France's prime minister on Saturday, February 15, vowed to help investigate allegations of decades of sexual abuse at a Catholic school, after the left accused him of lying to Parliament earlier this week when he said he was unaware of the case.
François Bayrou, the veteran centrist named premier in December to end months of political crisis, has come under scrutiny in recent days in relation to allegations of repeated physical and sexual abuse at a Catholic boarding school in the Pyrénées.
In 1996, the parents of a pupil at the school, near the southwestern city of Pau, filed a complaint after a school monitor slapped the boy so hard he lost his hearing in one ear. The supervisor at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school was found guilty.
This happened during Bayrou's tenure as education minister, between 1993 to 1997. Bayrou sent several of his children to the school, including while he was education minister and a regional official.
In May 1998, when Bayrou was no longer minister but still led the council for the region that includes the school, a priest and former headmaster there was detained and accused of having raped a 10-year-old boy a decade earlier. He was released then found dead two years later in the river Tiber in Rome.
Most recently, testimonies gathered by a former student led to prosecutors last year opening a probe into more than 100 allegations of violence, sexual assault and rape committed at the school between the 1970s and the 1990s. The ex-pupil, Alain Esquerre, told the France 3 broadcaster in November that he had since received complaints of alleged abuse up until 2016.
Last week French investigative website Mediapart reported that Bayrou – who has been mayor of Pau since 2014 and remains in the position – had knowledge of the abuse in the 1990s. But on Tuesday, Bayrou told parliament he was "never at that time told about" such complaints, sparking accusations from the left that he was lying.
On Saturday, he met Esquerre and other alleged victims at the Pau city hall, as a dozen protesters called for his resignation outside. "I did everything I could when I was minister," Bayrou told the press after the three-hour meeting. And "I did everything I thought I should do when I no longer was."
After hearing about the 1996 complaint, he had arranged for the school to be inspected, he added. Pressed by reporters, Bayrou repeated he was "not aware" of all the abuses at the time. "I knew about a complaint because of a slap. For the sexual abuse, I had never heard of it."
The prime minister said he would ask for "extra magistrates" to fully investigate the accusations. He also wanted to look into how to help former pupils who had made accusations that fell outside the statute of limitations, he added.
He said a civil servant, who had previously led an inquiry into abuse in the Catholic Church, would be meeting the former pupils. That inquiry in 2021 found that French Catholic priests, deacons and other clergy had sexually abused around 216,000 children, mostly pre-adolescent boys, from 1950 to 2020.
Esquerre was visibly moved. "I am 53 years old and I have been waiting for this moment for 40 years, so it's a huge victory," he said. "The Bétharram scandal, I remind you, is about physical assaults, cruelty of all kinds, humiliation, molestation and rapes against children aged eight to 13 years old, carried out by 26 adults – priests, including headmasters, and secular school monitors," he added.