This is the book everyone is talking about, even before its release this Thursday.
A story that burns your fingers, that we devour so much that it plunges us into a family secret.
A large family of left-wing notables, incest, repeated sexual assaults on a 14-year-old teenager, facts about which “dozens and dozens of people” have been silent for more than thirty years.
Camille Kouchner, daughter of Bernard, the former Secretary of State of François Mitterrand and Minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, recounts in a dry, punchy and elegant writing, not only the attacks suffered by her twin brother and of which she accuses her step- father, the political scientist Olivier Duhamel - who has just resigned from all his functions, at the head of the National Foundation of Political Sciences, as well as of Europe 1 and LCI where he intervened -, but also the denial of the entourage of this last since 2008, the family secret was unveiled in this very upscale environment.
Before exploding publicly today.
Facts
"Victor" - the first name has been changed because the victim, father of three children, does not want to appear publicly -, twin brother of Camille Kouchner, was the victim of sexual abuse.
The author of these attacks, she accuses: Olivier Duhamel, the companion of their mother Evelyne Pisier, herself a great figure of the Mitterrandian left at the end of the 1980s. Caresses, blowjobs, in the evening, in the bedroom of the boy, while Evelyne Pisier, whose mother had just committed suicide, sank into alcohol.
These assaults will only stop when the teenager, under the influence and terrorized at the idea of denouncing his almighty stepfather, leaves the house.
Characters
Olivier Duhamel
Olivier Duhamel, here in 2016, is accused of incest and sexual assault on a minor by Camille Kouchner./AFP/Stéphane de Sakutin
After the divorce of Bernard Kouchner and Evelyne Pisier, he enters the life of the latter.
Children love it.
Very libertarian era.
Little, Camille sees him caress the leg of a friend of his mother at the table.
Mom defends step-dad: “There is nothing wrong with that, my Camillou.
I know.
Fucking is our freedom.
When the family secret about sexual abuse comes out, some are not surprised: the older brother says that Duhamel loved to measure his penis with a double decimeter.
A childhood friend also reveals that around the swimming pool of the secondary house - where everyone was invited to bathe naked -, the political scientist had kissed her on the mouth behind her parents' back when she had 12 years.
Evelyne Pisier.
A pioneer of feminism, one of the first women graduates in public law and political science, she was appointed director of the book by Jack Lang during the second term of François Mitterrand.
Character of a novel, she had an affair with Fidel Castro.
"La Familia grande" is also a nod to the Cuban revolutions and to the communist period of Chile under Allende.
A country where Duhamel and Pisier adopted two children.
Disappeared in 2017, the mother of the twins reacted very badly, in 2008, when the family secret had been revealed to the close entourage: “You bastards!
You threw it all away.
I hate your perversity.
Everyone will know now, ”she reportedly told her child victims.
Marie-France Pisier
.
The actress, famous in the 1980s in the cinema as in the theater, sister of Evelyne, committed suicide in 2011, at 66 years old, at the same age as her father.
She is the only solar character in "La Familia grande".
Very close to her nephew and niece, she urges her sister to leave Olivier Duhamel as soon as she learns of the latter's sexual abuse.
The two sisters will remain at odds for life.
The author suggests that during the liaison between Evelyne Pisier and Fidel Castro, Bernard Kouchner could have lived a brief love with the actress.
The two post-68 sisters, says the writer, were “sharers”.
Another curiosity: Marie-France Pisier married the first cousin of Olivier Duhamel.
Evelyne Pisier and Bernard Kouchner, here in 2011, had three children together, including Camille, author of “La familia grande” ./ LP / Philippe Lavieille
Bernard Kouchner.
The author's father takes it first for his rank.
Not in relation to the facts, but because of its absence and its harshness.
“Bernard was screaming.
He terrified us, reproached us for the misfortune of the world, ”wrote Camille of his dad when he returned from his humanitarian missions at the end of the world.
Angry, not always end after the suicide of the grandmother, which devastates Evelyne Pisier from whom he is separated.
He retrieves his children and puts them to bed with a sleeping pill, so as not to be too bothered.
"My father, a hero deserter," says his daughter, who nevertheless pays tribute to him at the end of the book for the courage of his ideas and his humanitarian commitment.
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Christine Ockrent
.
Evoked simply as "the star of the TV", the former queen of the news, become the companion of Bernard Kouchner, appears briefly as a cantankerous stepmother, not at all loving.
"Your children make too much noise, tell them to laugh less loudly," she blurted out at the table among other similar courtesies.
The twins hate coming to this media couple who receives the leftist caviar or “peanuts” every evening and asks them only to remain invisible.
The policies
.
This story is also a social directory.
In the holiday home of Sanary, in the Var, where some of the sexual assaults occurred, parade every summer at the political scientist and the academic in sight many well-known friends including Michel Rocard, Edith Cresson, Pierre Bérégovoy, Lionel Jospin and others.
To speed up the adoption procedure for his first daughter in Chile, Olivier Duhamel makes an effective phone call to Jacques Chirac.
In order to adopt it, we must also get married urgently: the ceremony of the Duhamel-Pisier couple is held in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), whose mayor is Michel Rocard.
The trial of the left caviar
.
“From 1990, the revolutionary left ceded it to the left caviar.
Power pays ”, writes Camille Kouchner, who castigates the generation of her parents, described as libertarian but unconscious and profiteering.
On sexual assault, his trial is damning: “Very quickly, the microcosm of people of power, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was informed.
Many knew and most pretended nothing had happened.
The shock follows: "This silence is not just cowardice.
Some of them are happy to have to shut up.
Such a duty attests to their belonging to a world.
It is an additional and always necessary mark of their identity.
On the left as in the upper middle class,
we wash our dirty laundry with the family
”.
Why now ?
Camille Kouchner decided to write because she herself felt guilty for having carried this secret for so long, under the influence of her mother's companion with whom she played poker or tarot, more friend than parent.
“During all these years and a long time after, I protected my father-in-law […] because I loved him like a father and that in the explosion of our family, in the face of my mother's drift, he was everything. what I had left.
She also writes: "At 14 and for a long time, I preferred to keep the love of my father-in-law rather than to distance myself from it.
"The" Familia grande "is the blended family then broken down.
“La familia grande”,
by Camille Kouchner, Editions du Seuil, 204 pages, 18 euros.
