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Duhamel affair: Marie-France Pisier's last fight

2021-01-24T06:29:37.806Z


In 2008, after learning of the charges of incest brought by her nephew against Olivier Duhamel, the actress fought to make


" Cheers.

This January 5, Mathieu Funck-Brentano, 36, publishes on Facebook these three words, accompanied by icons in the shape of glasses of champagne.

Below, a photo showing the sublime green gaze of her mother, actress Marie-France Pisier, who died in 2011 at the age of 66.

Only a few friends understand this cryptic message ... And catch the echo of the "Duhamel affair".

The press has just revealed the upcoming publication of "La Familia grande", where Camille Kouchner tells that "Victor", her twin, Marie-France's nephew, was sexually abused as a teenager by their stepfather, the political scientist Olivier Duhamel (1).

This terrible secret, the actress fought fiercely for the last three years of her life.

This January 5, therefore, Mathieu thinks of his mother, who disappeared in troubled conditions.

He is not the only one.

“I said to myself:

If Marie-France had been there, we would have slashed the champagne!

»Confides the writer and director Marie Jaoul de Poncheville, intimate of the actress.

"

It was about time!

thought, for his part, the costume designer Christian Gasc, faithful among the faithful of Pisier.

Marie-France would have liked this book to exist.

Thanks to him, her soul is finally at peace.

"

PODCAST.

The Olivier Duhamel affair: Camille Kouchner's shocking book that breaks the taboo of incest

It was at the end of summer 2008, in her apartment along Luxembourg (Paris VIe), that Marie-France Pisier discovered the incest of which her nephew had been the victim twenty years earlier.

Her older sister, Evelyne, a law professor who married Olivier Duhamel after divorcing Bernard Kouchner, the father of her three children, arrives at her home.

In the kitchen, she collapses, repeating what Victor told her ... Stunned, the actress gives herself up to her close guard.

“Marie-France called me screaming and sobbing,” recalls Marie Jaoul de Poncheville.

Christian Gasc came running immediately: “We were repelled… We shouted our anger.

"

Marie-France Pisier begs her sister to leave her husband

“From the first day, Marie-France reacted without ambiguity, remembers Julien Kouchner, the eldest of Camille and Victor.

Without giving up her values ​​and this sentence she kept repeating:

You have to go through life like a Lord.

Marie-France Pisier begs her sister to leave her husband.

“She tells me that if I'm staying with Olivier, it's because I don't love my children!

»Evelyne chokes in front of them, stunned.

But the elder resists and, for the first time, a gulf separates the sisters, who until then had overcome head-on the trials of a romantic life, peppered with dramas.

Evelyne Pisier, here in 2002./AFP/Jean-Pierre Muller  

Tossed, with their little brother Gilles, between Indochina and Polynesia, these daughters of a colonial administrator were interned for several months in a Japanese camp because of their father.

They lived through the two divorces of their parents (who had remarried in the meantime), then arriving in Nice with a single mother without a diploma.

Adults, they were confronted, in 1986 then in 1988, with the suicide of their father, then of their mother.

If Evelyne chose a university career while Marie-France, spotted at the age of 17 by François Truffaut, filmed for Téchiné, Buñuel and Rivette, published novels and made films, the two sisters lived a few streets away. 'from each other.

Sharing the same vacations, the same friends, sometimes the same lovers.

The blonde and the brunette even live with first cousins, since the father of Olivier Duhamel and the mother of the businessman Thierry Funck-Brentano, companion of Marie-France since 1982, are twins.

"She wanted to build an army"

But faced with Evelyne's incest and denial, Marie-France gives up her relationship with this much loved sister.

They become strangers to each other.

"Evelyne changed sidewalks when she passed Marie-France," says a relative.

The youngest is "capsized" by this rupture, but has her head held high.

"Marie-France had a very deep sense of what was right and what was not", underlines Georges Kiejman.

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The lawyer, who was the actress' husband between 1973 and 1979, does not comment on "the Duhamel affair", but remembers the "character" of the actress.

"This character, she got it from her mother who twice divorced a Mauritian husband and struggled to raise her three children alone", continues the former minister of Mitterrand.

With her activist soul, the one who signed in 1971 the manifesto of 343 for the legalization of abortion launches into a fierce struggle to reveal the secret of her nephews.

"This incest obsessed him," says Marie Jaoul de Poncheville./John Foley / Opale / Leemage  

"Marie-France wanted to denounce Olivier Duhamel to the police," recalls Marie Jaoul de Poncheville.

When the actress understands that her nephew will not file a complaint, she entrusts her relatives with a mission: to warn as many people as possible.

“She wanted to build an army,” explains the director.

