Writer Gabriel Matzneff caught up by his past

The book does not come out until January 2 but it is already shaking the intellectual environment. In The consent (1), a superb story, Vanessa Springora, 47, new director of Éditions Julliard, recounts her loves, at the age of 14, with a prominent fifty-something writer, whom she names by her initials, " GM ". Gabriel Matzneff, immediately recognizable, is known for his practice of pedophilia, without exception, girls and boys, of which he makes the complacent apology in his works.

Long celebrated as an immense writer, this ace of posture, libertine dandy who perfumes transgression, takes on the air of lustful bonze to exalt his passion for Under sixteen, named after one of his essays.

"The ogre" and its prey

The title's "consent" is to be taken, in its double meaning: that of the young Vanessa, very enamored, who will take time to perceive the true nature of her seducer, and that of her mother, in the legal sense, delighted to see her alongside this prestigious man. Regularly invited to television, Renaudot Prize 2013, Gabriel Matzneff plows the same furrow with self-satisfaction that spouts his potential detractors.

Except once, in March 1990, when Denise Bombardier, on the set of "Apostrophes", denounces, with a cold and implacable rage, her actions which fall under the blow of the law. The next day, the Quebec author and journalist is derided and ostracized by the intellectual milieu.

Friend of Matzneff, Philippe Sollers publicly describes it as "Badly fucked". In The world, Josyane Savigneau defends his " foolishness " and ardently defends "The man who loves love". On Twitter these days, she still glorifies him.

In VOD, Jacques Lanzmann is surprised that Matzneff didn’t "Aligned the Bombardier with a big slap in the face". Upon her return to Quebec, she received anonymous letters, threatening calls, her house was tagged, her windows broken, as she tells in her autobiography published last February (2). "In retrospect, Vanessa Springora writes, I see the courage it took for this Canadian author to rebel, alone, against the complacency of an entire era. "

Summoned four times to the Juvenile Brigade, Matzneff got out of it by bamboozling the investigators, hiding the evidence before a search, much to the relief of Vanessa’s mother, whose responsibility was allegedly engaged. Vanessa Springora does not hide, and the pages are numerous, that this adult comes to fill a need for love that the absence of the father increases.

This chilling descent into hell of a kid in the hands of a manipulator is a dreaded precise of pedophilia. The prey details the tricks and methods of " ogre ", Always saved by the times and very active supporters who invoke his" nobility of feelings ", in the face of moral order.

An exceptional strategist, a clique of worshipers

Vanessa Springora recalls, overwhelming testimony on the learned mistakes of intellectuals, what was also the general "consent". Grandstand in 1977 on the front page of World ; petition signed by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, André Glucksmann, Jack Lang, Bernard Kouchner… Without a shadow since the living, of the expression of a remorse towards the “victims” of this guru of the pedophile drive, very much in the court, defended, in the name of style, by François Mitterrand. An exceptional strategist, a calculator who has managed to build up a clique of censors and adorers. Hat, the artist!

In three minutes, thirty years earlier, Denise Bombardier had very precisely pointed out what Vanessa Springora reveals: the impunity of the intellectual, the withering of his victims and the extreme difficulty of getting rid of his grip, even years later . Especially when the ogre in question persists in harassing her and stuffing all her books with private details, offering, in full view of everyone, the privacy of her prey. Without ever being worried or disowned. " Does literature excuse everything? Asks Vanessa Springora.

—————————

The words of Vanessa Springora and Denise Bombardier

Vanessa Springora, in The consent : " I think it is extremely difficult to get rid of such a hold, ten, twenty or thirty years later. All the ambiguity of feeling complicit in this love that we have necessarily felt, in this attraction that we have aroused, binds our hands even more than the few followers who remain at G. in the literary world. "

Denise Bombardier, in A life without fear and without regret, Memoirs: "I was the one through whom the scandal came about. I had broken the rules. I hadn’t played my role as a writer respectful of the great writer Gabriel Matzneff. But I had simply spoken with the words of my indignation. And I was both exhausted and released. Can I admit that this intervention was one of the few where, in my life, I did useful work? "

. (TagsToTranslate) pedophilia (t) Culture (t) writer (t) caught (t) Matzneff (t) Gabriel (t) past