of the culture and consider themselves above the rubes from whom they make their money.
There’s a reason Ricky Gervais struck such a chord at the Golden Globes when he told the assembled Hollywood royalty to get over themselves.
“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech,” he said. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.”
This should be a cautionary tale for all cultural aristocrats. Not all radical fads hold up well over time. Perhaps in 50 years, a memoir from someone who as a child was subjected to hormone blockers to change his or her gender will provoke similar retroactive outrage.