French Prime Minister François Bayrou says his eldest daughter’s revelation that she was among children who were abused at a Roman Catholic school “stabs him to the heart as a father”.
Hélène Perlant, who is now 53, alleges that a priest at Notre-Dame de Bétharram beat her at a summer camp when she was 14.
In recent weeks, details of physical and sex abuse perpetrated over decades at Bétharram in the Pyrenees have drawn increasing attention to Bayrou, who was local MP and education minister at the time.
Bayrou, 73, has denied suggestions that he knew about the abuse pupils allegedly suffered from the 1950s to 2010. He is due to appear next month before a parliamentary inquiry.
The boarding school is located in his stronghold in the south-west and he sent three of his children there.
Hélène Perlant was one of them, and in the latest twist to the saga she has accused a priest at the school of beating her when she was 14.
However, she was adamant she had never spoken to her father about the incident, which took place in the 1980s.
“I remained silent for 30 years. Other than this, I’ve never mentioned it to anyone,” she said in an interview with weekly Paris Match on Tuesday.
The priest, she told the magazine, “grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several metres, then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach,” she the told magazine.
“I wet myself and stayed like that all night, damp and rolled up in a ball in my sleeping bag,” she added.
Explaining why she had not talked about the experience, she said: “Bétharram was organised like a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on pupils and teachers, so they stayed silent.”
Notre-Dame de Bétharram – which was renamed Le Beau Rameau (The Beautiful Branch) in 2009 – is a primary and secondary school about 25km (15 miles) from Pau, a city Bayrou has led as mayor since 2014.
The school also lies within the constituency Bayrou represented as MP from the 1980s to the 2010s.
A number of allegations of abuse committed by priests and staff surfaced in the 1990s.
But in 1996 an investigation by the French education ministry concluded that “Notre-Dame de Bétharram is not a school where pupils are brutalised”.
Later a former headteacher accused of raping a 10 year-old pupil was released without charge.
Allegations continued to trickle out until 2023, when a man who had attended the school in the 1980s formed a Facebook group for alleged victims.
The social-media campaign led to about 200 complaints being filed. Almost half include allegations of sexual violence, including rape by two priests.
By February 2025 the scandal had reached national proportions and increased pressure on Bayrou’s already fragile prime ministership.
Three of his six children have attended the school and his wife was a religious studies teacher there. In addition, Bayrou was education minister in the mid-1990s, when the first reports of abuse emerged.
A judge who handled the rape case told Le Monde newspaper last year that he had a meeting with Bayrou in 1998 and that the politician had expressed concern about his son, who was a pupil at the school.
Bayrou disputes this account and maintains that he “hadn’t heard of any sexual violence at the school at that time.”
In her interview, Hélène Perlant backs up her father’s version of events. “I place him on the same level as all the parents. The more involved you are, the less you see and the less you understand.”
During a visit to a prison in south-eastern France on Wednesday, the prime minister said she had never spoken to him about the incident.
“That we didn’t know and the fact such abuses took place are almost unbearable for me,” he said.
But he made clear that in his role “as a public official, which goes beyond the role of father, it’s the victims I think of”.
The centrist leader became prime minister in December. He leads a vulnerable minority government that could be toppled if left-wing parties and the far right unite in a vote of no confidence.
Hélène Perlant has also given her account to Alain Esquerre, who has written a book about his tireless campaign to expose physical and sexual abuse at the school.
Esquerre told the AFP news agency it was a shame for the victims that her account had become so prominent, “because it steals their limelight a little”.
(BBC News)
