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French Prime Minister François Bayrou has been engulfed in a widening scandal over physical violence and sexual abuse allegedly committed over decades at a Catholic school in his home region in the Pyrenees.
The crisis has been brewing for weeks, after more than 200 of now adult victims came forward to speak about the psychological terror, beatings and rapes allegedly inflicted on them by priests and teachers at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school from the 1950s to the 2000s.
Some have accused the prime minister of knowing about the problems since he was a prominent local politician at the time and later education minister. Bayrou has denied knowledge of the abuses.
But the scandal deepened for Bayrou this week when his eldest daughter, Hélène Perlant, 53, revealed in interviews that she too had been beaten by a priest at the school, though she insisted she never told her parents about it. Several of Bayrou’s five children attended the school, and his wife taught some classes there.
Perlant then appeared to cast doubt on Bayrou’s lack of knowledge about the Bétharram case. In an interview with investigative outlet Mediapart on Wednesday, she said her father met with a judge investigating charges of rape against one of the priests at the school in the 1990s.
“I don’t think [my father] remembers, but I was there the evening he came back from judge Mirande’s,” she said. Her father asked her at the time if she thought the allegations could be true, she added.
Judge Christian Mirande has confirmed the meeting, while a Bétharram teacher and a student have said publicly that they alerted Bayrou to the problems.
Opposition figures from the far right and far left have threatened to hold a vote of no confidence that could topple Bayrou, as they did last year with prime minister Michel Barnier. Appointed in December by his longtime ally President Emmanuel Macron, Bayrou is already on thin ice as he has been unable to pass the 2026 budget in the fragmented parliament.
He is due to answer questions before a parliamentary inquiry on May 14.
“As a father, it stabs me in the heart . . . it’s almost unbearable,” Bayrou said of learning of his daughter’s experience. “I was never informed of anything regarding violence [in the school].”
Perlant told France Inter that she “wanted to come forward, to say ‘I’m one of those at Bétharram’, so as to be able to talk with [other victims] — just another victim, one among others, and the daughter of the prime minister”.
She recounted her experience in an interview with Paris Match, saying a priest had “grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several metres, then punched and kicked me all over”. The incident happened in front of dozens of people, she said, none of whom came to her aid. “I wet myself and stayed like that all night, damp and rolled up in a ball in my sleeping bag,” she added.
Like in other countries, France has been reckoning with cases of alleged cover-ups by the Catholic Church. Most recently, the late Abbé Pierre, a priest who founded a major charity for the poor, was exposed as a paedophile. The alleged offences occurred over decades, and investigations have shown that leaders in the French Catholic Church were aware of his behaviour, as was the Vatican.
