She is the only one of the three to speak in front of the camera.
On the set of "Files of the screen", this Tuesday September 2, 1986, the emotion is particular.
Viewers of Antenne 2 have just watched a TV movie, “Amelia” (37% audience, three times more than the unstoppable western of Channel 3).
More than its cinematographic qualities, it is undoubtedly its theme which attracted them so many: an incest and the way in which it disturbs its young victim.
The set brings together psychiatrists (among them, Tobie Nathan, very young), doctors (including Gilbert Tordjman, who, terrible irony, will be, twenty years later, accused of sexual abuse of his patients), a lawyer and a judge.
But the big news is the presence of three victims.
Ladies X and Y are talking from the back.
Eva Thomas, 44, raped by her father at the age of 15, refuses this precaution.
She also founded the SOS Inceste association a year earlier, in 1985.
Elegant, gray hair, dressed in a soothing green, posing intentionally neutral words, except that of "monster" which, at one point, escapes her, she tells of astonishment, refuge in silence and anorexia.
Such words have never been spoken on television before.
“I chose to testify with my face uncovered because I would like to come out of shame,” she says.
Thirty-five years later, Eva Thomas does not remember having been afraid during those few minutes.
“I was very determined.
I had warned my family.
I wanted things to move, so I threw myself into the void.
"
A testimony that shifts opinion
The telephone switchboard explodes.
Countless expressions of sympathy from a shocked public, but also protests from fathers claiming “happy incest”, even citing their own as an example.
“This show got me into a whirlwind of public debate.
The theme was often "Incest: fantasy or reality?"
»» Since then, Eva Thomas has written two books.
Her father asked her forgiveness in a letter.
She saw him again, was able to reconnect.
“When everything is said socially, it's easier to find each other.
But that was only possible because he confessed.
"
For Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, author of an enlightening “History of pedophilia, XIXth-XXIst centuries”, published by Fayard in 2014, this program is one of the moments that changed opinion.
“Based on Eva Thomas' testimony, the media gave voice to the victims.
From an object of desire, the abused child has become a victim of heinous crimes.
Three years later, in 1989, another open-face testimony had a huge impact.
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On March 27, a young woman, Claudine Joncour, drives home the point by claiming to have been raped by her father from the age of nine and for the following four years.
During the program "Mediations", on TF1, in front of the journalist François de Closets, she describes the terror, the avoidance game so as not to be alone with her father, the blackmail to which he subjects her ("If you say it to your mother, she is going to commit suicide ”).
After the broadcast, the father lodged a complaint for "defamation".
The facts being prescribed, he wins his case.
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In July 1989, the Saint-Brieuc tribunal de grande instance condemned Claudine Joncour and François de Closets.
Minimum penalty, certainly (reduced fines and a symbolic franc for Claudine Joncour), but penalty all the same.
François de Closets remembers: “This is one of the two really important shows that I did.
During the recording, I was on the verge of tears.
I had met Pierre Arpaillange, Minister of Justice, who had refused to touch the prescription.
A few months later, the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the first to recognize minors as full-fledged beings, was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit's words
Is television the barometer of our developments?
Four years before Claudine's testimony, an episode of the program "Apostrophes" with a diametrically opposed perspective had been broadcast.
We saw a plump Daniel Cohn-Bendit, slumped in his chair like an ill-bred kid, his insolent gaze jubilant with the happiness of shocking the bourgeoisie, asserting in the face of the frightened seminarist face of Paul Guth, then successful conservative writer: " You know that a kid's sexuality is absolutely fantastic!
[…] I worked with kids who were between 4 and 6 years old.
Well, you know, when a 5 year old, 5 and a half year old little girl starts to undress you, it's fantastic, because it's an erotic-manic game.
"
In 1975, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (here with Olivier Duhamel, in 1997) made remarks that he would drag like a ball.
/ Opal / Leemage / John Foley
Since then, Cohn-Bendit has been dragging along, like a ball, both these statements and extracts from an old book published in 1975, “The Grand Bazaar”, in which he evoked his experience as an educator in the self-managed garden in Frankfurt, Germany, in these terms: "It had happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and started to tickle me.
I reacted differently depending on the circumstances, but their desire was a problem for me.
I asked them: why don't you play together, why did you choose me, me, and not other kids?
But if they insisted, I stroked them anyway.
»François Bayrou, in 2009, throws these sentences in his face, a YouTuber pursues him in the metro accusing him and uploads the video of his flight.
Collective complicity
The past is catching up with others.
On January 18, 2021, on Europe 1, Jack Lang, whose name (without anything ever being proven) appears regularly when we associate pedophiles and politicians, recognized that signing a platform as he had done in 1977 for calling for the decriminalization of sex with children was "unacceptable bullshit".
But, he added: “We were very numerous, at the time, to sign that.
It was a series of intellectuals, it was after 68.
And we were carried by a sort of faulty libertarian vision.
"
Bernard Pivot, too, puts forward “another era” to explain his complacency in the face of the words of the writer Gabriel Matzneff, who boasted to “Apostrophes” of his loves with teenagers, arousing only smiles. accomplices, with the exception of the Canadian writer and journalist Denise Bombardier, at the time called "badly fucked", today celebrated for her courage.
Until 1990, the writer Gabriel Matzneff was regularly received by Bernard Pivot in the program "Apostrophes".
