PARIS – Camille Kouchner, a small, taciturn woman who for decades was consumed with guilt, became the great troublemaker of French society. His battle to free himself from a painful family secret has touched a nerve across France.
For decades, Ms. Kouchner felt trapped. “Guilt is like a snake,” she writes in “La Familia Grande”, a book whose story of incest and abuse is also the relentless portrait of an important French family. It was a “poison”, a “hydra” with many heads, invading “the whole space of my mind and heart”. Until she felt she had no choice but to put aside 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 at the height of Parisian intellectual and cultural life before abandoning all of her positions on the eve of the book’s publication.
His mother, Évelyne Pisier, a famous writer who was once Fidel Castro’s lover and who died in 2017, vehemently turned against Kouchner because of the accusation. The “big family” in the book’s title was, by extension, a certain French cultural elite with a leftist tendency who chose to protect one of their own.
In short, Mrs. Kouchner was taking on too much.
“Ok, Camille, you are afraid of the repercussions, but if you don’t speak, how can you be whole?” Ms. Kouchner, 45, said in an interview. “If you don’t speak, you leave a world upside down. You have to take the risk because you have a small chance of telling those who suffer that their suffering is not for nothing. “
His acceptance of this “small chance” led to the kind of political and cultural detonation that the French call “affaire”. A #MeTooInceste hashtag took off when tens of thousands of French victims broke the silencing taboo. The book, published this month, sold more than 200,000 copies. Several of Duhamel’s friends, including Élisabeth Guigou, a former justice minister, have resigned from prominent positions.
President Emmanuel Macron used Twitter to welcome a release, through the “courage of a sister who could no longer be quiet”. He condemned “a silence built by criminals and successive acts of cowardice”.
“It’s really overwhelming,” said Kouchner, a lawyer and university professor, in a low, almost self-deprecating voice that tends to mask his determined candor. His gaze is frank and direct. “I am very happy with the #MeTooInceste movement, not so much because people are talking – many have already done so – but because they are being heard.”
However, she continued, her main objective was not political, but literary, an attempt to describe her own agonizing evolution. As a descendant on the part of the mother of a French anti-Semitic fascist, and on the part of the father of ancestors slaughtered in Auschwitz, she had to shape her own identity from a very young age. When she had her own child, she realized that she couldn’t be quiet about Mr. Duhamel for fear that he might attack again.
She also had to face her mother’s strange complicity. When asked why she wrote the book, Ms. Kouchner replied, “Because my mother is dead.”
His mother had many sides: the playful intellectual that Mrs. Kouchner adored; the woman who started drinking after her parents’ suicide; the suffering father whose sister, actress Marie-France Pisier, also died in an apparent suicide.
She was also the feminist mother who did not say no in Cuba when Castro – in good macho style – sent a car to pick her up; the mother who left Mrs. Kouchner’s father, Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and later Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, because “he chose to save other children, not his own”.
In many ways, Mrs. Kouchner’s mother is the central figure in the book, loved and then estranged. Her mother sided with Duhamel, at least in silence, when confronted in 2008 with the accusation that, two decades earlier, her second husband had sexually abused her 14-year-old stepson.
Near the end of the book, in a breathtaking passage, the author quotes her mother saying: “If you had spoken, I could have left. Your silence is your responsibility. If you had spoken, 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. “
Thus, the guilt is transferred, assuming multiple faces. The same is true of buried crime. Likewise, a secret kept for a long time requires its inexorable measure of suffering.
Mrs. Kouchner, whose brother swore silence when she told him what had happened, writes that she concluded in early adulthood that “My fault is consent. I am guilty of not having prevented my stepfather, of not having understood that incest is prohibited. ”(Under French law, sexual abuse of a child by a stepfather is considered incest.)
His sense of guilt was compounded by his mother’s accusation that his silence was the real crime. Above all, there was a particular terror: in a family of multiple suicides, her mother’s readiness to take her own life could never be excluded. She died of cancer.
“My mother reversed responsibilities, reversed roles,” said Kouchner. “She became the victim of my decision not to speak. And when I spoke, she accused me of wanting to ruin her life. I said to her, ‘So, should I speak or not? Whatever I do is wrong ‘”.
What about Mr. Duhamel? “My mother confronted him and I think that in the end they built a story to try to absolve themselves, to hide the violence from everything.”
Now there seems to be no restraint on the “affaire”. Mr. Duhamel, 70, hired a prominent lawyer to defend him. He has said nothing since his resignation this month as head of the body that oversees the renowned Sciences Po university.
It was clear that Duhamel benefited from the silence of many in his circle of friends in Paris, a recurring pattern in cases involving powerful men. Jean Veil, a prominent Paris lawyer, and Frédéric Mion, the director of Sciences Po, acknowledged that they knew about the sexual abuse charges, but did not act against Duhamel.
Mrs. Kouchner’s brother, called “Victor” in the book, for the first time filed a lawsuit against Mr. Duhamel. The French public prosecutor opened an investigation for child rape and sexual assault. An official incest investigation commission was reinvigorated with the appointment of two new co-chairs.
“It is decent that he be quiet,” said Kouchner of Duhamel. “Because, in fact, he kept me quiet for many years. Not directly. Even so, he crushed us. Up to a point, I said, ‘Why am I silent? What is this secret that is not a secret, that secret that preserves an executioner? ‘”
Wasn’t “Executioner” a strong word? “Ah, he did a lot of damage to us,” said Kouchner. She noted that Duhamel was unlikely to face punishment because of France’s statute of limitations, one of the reasons she wanted an “indelible” testimony that her children and grandchildren could read.
There is much for your descendants to ponder. Mrs. Kouchner’s evocation of summer days at the family estate on the Côte d’Azur is powerful in her evocation of a false idyll: tennis, meals, Scrabble, wine, laughter – as well as a naked bath in the pool, playing under the table and the mockery of bourgeois sexual restrictions.
“It is forbidden to forbid” 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 while, a snake lurked, in this family and beyond. Mrs. Kouchner quotes an expensive saying to her father, Bernard: “Among the strong and the weak, it is freedom that oppresses and law that liberates”. She notes, “I would discover the full meaning of this.”
Constant Méheut in Paris contributed reporting.