Francesca Gee Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #294

Francesca Gee, a journalist, is the author of two books on Gabriel Matzneff—whom she knew in her adolescence—The Deadliest weapon (2021) and The Scandal of Consent (2024), a critical look at Vanessa Springora’s 2020 best-selling memoir. She also wrote Who Is Francesca?, a study of mimetic desire and its role in shaping social norms.

Initially, Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand sent letters of support, and lawyer Thierry Lévy was involved but less known is that Pierre Boutang—Maurras collaborator, monarchist, Pétain nostalgist, and Action Française figure—mentored Renaud Camus, René Schérer, and Gabriel Matzneff. What is your recollection of the philosopher Pierre Boutang?
Francesca Gee: Thierry Lévy, the lawyer who wanted to abolish prisons, was the first newspaper owner to publish Matzneff’s columns in Aux Écoutes, which he inherited from his father.

Matzneff is known to have been supported by French President Mitterrand ; he also boasts of having received a laudatory letter from Georges Pompidou at the time when he was head of the French state.

Pierre Boutang, according to his biographer Stéphane Giocanti, worked for both the Gaullist militia SAC and for Jacques Foccart, who was one of its founders. He greatly influenced Matzneff in his youth, as the writer Henry de Montherlant and the newspaper owner Henri Smadja also had.

In 1965, Matzneff was backing Mitterrand’s presidential campaign in the columns he wrote for Smadja’s daily Combat ; Boutang recruited him to do likewise in La Nation française, a surprising request from a royalist.

Later on, Matzneff turned to Roger Frey, also a founder of SAC and then president of France’s Constitutional Council, for a favour. Frey agreed to illegally arranging for police surveillance of Matzneff’s ex-wife!  (Editor’s note: Frey’s tenure was already infamous for violent repression, including the 1961 Paris and 1962 Charonne massacres.)

The unbelievable degree of impunity enjoyed by Matzneff can only be explained if he was, like Boutang, an intelligence asset. He was possibly recruited willy-nilly under the threat of scandal and maybe arrest. Boutang himself may have entered the intel world either on a voluntary basis, for ideological reasons, or because his arm was twisted.

As a high school teacher in Clermont-Ferrand, he had an ambiguous relationship with his 17-year-old student René Schérer. Later on, Boutang reminisced, in his writings, about their mountain hikes, during which they spent the nights camping. Schérer’s brother, the filmmaker Eric Rohmer, went with them too.

About Renaud Camus, I know nothing.

“If sexuality, as I believe, is in itself not reprehensible, there is no reason why it should be so with children, or with children involved. It is absurd to consider it unlawful up to a certain age, and suddenly lawful the day that age is passed. Children have sexuality and well-known emotional impulses, which can very well be directed toward adults, particularly young and attractive adults, such as gym teachers or summer camp counselors, as we have all observed.” (Renaud Camus, L’Infini, Gallimard, no. 59, Autumn 1997, “La Question pédophile”).

Why does Dominique de Roux—founder of the Cahiers de L’Herne and admirer of Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger, Céline, and Salazar—call you “crazy”?
Francesca Gee: Dominique de Roux, a close friend of Matzneff and also a member of Pierre Boutang’s inner circle, also worked for the intelligence services, supplying information to the SDECE, notably in Lisbon during the Carnation Revolution. He showed particular interest in Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, whom he actively supported.

The entire de Roux family was tied to Boutang. Dominique de Roux’s son Pierre-Guillaume attended Boutang’s Sorbonne courses and later published Cahier neuf, Vol. 1 and Pour saluer Pierre Boutang. His wife Jacqueline contributed to a Dossiers H volume on Boutang, and his daughter-in-law Laurence Varaut had also been his student. Dominique’s Portuguese reporting was backed by Boutang’s son Pierre-André and journalist Jean-François Chauvel.

As for Matzneff’s claim that de Roux’s called me crazy, there is no evidence that he ever did : it probably is one of the author’s many venomous insinuations. He liked nothing better than to sow discord.