/ Sygma / Corbis / Getty / Sophie Bassouls
"I would have needed a lot of lucidity [...] to escape the excesses of a freedom that my colleagues in the written press and the radio were just as comfortable with", wrote Pivot to the "JDD" to apologize, thirty years after the events.
Let us note all the same that this “time” will have been particularly long for the journalist, who invited Matzneff for the first time in 1973, and on several occasions until 1990, year of the famous emission with Denise Bombardier.
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What was that time when certain intellectuals tried to make pedophilia a tolerated way of life?
From the 1920s to the 1950s, a writer like André Gide defended, in his work and in his life, a teacher-student relationship between an adult and a child, an "educational pederasty" that included the sexual act in a context of 'trainer' exchanges.
This attitude never led to a legal complaint from the families concerned.
“Gide was convinced that this pederasty would be recognized and accepted,” says Frank Lestringant, author of a monumental biography (André Gide the concern, Flammarion, 2011).
At the time of his death, he was attacked much more on his political positions than on pederasty.
"
Henry de Montherlant and Roger Peyrefitte (the author of “Particular Friends”) were both arrested, one in 1938 at a fair in Berlin, the other in 1940 in the Luxembourg Gardens, for “embezzlement of minors”, without this casting the slightest shadow on their literary careers.
Michel Tournier, who died in 2016, won the Goncourt Prize in 1970 with a novel, “Le Roi des aulnes”, which many believe, behind the metaphor of the ogre, the content is explicitly pedophile.
All these texts (except those by Peyrefitte) are still available in the very prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
An ephemeral "Front for the liberation of pedophiles"
The 1970s flourished on this soil.
Until the early 1980s, the newspaper “Liberation” opened its columns to a few extremely complacent writings.
Journalist Sorj Chalandon responded in 2017 to a reader to explain (and not justify) these wanderings.
“Moral order.
Here is the enemy.
And "Liberation" of this time is nothing other than the particular echo of the common vertigo.
We are at the end of the 1970s. The traces of the May barricades trail on the walls and in the heads.
[…] The ban, any one, is felt to belong to the old world, to that of the embittered, the oppressors, the employers' militias, the bludgeoning police, the corrupt […].
"
Among these freedoms to defend, that of a sexuality repressed for too long: free love, the right to divorce, the explosion of porn movies, libertinism and the “sensual” education of children are thrown in the same libertarian bag.
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In January 1977, a petition circulated in favor of three men tried before the Assize Court of Versailles for “indecent assault without violence on minors under 15 years old”.
It asks for the end of the proceedings, affirms the “consent” of the children and bears the signatures of Louis Aragon, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann, Jack Lang, Roland Barthes, Patrice Chéreau or Philippe Sollers.
At the same time, an open letter addressed to the review commission of the Penal Code to go in the direction of "a recognition of the right of the child and the adolescent to maintain relations with the persons of his choice" bears, she, the initials of personalities like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Françoise Dolto or Jacques Derrida.
In the 1970s, pictures of David Hamilton, artistic blur on languid bodies of young nubile girls, adorned most teenage bedrooms, and those of Irina Ionesco using her 4-year-old daughter as an erotic model were published everywhere.
A very ephemeral “Front for the liberation of pedophiles” was even created, while the writer Guy Hocquenghem and the philosopher René Schérer, brother of Eric Rohmer, pleaded for the sexual freedom of the child in several magazines.
AIDS, the Dutroux "affair" and psychiatrists
Two writers then embody this trend: Gabriel Matzneff and Tony Duvert.
The first, notably a columnist for "Le Monde" or "Le Point", is very introduced in literary circles, and hailed as much by Philippe Sollers as by Jean Dutourd or Jean d'Ormesson, little known for being frantic promoters of the liberation of the manners.
A barely criticized Renaudot prize will be awarded to him again in 2013 by a jury of which Christian Giudicelli is a member, an editor who scoured Filipino pedophile brothels with him.
To crack this aura, it will take the shock caused by the publication, at the end of 2019, of "Consent" (Grasset), the book of one of his "little lovers", Vanessa Springora.
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The case of Tony Duvert, whom the writer and former president of the Académie Goncourt, François Nourissier, celebrated with admiration as a “literary thug”, is a little more complicated.
Theorist and proselyte of pedophilia, he very clearly claims the right for children to dispose of their bodies as they see fit and makes this freedom the pivot of his work, in particular in "Le Bon Sexe Illustré" (1974) and “The Male Child” (1980).
In 1973, he won the Medici Prize for Landscape of Fantasy.
“His tragedy,” explains his biographer Gilles Sebhan, “is that there was a rather short time when he believed that pederasty could be accepted.
"
Theorist and proselyte of pedophilia, Tony Duvert, who died in 2008, made it the pivot of his work. / Sygma / Getty / Jacques Haillot
AIDS will end up adding a serious element to sexuality, and the Dutroux affair, in 1996, will definitely superimpose the image of the pedophile on that of the sexual criminal.
Then, the work of psychiatrists on the trauma of children, such as the testimonies of victims of incest on television, will remove all their “transgressive romanticism” from this type of relationship.
Duvert will stop publishing, and will return to live for a few years with his mother, whom he hated, before dying in solitude (his body will be discovered more than a month after the death) in his pavilion in Thoré-La-Rochette, in the Loir-et-Cher, in August 2008. Avoiding the current unanimous condemnation of Olivier Duhamel, frightening sucker of the excesses of the time when it was dreamed that it could be "forbidden to prohibit".