The bizarre flirtation between the elite French intellectuals and paedophilia in the
second half of the 20th century is one of those stories that falls into the box "stranger
than fiction". Speaking about sex with minors in a radio
interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said that assuming "that a child is incapable of explaining
what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that
are intolerable, quite unacceptable." The controversy usually concentrates on
a petition that was published in France's foremost paper Le Monde in 1978 which argued
the rights of "12 and 13-year-olds" "to have relations with whomever they choose".
The petition was signed by many prominent names: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as well as a
number of future French ministers. This petition was but one instance of a
pro-paedophilia lobby that was extremely active at the time.
The popular support of this pro-paedophilia lobby among the intellectual elite is
dismissed as a sign of the times by more recent commentators from the Left and it is
seized on as proof of the evil and decadence of these cabal of thinkers by those on the
Right. In this episode I want to get past the
scandalous surface of this story and try to understand how anyone - not to mention
some of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century - could arrive at the unimaginable
philosophical position of defending paedophilia.
The only way to do this is to understand the intellectual Zeitgeist that dominated this
era of French and world history. 1968
Any talk of this bizarre time in the French intellectual tradition needs to be understood
against the backdrop of 1968. The protests of May 1968 ranks with 1848 and 1789 as
one of the great watershed moments in French history.
In the opening weeks of May 1968, the student riots brought Paris to a standstill
precipitating a General Worker's Strike and leaving the country on the edge of
revolution. It set off a wave of mass protests across the globe from the Rio de Janeiro
and Mexico City to London, Madrid, Warsaw, Prague and cities across the US.
This global protest had no shared ideology or demands but was characterised by a
disgusted rebellion against the rigid authoritarian status quo epitomised by the
American War in Vietnam. It started with a minor
protest in January by 26 students over a lack of facilities in the
University of Nanterre but came to a head when the de facto leader of the group was
called to be disciplined in the Sorbonne University on the 6th of May.
He was accompanied to the hearing by a thousand students walking and singing with
him. And then it turned ugly. It seems the CRS - the French riot police - didn't like
the singing and charged the students striking them with their batons, leaving many
unconscious on the cobblestones. But much to their amazement, the students
regathered and fought back - overturning cars, building barricades and digging up
cobblestones to use as projectiles. The fighting went on for hours as the streets around
the Sorbonne were filled with smoke and tear gas. The riots had begun.
As with the uprisings of 1848, the 1968 movement finally dissipated but in its wake the
intellectual landscape of France was completely reshaped. As the author Mark
Kurlansky writes of this year in his book 1968: "In history it is always imprecise to
attribute fundamental shifts to one moment. But 1968 was the epicentre of a shift,
of a fundamental change, the birth of our post-modern media-driven
world... It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a
new geopolitical order." The Birth of Active Politics
In the wake of 1968, the era of active politics had begun. Petitions and protests were
the engine of this activity. There were hundreds and hundreds of petitions signed and
distributed in the coming decade. These petitions attacked the moralistic and ossified
establishment on all fronts - one of which was of course sexual.
There was a dramatic shift in sexual mores in the 1960s. 1968 had been preceded by
1967's summer of love. There was atmosphere of sexual freedom and a more general
rebellion in lifestyle after 1968 and it was against the backdrop of this sexual
revolution that the pro-paedophilia lobby enters into the story.
Muriel Salmona, a psychiatrist and president of the Traumatic Memory and
Victimology Association has said that after 1968, attitudes towards paedophilia began
to shift among the intellectual elite: Children were viewed as having the right to be
considered sexual beings-in Salmona's words: "pedophilia was considered a sexual
orientation ... It was all part of a vision of freedom."
In the wake of the 1968 protests and the sexual revolution of the 60s, the defenders of
paedophilia begin to gain a lot of traction. At this time pro-paedophilia activists
formed associations such as the Paedophile Liberation Front and the Research Group
for a Different Childhood and they began publishing their own journals such as
Backside and The Little Rogue. As one sociologist Jean-Hughes D chaux has
commented:
"opponents of pedophilia were accused of being 'reactionary' and
pedophiles were redefined not as guilty of sexual abuse but as
victims, like homosexuals, of 'retrograde' legislation"
D chaux is referencing here the French law at the time which treated homosexuality
and paedophilia as moral crimes punishable by law.
The pro-paedophilia lobby framed the issue as a matter of oppression of children.
"The notion of child protection was [deemed] patriarchal and denounced as a
danger to the child's personal integrity," - D chaux
Thus for the French intellectuals of the era this was a matter of questioning the state's
authority, of questioning whether the state was overreaching by exercising its
authority to protect minors from sexual abuse. Analysis
Any attempt to understand how the elite intellectual of France could come to believe
in paedophilia must start here. 1968 was a powder keg. It may not have
culminated in the literal rolling of heads as 1789 had but it was an explosion of revolutionary
energy just the same. The educated youth was brimming with
the energy of transformation. This energy exploded in the protests and
riots of 1968 but it continued on strong into the 1970s and 80s. Looking at the world
around them - the world of capitalism and consumerism, a world of elitist and unjust
institutions - all of which was brought into sharp focus by the Vietnam war - seeing this
world the students and intellectuals believed that an alternative must be found.
This was the age of liberation. The Civil Rights movement in America had raised hopes
of a freer and better world while also highlighted how rigid and broken it was and how
words like freedom and equality were quite often laced with terms and conditions.
In the space of a decade the civil rights movement fought for the rights of African-
Americans, the feminist movement fought for the rights of women and the LGBT
movement fought for recognition with the Stonewall Riots which are still
commemorated every year with Pride marches. There was the sexual revolution that
challenged the societal mores around sexuality and there were the anti-war protests
against Vietnam. Across the world the old moralising
order was being challenged. There was a frustration and anger at the state of the
world and an earnest and often na ve desire among the youth to make a better world.
In a 2001 article for the French left-wing magazine Liberation, journalist Sorj
Chalandon captured the spirit of the post-1968 era perfectly:
Laboratory. The moral order. That is the enemy. And Lib ration at that time is
nothing but the particular echo of the common vertigo. We are at the end of the
1970s. The traces of the May of the barricades linger on the walls and in the
heads. "Forbidden to forbid", "let's challenge all forms of authority". It was more
than a period, it was a laboratory. It gave birth to hopes, dreams, senseless
fights. [...] The ban, any ban, is felt to belong to the old world, to the world of the
bitter, the oppressors, the employers' militias, the bludgeoning police, the
corrupt. Thought is in confusion. [...] In this tumult, this reversal of senses, this
anchoring of new reference points, in this new understanding of morality and
law, this fragility and urgency, everything that stands in the way of all freedoms
is to be torn down.
Everything was challenged. Nothing that had been handed down from the old order
could be taken for granted. And in instinctively challenging every element of the status
quo it was eventually discovered that perhaps some boundaries were better left in
place. Like for example the belief that children can consent to sex.
This is the context in which the petition of 1977 has to be read. These French
intellectuals were not allied with the establishment but were in solidarity against it.
They were at the cutting edge of the revolution in social values.
In hindsight this is the best and only case that can be made in defence of these great
thinkers. They were engaged in hundreds of various causes. They were signing new
petitions every other day for some cause of other.
To isolate the paedophilia petition from the rest of the Zeitgeist of that era is to
commit a historical injustice. With that being said, a good rule of thumb for humans in
all places everywhere might be, to paraphrase Mark Twain: "if you find yourself on the
side of paedophilia, it's time to pause and reflect"
That's everything for this episode of The Living Philosophy.
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