The aid allocated by the National Book Council (CNL) to Gabriel Matzneff, who is the subject of an investigation into rape of minors, "is not justified and should not have continued". The position of the Minister of Culture is clear. In a letter addressed to the president of the CNL, Vincent Monadé, Franck Riester indicates that the annual public allowance (AAR) which benefits the writer doing should not be renewed.
Awarded with the Renaudot Prize in 2013 despite the fact that in his works he praised sexual relations with minors, the 83-year-old writer is implicated in “Le Consentement”, a book by Vanessa Springora where she tells how she was seduced by the author almost fifty years old, when she was not even 14 years old.
Between 130,000 and 160,000 euros since 2002
Franck Riester must speak Tuesday on this social assistance granted to aging authors with low incomes. Fifteen writers aged 72 to 96 benefit from it, according to the CNL. Created by André Malraux in 1965, this social assistance is awarded to elderly authors with low incomes, with verification by a social worker. Abolished in 2013, the aid will no longer exist after the death of its current beneficiaries. Since 2002, Matzneff is said to have received between 130,000 and 160,000 euros.
"It now seems to me essential to accompany the annual decisions to renew these AARs with tighter control relating both to the income and living conditions of the beneficiaries and their present and past contribution to our literary and artistic life" , writes the Minister of Culture. He therefore hoped that a commission would be set up “this year” which would decide on the annual renewal of the CNL's annual allocation.
Etienne Gernelle, the director of the weekly Le Point, in which Matzneff has been keeping an irregular column since 2013, also announced on Sunday that the writer had decided to stop his collaboration. “He wrote to us on December 8 to say that he was stopping. He was the one who decided it, he probably knew that Vanessa Springora's book was going to come out, so he sent us this letter, "he said on France Culture radio.