Almost 37 years after his death, Michel Foucault was accused of abusing minors in Africa: 'He was a horrible guy'

03/30/2021 18:37

• Clarín.com

• Culture

Updated 03/30/2021 6:38 PM

Almost 37 years after his death, the French philosopher and essayist Michel Foucault was accused of the crime of pedophilia by the essayist

Guy Sorman

(77).

Foucault's writer and compatriot accused him of pedophilia in Africa, during an interview with The Sunday Times, which took a public stir in the last hours.

Sorman said that in 1969 he visited the author of "

Watch and Punish

" (1975) in the town of Sidi Bou Said, in Tunisia, where he lived, and there he learned that

he paid minors to have sex with them

.

He assured that they were boys between 8 and 10 years old.

"He would tell them: 'See you at ten o'clock at night at the usual place,'" which, as he described in the interview, was the local cemetery.

"He abused them sexually. He made love on the tombstones with the boys," he shot.

According to Sorman, on that trip that he tells of 1969 there were also other witnesses, including journalists, who knew about this.

He said

they kept him quiet because Foucault was like "a god in France; the philosopher king

."

"

He would not have dared to do that in France,

" he said, while noting that in Foucault's alleged acts there was "a colonial dimension of white imperialism."

The political scientist Guy Sorman in Buenos Aires.

Photo Alfredo Martínez.

He assured that seeing what he did in Tunisia made him reproach himself "for not having denounced at the time", but emphasized that this did not lead him to reject his work "but to look at it in a different way."

He thought that it should not be canceled, but "see it with a double glance."

Likewise, he said that it

seems necessary to him to know that "he was a horrible guy

.

"

According to CNN, Foucault was involved in another controversy while he was alive, having signed the petition for the Parliament of France to decriminalize consensual relationships with minors.

AFG

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