In 2017, a 6-year-old girl told her mom that the man next door showed his genitals to her and fondled her. After he was arrested, French authorities searched his home and found hundreds of thousands of child porn pictures, as well as videos featuring bestiality and excrement. They also found a diary where he detailed what he did to his victims. The pervert was not some demented idiot—he was a surgeon.
In 2020, he was sentenced to prison, and on May 23 a French court found Joël Le Scouarnec guilty of raping and sexually assaulting 299 children; he was sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison. He admits that his first sexual offense took place in 1985 when he raped his 5-year-old niece. It appears that he took after his father, who sexually assaulted his own grandson, namely Joël’s son. “I reproduced in many children what my father did to my son,” the former surgeon said.
Why wasn’t he punished sooner? In 2005, he was convicted for possessing and importing child porn; he was sentenced to four months of suspended prison time. His medical license was not suspended and he was not barred from interacting with children. We now know that from 1989 to 2014, he raped hundreds of boys and girls in hospitals, the average age being 11. Most were unconscious or sedated.
How could he do such things? “I didn’t see them as people.” He is telling the truth. When Albert Speer, second in command to Hitler, was asked how he could kill so many Jews, he said he didn’t hate Jews. “I depersonalized them,” he said. Le Scouarnec also confessed that he “acted without any qualms,” thus confirming his sociopathic status.
Pornography, especially hard-core child porn, desensitizes its consumers, making it possible for them to treat human beings as subhuman. Indeed, Le Scouarnec readily admitted, “I was addicted to viewing child pornography.” But there are other factors that also played a role.
French law is very relaxed when it comes to sex between adults and minors. Up until fairly recently, there was no age of consent in France—now it’s 15. Currently, men who have sex with minors have legal rights—they cannot be charged with rape unless they engage in “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise.” In other words, if a 15-year-old girl is coaxed into having sex with a 25-year-old man, there are no penalties for the guy.
Law often follows changes in the culture, and as such we need to inquire why French laws governing sexuality are so lax. To do that we need to examine the thinking of French intellectuals on these matters.
Recall that Le Scourarnec started his rape rampage in the 1980s. A decade earlier, in 1977, French intellectuals signed a petition addressed to the French Parliament calling for the end to age of consent laws. Sex between adults and kids, they said, should be legal. The signatories were a “Who’s Who” of intellectuals.
One of those savants was author Gabriel Matzneff. In 2020, he published a book about his sexual adventures with young boys and girls. He also admitted to having sex with eight-year-old boys in the Philippines. But this was not the first time he came clean. He openly bragged about these exploits for years, going on TV to discuss them. Not only did he do no jail time, he became the hero to the literati.
Matzneff learned the central lesson of the social revolution in France—“It’s forbidden to forbid.” He took that 1968 message to heart, saying, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience.”
Those who also signed the petition included such notables as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. All of them were sexually promiscuous. Foucault, a reckless homosexual, went further, justifying rape.
Other signatories included Felix Guattri, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière and Giles Deleuze.
Guattri joined the Communist Party when he was a young man, and while he later quit, he never stopped promoting the politics of the left, focusing on the need for a sexual revolution. Lyotard was a postmodernist, an atheist who denied the existence of truth. Rancière believed in the “equality of intelligence,” telling his happy students that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person. Deleuze was praised for his intellect by Foucault, but it didn’t pay dividends in the end—he committed suicide by jumping out the window of his Paris apartment.
Did these intellectuals cause Le Scouarnec to become a monster predator? Not directly. It’s more complicated than that. They certainly had nothing to do with his upbringing. But they did help create a milieu where legal and social norms governing sexual expression became so relaxed as to be practically non-existent. Thus did they make it easier for a very sick man to get away with his history of rape and assault with impunity.
Evil does not occur in a vacuum. When perverts like Matznetff are applauded by the deep thinkers, it seeds the social soil for men like Le Scouarnec to act “without any qualms.”
