In France, Epstein files evoke history of pedophilia in intellectual circles

PARIS (CN) — When describing Jeffrey Epstein earlier this month, former French culture minister Jack Lang enthused, “The Jeffrey I knew was a man passionate about art, charming!”

Lang, who until his forced resignation Sunday was president of the prestigious Arab World Institute, told French TV channel BFM, referring to the convicted pedophile, “This man was not the criminal he was described as today.”

Lang, 86, served as culture minister under former President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and early 1990s, when he was responsible for the Louvre's renovation and the building of I.M. Pei's now iconic pyramid at the museum's entrance.

He is one of the most prominent French figures to surface in the recent release of roughly 3 million Epstein files, alongside former Minister of Finance Bruno Le Maire and extreme-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen.

There were 685 mentions of Lang's name in the newly released files, including in emails signed “with my friendship,” although he now says the two were just acquaintances. There were family dinners, real estate plans and A-list invitations. Lang brought Epstein to the 30th anniversary of the Louvre Pyramid, where the two are pictured together just five months before Epstein’s death in custody.

Lang was coming under increased pressure as the prosecutor’s office for financial crimes on Friday opened a preliminary investigation for suspected “laundering of tax fraud proceeds.” He was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Sunday to explain his ties to Epstein after initially fending off numerous calls to step down.

Those moves came after a report in French investigative outlet Mediapart about an offshore fund based in the Virgin Islands and jointly held by Epstein and Lang’s daughter, Caroline Lang.

Caroline Lang was also to inherit $5 million in Epstein’s will, Mediapart reported. She told the outlet that the fund was to support emerging artists and that she knew nothing of the will.

“I have the feeling that Jack Lang's line of defense, which involves referring to the fact that Epstein was in love with art and was a charming person, is going over extremely poorly in civil society today,” Pierre Verdrager, sociologist and author of "The Forbidden Child," said.

But the Lang affair recalls a decadeslong history of France’s intelligentsia defending, participating in and writing about pedophilia, often without punishment. The movement gained mainstream attention in the 1970s; riding the tailwinds of the May 1968 protests, some of the country’s most prominent artistic figures argued that decriminalizing pedophilia should be part of the sexual liberation movement.

France famously took in filmmaker Roman Polanski after he fled the U.S. in 1977 on the verge of his sentencing for engaging in sexual acts with a 13-year-old girl.

“I would refrain from having a conspiracy-minded analysis of these issues,” Verdrager said. “It's enough to look at history to see that, effectively, until a relatively recent date, pedo-criminality, which wasn't called that at the time, was supported.”

According to Verdrager, there was a group of French intellectuals that advocated to allow sexual relations between adults and minors.  

“In the '70s and '80s, there was a whole movement in France, and not just in France, that was determined to make it heard that sexual contact between adults and children is something not only possible, but desirable and legitimate,” Verdrager said. “So there was a whole section of the intelligentsia that actively worked to defend these causes, and which today, in light of current events and the transformation of the social world in relation to the issue of child sex crimes, is resurfacing.”

Gabriel Matzneff, a prominent literary figure throughout the 1970s, spearheaded the movement. His published books included excerpts about traveling to the Philippines to engage in sexual activity with 8- to 12-year-old boys; later, he had a yearslong relationship with Vanessa Springora, who was 13 at the time they met — he was 50.

This wasn’t kept behind closed doors.

Throughout the 1970s to the 2000s, Matzneff appeared in public with 13- and 14-year-old girls according to Gisèle Sapiro, a professor of sociology at EHESS. They would sometimes appear with him on television.

“In the famous television program dedicated to books, ‘Apostrophes,’ in 1990, the host, Bernard Pivot, presented Matzneff, laughing, as a 'sex educator,' and everyone on set laughed, except for the Quebec writer Denise Bombardier,” Sapiro said. “[She] explained … that in her country such abuses are prosecuted.”

In 1977, Matzneff and other members of France’s elite artistic circles — including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Lang — wrote an open letter in France’s leading newspaper Le Monde. They pleaded for judges to release three men who were convicted of indecent assault without violence on minors under 15 years old.

"French law contradicts itself when it recognizes a capacity for discernment in a minor of 13 or 14 years of age whom it can judge and condemn, while it denies him this capacity when it comes to his emotional and sexual life,” the letter said. “Three years in prison for caresses and kisses is enough.”

Between 2002 and 2020, Matzneff received a monthly state pension that supports writers living in financial distress. This was cut when Springora published a book, “Consent,” detailing their relationship; it received nationwide acclaim and sparked a fresh conversation about the issue.

A day after the book was released, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into Matzneff for raping a minor; however, despite searching his home for unpublished writings, they were unable to find evidence of pedophilia within the statute of limitations.

Muriel Salmona, a psychiatrist and founder of the Association of Traumatic Memory and Victimology, argues that in France, many intellectuals believed they were entitled to engage in sexual activity with minors because of their social status. In her opinion, this is a bit of a “French specificity” on the subject.  

“People were so sure of their privileges and of their entitlement ... And that they had the right to do what they had done because of their status, for example as an artist, a politician — their importance, that's it,” she explained.  “So we can prosecute and condemn people who are of a low sociocultural level, but not them — they’re not ashamed, that's what's really hallucinatory, absolutely hallucinatory.”

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