In the early 1970s, Yves Berger at Grasset urged Jacqueline Baudrier to give literary programs to Bernard Pivot, the first to feature Tony Duvert—Médicis winner judged by Roland Barthes, Edgar, and Lucie Faure—and later René Schérer and Gabriel Matzneff. Is Bernard Pivot a respectable figure?
Francesca Gee: I have nothing against Bernard Pivot, who in 1973 invited me and Matzneff to lunch and whose literary programs I watched back then. Yet he played a key role in the promotion of pedophilia, lasting into the 1990s.

As early as 1964, Matzneff mentions spending an afternoon with Pivot at the Vincennes racecourse. Pivot first invited him on his show Ouvrez les guillemets, in 1972, after Matzneff had scattered Montherlant’s ashes in Rome. Between 1975 and 1990, Matzneff was invited seven times on Apostrophes. The first time he was there to promote his pedophile manifesto, Les Moins de seize ans. Other dubious guests included René Schérer (for Émile perverti), Tony Duvert, Guy Hocquenghem, Roger Peyrefitte, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Renaud Camus, and even Pierre Simon, a member of Health Minister Simone Veil’s lcabinet and a signatory of the 1977 petition.

In 1987, Pivot even featured Jean-François Lemaire—a friend of Matzneff, who has been accused of raping a four-year old child with him—on a broadcast about Napoleon. Pivot has mainstreamed the pedophile discourse, never confronting advocates of child molestation with credible opponents. The only challenge came in 1990, when the Canadian Denise Bombardier confronted Matzneff, live on Apostrophes. The French intelligentsia closed ranks behind Matzneff; Philippe Sollers piled abuse on Bombardier.

After that scandal, Pivot never invited Matzneff again.

In 1975, the ORTF was dissolved, and Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, Marcel Jullian, and Jacques Chancel took over programming. Philippe Sollers returned to Gallimard, Martine Boutang to Grasset, and her husband Pierre-André Boutang founded ARTE.
Francesca Gee: In 1974, after President Giscard d’Estaing’s was elected and Marcel Jullian appointed as program director, Jacques Chancel helped reshape the Antenne 2 channel. Bernard Pivot’s Apostrophes first aired the following year.

Also in 1974, Chancel commissioned Matzneff’s book Les Moins de seize ans. This book would be reissued a number of times and prompt petitions to decriminalise sex with minors as well as lower the age of consent. It emboldened offenders to act out ; after it came out, militant pedophiles such as Dutch senator Brongersma closed ranks with Matzneff.

Chancel later showed unease: during a Radioscopies episode, (Editor’s note: unavailable to the public or journalists in the archives of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA).) he asked Matzneff what had become of the adolescent girls he seduced. The writer was left speechless. Giscard’s term thus marked a turning point in post-1968 “sexual liberation.”

Journalist Patrick Poivre d’Arvor joined Antenne 2 in 1975. He  befriending Matzneff and followed his  example in practicing literary harassment. Convicted for plagiarism and invasion of privacy, Poivre was banned from reprinting the offending novel and ordered to pay substantial damages.

Matzneff, on the other hand, has never faced trial, despite his boasting of abusing hundreds of children. In the early 1980s, Philippe Sollers joined the Gallimard publishing house and launched a review, L’Infini. A special issue devoted to “The Pedophile Question” included a contribution by Matzneff.

When Matzneff’s usual publisher refused to bring out his increasingly obscene Journal, Sollers volunteered to publish it. Sollers and Matzneff shared a common taste for Sade, a writer whom Antoine Gallimard, the head of the publishing house, also promoted.

This era also saw the rise of “cultural Trotskyism,” when radicals infiltrated publishing and media. Many were close to Matzneff, including Pierre-André Boutang  who was one of the founders of the Franco-German television channel Arte.

In 2004, his wife Martine blocked the first book I wrote to expose Matzneff. I am quite certain that she was acting on behalf of Matzneff’s chief protector Bernard-Henri Lévy, . (Editor’s note: Matzneff was a contributor to Le Point from 2013 to 2019.)

