Faced with a parliamentary investigation and witnesses under Ede on Wednesday, François Bayrou, the controversial French Prime Minister, said he was never personally informed about physical and sexual violence in a private Catholic school with which he had close ties in his region in southwestern France.
Since the beginning of last year, 200 legal complaints have been submitted that accuse priests and employees of Notre-Dame de Bétharram School of Physical ABUSE, sexual attacks and rape between 1957 and 2004. The accusations have multiplied in recent months and placed Mr Bayrou under growing pressure.
Mr Bayrou, a central politician who was Minister of Education between 1993 and 1997, stated on Wednesday that he had only heard through the press of the violence. It is not disputed that he ordered an inspection from the school in 1996 after a supervisor was found guilty of attacking a 14-year-old male student.
Mr Bayrou’s claim that he was only aware of his statement to the National Assembly in February by reporting the violence when he said, talking about the school, “I was apparently never, never informed of anything when it comes to violence, let alone sexual violence.”
Three of the children of Mr. Bayrou went to the school, and last month, his daughter, Hélène Perlant, told Paris Match Magazine That a priest in connection with the Bétrarram school defeated 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 counter -accusations. Mr Bayrou, mayor of Pau, a city near the school, and seemed to be next to prime minister, and sometimes seemed confused. He suggested that the whole ‘scandal’ was a cynical maneuver against him by political enemies.
“I never lied, I never hid anything,” he said and told a member of the parliamentary committee, Paul Vannier of the extreme left-wing France Unbowed Party, that lying is “a word that I abolish and that you choose to use so often.” The past four months, Mr Bayrou said, he has “been tasted, taxed and dragged into the mud.”
Vannier accused Mr Bayrou of “lying against legislators to hide your knowledge of violence against children.”
Mr Bayrou rejected as false claims of a former teacher at the school that she had tried to warn him of violence in the mid -nineties by post and personally.
In February, prosecutors announced that they would investigate new allegations of physical violence and sexual abuse of former students at the Bétharram School. A parliamentary investigation into violence in schools was founded in the same month under the leadership of Fatiha Keloua Hachi, a socialist legislator who directed the prime minister’s interrogation.
Mr. Bayrou, who leads a minority government that would fall as the far right and the far left together support a voice without trust, has seen his popularity. It is now as low as 27 percent, According to the respected IFOP pollster. On Tuesday, in one TV interview That took more than three hours, President Emmanuel Macron said he continued to trust his prime minister.
“I was the Minister of Education, I was a legislator from that district and I have never heard of violence of such a gravity,” said Mr Bayrou, who is a remarkable Catholic. “You heard about claps, and there were one. But I never heard about serious violence or sexual violence.”
The protest on the abuse in Bétrram comes in the midst of a broader settlement in France with sexual abuse – in the film industryin the mediain families” In the Catholic Church – saying victims is long too late. But Mr Bayrou seemed frustrated that he was criticized for his dealings with decades of old things.
“Thirty years ago, at schools, and especially in this kind of schools, were the methods a bit rough? Surely yes,” he said. “Would they be accepted today? Definitely no,” he added, conviction of legislators who accused him of minimizing the abuse.
“Any physical abuse of a child, or even an adult, is against the law, whether it is 1996 or 2025,” said Mrs. Keloua Hachi.
Mr. Bayrou shot back: “You are completely right, but I am not the one who has inflicted the physical abuse!”
The last of Mr Bayrou’s children who went to the school who left in 2002, and his wife taught Catechism for a period that is disputed, but that the prime minister is estimated to be nine months. Like a local and national politician, and by family ties, his ties with the school are deep.
In her interview in Paris, Mrs. Perlant said that “Béthram was organized as a cult or a totalitarian regime, which puts psychological pressure on students and teachers so that they are silent.”
Mr. Bayrou recently seemed an increasingly insulated figure. He is confronted with a strong opposition against his proposals for cutbacks of $ 44.7 billion in the budget of 2026 to tackle a spiral deficiency, and Mr Macron was not impressed by his unusual recent proposal to bring the budget to a referendum. An increasingly unstable France has had four prime ministers in the past year.
Aurelien varieties And Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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