Breaking taboo in elite family: Duhamel’s incest triggers shock wave in France – News



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In the book “The Big Family” the sociologist Olivier Duhamel is accused of abusing his stepson.

“The big family” brings together a large number of the French political and scientific nobility. The book of the same name was written by Camille Kouchner. In it, he accuses his stepfather, Olivier Duhamel, of having sexually assaulted his twin brother in the 1980s.

The defendant Duhamel is a constitutional lawyer and sociologist and one of the most influential men in the French scientific community until the book was published.

The Kouchner and Duhamel family

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  • Lawyer Camille Kouchner’s book “La familia grande” (“The Great Family”) addresses sexual abuse in her nationally known Parisian intellectual family.
  • Camille Kouchner accuses her stepfather Olivier Duhamel of having sexually assaulted his then younger brother Antoine in the 1980s.
  • Incidents are now prohibited by law.
  • Duhamel did not respond directly to Kouchner’s allegations, but resigned from all public duties after publication.
  • Camille and her brother Antoine Kouchner are the children from the first marriage of Bernard Kouchner and Evelyne Pisier.
  • Bernard Kouchner was the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs and Finance and co-founder of the aid organization Médecins sans Frontières.
  • Evelyne Pisier († 2017) was one of the first public law professors in France. After her divorce, Pisier married constitutional lawyer Olivier Duhamel.

For years, child protection organizations had complained that pedophilia was taboo in society. Kouchner’s book changed this, at least temporarily. Newspapers write about a shock wave and reports of abuse within families. Hundreds of testimonials can be read on social media. Self-help organizations say they are inundated with inquiries.

The media have difficulty addressing the issue

The shock wave has also affected traditional French media. First, the private broadcaster LCI fired the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. He had deceptively relativized the Duhamel case in a television discussion.

Conceived as a parody of Finkielkraut, the prominent cartoonist Xavier Gorce published a dialogue between two penguins: The little one asks the big one: “If I am abused by the adoptive half brother of my transgender father’s partner, who is now my mother, it is incest? »

The cartoon appeared in the online edition of the newspaper “Le Monde”. A storm broke out on social media. “Le Monde” withdrew the cartoon on the grounds that the illustrator had expressed himself misplaced in relation to victims of pedophilia and transgender people.

Then Gorce gave up his collaboration with “Le Monde” and complained about the censorship. That, in turn, did not allow “Le Monde” to apply. The editorial team must take responsibility and pay attention to the feelings of the readers.

Dispute for freedom of expression

This is reminiscent of the dispute over the Muhammad cartoons in France: the argument of offending the feelings of believing Muslims is always contradicted, according to the secular principle of the republic, that freedom of opinion and freedom of the media they are inviolable.

Now the question arises again: How far can satire go when it comes to incest or pedophilia? Illustrator Gorce gave his answer in another penguin dialogue: The big penguin asks the little one: “Do you already have a humorous passport?”

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