"Marie-France was revolted by the fauna of ministers and important people who continued to go to Sanary-sur-Mer

(Editor's note: in the Var residence of Olivier Duhamel and Evelyne Pisier)

, assures the producer and academic Sylvette Desmeuzes, met in Hollywood in 1970. As soon as she heard that someone was invited there, she told him everything.

She wanted to create a void around Evelyne and Olivier.

"

Christian Gasc, who lives surrounded by photos of the actress in the building where she lodged him for two and a half years, sums up this "crusade": "In her dismay, Marie-France had decided, at the bottom of 'herself, to have the skin of Duhamel'.

The actress alerts hundreds of people.

During this time, Olivier Duhamel, who was MEP from 1999 to 2004, hosts the “Mediapolis” program on Europe 1, one of the Lagardère group radios, of which Thierry Funck-Brentano is one of the co-managers.

"TFB" would have continued to see his cousin - contacted, the person did not answer us.

Many anxieties

In 2009, Marie-France Pisier married her partner.

But at the town hall as at the restaurant Le Récamier, near the Bon Marché, Evelyne is not invited: Christian Gasc remembers that there were only their children around the couple, Mathieu, and Iris, as well as Sylvette Desmeuzes.

Some members of the family will not discover this union until the death of Marie-France.

Those years, the one who won two Césars and played in about sixty films does not turn much.

After 2008, she will play in the comedy "Is there any ham left?"

»And two TV movies.

"She led the life of a student: she read and went to the cinema a lot", underlines her friend Brigitte Fossey, who was her partner in the soap opera "Les Gens de Mogador" in 1972. Marie-France Pisier sees her friends, goes at the gym with Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert or Florence Pernel.

But she also suffers from the recurrence of breast cancer diagnosed in 2003 and sometimes grumbles.

Marie-France Pisier and Brigitte Fossey (on the right) were partners on the set of “Gens de Mogador”, in 1972./BestImage/Guillaume Gaffiot  

"This incest obsessed him," says Marie Jaoul de Poncheville.

Marie-France was extremely anxious: she would sometimes come to my house telling me that she just wanted to sleep… It was as if the myth built by her mother Paula was collapsing, according to which her family was the most extraordinary, original. and free.

»In April 2011, the horizon cleared up for Marie-France Pisier: she is in remission from her cancer and is delighted at the idea of ​​participating, on May 17, in the tribute that the Cannes Film Festival will pay to Jean -Paul Belmondo, his partner in "the Corps of my enemy" and "the Ace of Aces".

In mid-April, she spends the Easter weekend with her husband in their villa in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer.

20 km from Sanary, where they spent so many summers.

But on April 24, at 3:30 a.m., Thierry Funck-Brentano found his wife lifeless in the pool, her head trapped in a heavy wrought iron chair, rubber boots on her feet.

The gendarmes open an investigation.

The actress, who suffered from sciatica, had swallowed painkillers and drunk alcohol, but not enough to cause her death.

Water is found in his lungs, but not enough to cause drowning.

Hydrocution?

Heart attack ?

The gendarmes, who do not suspect any “external intervention”, conclude that a probable suicide is involved.

“She never wanted to be buried with her worst enemy!”

Thierry Funck-Brentano has always been persuaded by this thesis.

Not Marie-France Pisier's children or her friends.

On April 23, Christian Gasc, Marie Jaoul de Poncheville and Sylvette Desmeuzes spoke to the actress on the phone.

They assure that she was not suicidal.

And all three are convinced that after the trauma of her mother's suicide, which she had found in a state of decomposition, the actress would never have committed such an act.

“The suicide of Marie-France is inconceivable, insists Sylvette Desmeuzes.

If she had suffered too much, she would have told her children about it… And she would have died with panache, not sitting in a chair!

"

For Christian Gasc, “Marie-France would have liked this book to exist” ./BestImage/Coadic Guirec  

Some believe in an accident after illness.

Others believe the investigation was botched.

"Why didn't the dogs bark?"

"Asks Christian Gasc again.

During the investigation, the gendarmes brought to light the incest, but without complaint, the file remains there.

On April 30, 2011, Marie-France Pisier was buried in Sanary-sur-Mer, in the vault of the Duhamel-Funck-Brentano family.

“At the cemetery, when I realized that she would be buried with her brother-in-law, I wanted to scream!

Remembers Sylvette Desmeuzes.

"She never wanted to be buried with her worst enemy!"

A relative fumed.

Died of lung cancer in 2017, Evelyne will join her sister in the Sanary cellar.

After 2011, Marie-France Pisier's fight to uncover Victor's accusations is put to sleep… until January 5.

(1) Questioned in the press, the latter confined himself to answering that following these revelations, the prosecution opened in the wake of an investigation which is in progress.

Source: leparis

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