How France made MeToo a culture war
Benoît Jacquot, left, had not previously been named by Judith Godrèche
“No, no, NO. No Benoît Jacquot,” Judith Godrèche wrote on Instagram on Saturday, lambasting the French film director. Then, describing herself in the third person, she wrote: “It didn’t excite her.”
And so the actress, 51, reignited a culture war in France about sexual impropriety that has divided the country along generational lines.
She was responding to an old interview Jacquot had given, in which he had talked about his six-year affair with Godrèche, which began when he was 40 and she was 15.
“It was a transgression … in the eyes of the law,” he said in the documentary made in 2011, which has resurfaced online. “In theory, I didn’t have the right. But … I didn’t give a damn – and her, it excited her a lot, I’d say.”
Having previously alluded to the relationship in the late Eighties and Nineties, but not named Jacquot, Godrèche decided to speak out to help stop others idealising such situations.
The comments came not long after an interview she gave to Elle magazine in which she said that “the cinematographic power of a teenager is boundless, but you can make sublime films without sleeping with your underage actress. For me, it becomes a perversion.”
The row has added another dimension to a debate that in recent months has centred on the ample form of Gérard Depardieu. Given Depardieu’s outsized presence in French culture, it is no surprise that the actor has become a fleshy lightning rod for the nation’s anxieties around #metoo.
Gerard Depardieu
Accusations of sexual misconduct and rape have swirled around the 75-year-old star for years, but they have mostly been dismissed as the excesses of a man whose Rabelaisian appetites and sensuality have also been the source of so much great art.
A rift has emerged between the young, raised on social justice and social media, who think Depardieu is unconscionable, and the older generation who can’t see what all the fuss is about.
As Depardieu wrote in an article for Le Figaro in October, defending himself: “All my life I’ve been provocative, over the top, sometimes offensive. I often did what nobody else dared: tested limits, upended convictions and habits and, on set in between takes, in between tensions, laughed and made others laugh.”
At long last, however, it seems his motherland – although he is a tax exile these days – has ceased to see the funny side. The Figaro editorial was a response to accusations of sexual impropriety against Depardieu by more than a dozen women. The newspaper Le Monde had run a six-part editorial, Le Cas Depardieu, laying out the actor’s insalubrious past. Most seriously, in 2020 he was charged with raping the actor Charlotte Arnould, the daughter of one of his friends.
A month later, a documentary aired on French television which further turned the screw. Depardieu: The Fall of an Ogre included previously unseen footage of a trip to North Korea in 2018, in which the actor sexually harrasses his translator, makes obscene comments to women, and even a sexual comment about a child. Within weeks his films – which include classics like Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card – had been removed from Swiss television, while French networks cancelled future projects. The minister for culture mooted removing his Legion d’Honneur. His wax likeness was even removed from the Musee Grévin, presumably freeing up room for two or three others.
“The layering of sexism and racism in that documentary spoke volumes about France’s patriarchal and colonial gaze,” says Alice Pfeiffer, a writer and author of Je Ne Suis Pas un Parisenne, a book about the sexism in French representations of women.
“Social media has set new standards and discussions, where engrained French biases were suddenly made evident. In France, terms such as ‘crime of passion’ are still invoked in court, and Picasso is still seen as a genius. The mythology of the passionate artist, whose sex crimes are simply collateral damage or part of the character, still runs strong.”
As if to prove the point, Yannis Ezziadi, a Right-wing writer, put together a letter signed by 56 notables, including Charlotte Rampling, condemning the attacks on Depardieu. “Gérard Depardieu is probably the greatest of all actors,” it said. “When you attack Gérard Depardieu like this, it is art you are attacking. By his genius as an actor, Gérard Depardieu contributes to the artistic brilliance of our country.”
Yannis Ezziadi – Guillaume Bonnet / AFP
Even President Macron weighed in, claiming Depardieu had been the victim of a “manhunt”.
In reaction, hundreds of artists, many of them young, signed a counter-letter, accusing Rampling & Co of “spitting” on the victims of sexual violence.
“I’m not surprised to see Macron defending Depardieu,” says Pfeiffer. “Because culture and sexism are so tied together, and are central to the French culture he promotes. Older generations think wokeness is out of hand. They disagree with the accusations. Their chant is “on peut plus rien dire” – we can’t say anything more.”
For Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, a writer and journalist, Macron’s comments were a distraction from more pressing political concerns. “That was a dead-cat move by Macron,” she says. “It was planned cynically so that the immigration law fiasco would disappear.”
Whatever the truth of the president’s intervention, the debate is the latest skirmish in a long war. The #metoo moment has never come naturally to France. When sexual harassment claims against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein first emerged in 2017, American women – celebrity and civilian – were quick to share their own experiences, in the press and on social media. Britain followed soon after, along with the rest of the Anglosphere.
The French have always had a lighter hand on the tiller when it comes to matters of love and lust. This is the country of the cinq-a-sept, the early evening window when you see your mistress, and where politician’s approval ratings rise, rather than fall, with the revelation of extramarital affairs.
Consequently, what was presented to Anglo-Saxons as an urgent corrective was more of a matter for debate in France. Sandra Muller, a French journalist, took up the fight, under the banner #balancetonporc, which literally means “expose your pig”. But in January 2018, the actress Catherine Deneuve led a group of 100 celebrated French women who signed a letter accusing the campaigners of intolerance and censorship. “[R]ape is a crime,” the letter said, “but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not, nor is being gentlemanly a macho attack.”
French actress Catherine Deneuve, right, with Bonne Pomme co-star Gerard Depardieu – YOHAN BONNET/AFP/Getty Images
While it might speak to national stereotypes of licentiousness and antiquated gender roles, the evidence is that this view is increasingly in the minority in France. In 2020, the publisher Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, a bestseller in which she detailed her sexual abuse at the hands of the celebrated author Gabriel Matzneff, which began when he was 49 and she was 14. The fallout led directly to a change in the law in 2021, which codified sex with an under-15 by an adult as rape. Previously it had only been rape if there was evidence of coercion.
In many other respects, France is more progressive than the US and Britain. Studies show the country has the highest percentage of women in the workforce in the world. There is free universal childcare from the age of three. But sexual and domestic violence are ongoing problems. Official figures say there are 94,000 rapes or attempted rapes reported each year, compared to fewer than 70,000 in the UK.
Justifying his affair with Godrèche, Jacquot said he was encouraged by the world he moved in. “The fact is that cinema … was a sort of cover … for practices of that kind,” he said. “And at the same time, in the cinema world you feel a certain respect or a certain admiration [because] others would like to do the same thing.”
The furore over Godrèche’s comments shows that even if traces of these sympathies linger, they will not for much longer. Or if they do, those who hold them will keep their views to themselves. Even in France.
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