“Many things keep me at a distance from Gabriel Matzneff. First and foremost, of course, his indulgence not toward Russia, but toward its rulers. But I have always had a soft spot for his way of writing what he lives and living as he writes. And above all, there is this side of him—the outcast, the scapegoat of the moral leagues, the online petitions when he is awarded a literary prize, the prince of letters whose name has become almost unpronounceable, the pariah—that makes him, despite everything, irresistibly sympathetic to me.” (B-H.Lévy, “Matzneff, Pinchard, Martinez”, Le Point, March 15, 2018.)

Jean-Edern Hallier then founded Libération after publishing in L’Idiot International contributors like Alain Soral, Frédéric Taddeï, Marc-Édouard Nabe, Michel Houellebecq, Alain de Benoist, Philippe Muray, Eduard Limonov, Jacques Vergès, and Gabriel Matzneff—later invited back by Thierry Ardisson, Frédéric Beigbeder, Eric Naulleau, and François Busnel. What responsibility does Hallier bear?
Francesca Gee: I don’t know him, but his biography places him at the center of the same Parisian network: Hallier fathered a child with the daughter of Béatrix Beck, who was one of Pierre Boutang’s mistresses; he was friends with with Boutang’s son Pierre-André; he co-founded Tel Quel review with Sollers; Simone de Beauvoir in creating L’Idiot international; and his bid to join the Académie Française was supported by Jean Dutourd, a staunch proponent of Matzneff. After Hallier died, those close to him claimed he was murdered, although this was never confirmed by the courts.

Often overlooked are Philippe de Saint Robert and Paul-Marie Coûteaux, who advanced Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen, and Pierre-Yves Rougeyron. Has the FN/RN been complicit or permissive toward Matzneff and pedophilia?
Francesca Gee: The FN/RN never publicly endorsed pedophilia,  its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen did have friendly ties with Gabriel Matzneff, which the writer himself revealed.

(Editor’s note: Matzneff recalled his long-standing friendship with him, from whiskies at the Pont-Royal bar and shared diet routines to singing together in a pool (“Étoile des neiges, mon coeur amoureux”). Their closeness, spanning the late 1970s to the 1990s, included dinners on food, wine, art, travel, and politics. In Vous avez dit métèque? (2008), he also described lavish meals with Roland Laudenbach, Antoine Blondin and trips to Switzerland to shed excess pounds, with Christian Cambuzat.)

Debates over whether Matzneff is right-wing or left-wing strike me as pointless, given the way these labels tend to shift. By today’s standards, Mitterrand in 1981 was more right-wing than Marine Le Pen in 2025. On social issues—sexual revolution, immigration, assisted suicide—Matzneff has always been firmly on the left, even describing himself as a “loyal supporter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon” in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections. It was a Socialist government, under François Mitterrand, that in 1982 lowered the age of consent for homosexuals, from 21 to 15, which in my opinion is way too young.

Yet Matzneff also had strong ties to the right-wing, neo-pagan movement G.R.E.C.E. and its review, Éléments, whose columnist Alain de Benoist was a staunch supporter. Matzneff was also close to Bertrand Renouvin of the Nouvelle Action Française. I do not know Coûteaux, but I knew Saint Robert, a left-wing Gaullist, who made sure I was moved to school close to Matzneff’s home, Lycée Montaigne.

What happened at Lycée Montaigne?
Francesca Gee: Even right in front of its doors, Lycée Montaigne did nothing to protect its students. Matzneff would come and wait for me in plain sight at lunch break.

In my final year, I was summoned twice by the « censor », who was the headmaster’s adjunct, for no specific reason; the second time, a timely fire alarm allowed me to run away. The censor’s motives seemed highly suspicious to me. If his goal was to protect me, why didn’t he involve a social worker or the school nurse? It would have been more appropriate.

That same year, the curriculum included reading Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier (who incidentally was another frequent guest of Pivot). This novel, which won the highly-coveted Goncourt literary award, showcases a marginal figure fascinated by young boys, whom the author eroticizes.

Given the context of the Latin Quarter in those days, it isn’t very surprising. Lycée Montaigne was, and remains, a very progressive institution, where fistfights with the “fascists” from Assas University next door often erupted. About ten years ago, one of my nieces, in her final year, was even given a year-long assignment focusing on Matzneff and his works !