French Prime Minister François Bayrou has vowed to support an investigation into decades of alleged abuse at a Catholic school, following accusations from the left that he misled parliament by claiming he was unaware of the case while he was a local official and education minister. Pressure on Bayrou increased on Monday after a lawyer in his home town of Pau called for an investigation into alleged "obstruction of justice".
Bayrou has survived several votes of no-confidence since taking office in mid-December. But he now faces scrutiny over allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Notre-Dame de Bétharram – a Catholic boarding school in the Pyrenees where he sent several of his children.
In 1996, when Bayrou was education minister, a student lost hearing in one ear after being slapped by a school monitor, who was later convicted.
In 1998, a former headmaster was detained for allegedly raping a 10-year-old boy in the 1980s but was later released and found dead in Rome’s Tiber River two years later.
Last year, following testimonies gathered by ex-student Alain Esquerre, prosecutors began investigating over 100 cases of abuse at the secondary school between the 1970s and 1990s. Esquerre told France 3 in November that he had received new allegations of abuse up until 2016.
"A collosal number of victims are still lurking in the shadows," Esquerre said.
On Monday, lawyer Jean-Louis Blanco filed a request for a criminal investigation, after a gendarme in charge of investigating the school's former director, accused of rape in 1998, claimed on TV programme Sept à Huit that Bayrou had "intervened" with the General Prosecutor of Pau at the time to influence the judicial process.
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'I did everything I could'
Last week, investigative website Mediapart reported that Bayrou – who has been mayor of the southwestern city of Pau since 2014 – was aware of the abuse in the 1990s and had been informed on several occasions: twice in 1996 and once in 1998.
It claimed Bayrou, a devout Catholic, had lied in order to protect the school.
Last Tuesday Bayrou told parliament he was "never at that time" informed of such complaints.
On Saturday, the prime minister met Esquerre and other alleged victims at Pau city hall, as a dozen protesters outside demanded his resignation.
"I did everything I could when I was minister," he told the press following the three-hour meeting. "I did everything I thought I should do when I no longer was."
After the 1996 complaint, he said he had arranged for the school to be inspected. He also said he would ask for "extra magistrates" to fully investigate the accusations, and would look into how to help former pupils who had made accusations that fell outside the statute of limitations.
Victims are to meet a civil servant who previously led a 2021 inquiry into extensive abuse by clergy in France between 1950 and 2020.
Esquerre said he had waited 40 years for action and thanked Bayrou for being "attentive" to their testimonies.
"The Bétharram scandal involves physical assaults, cruelty, humiliation, molestation, and rapes of children aged eight to 13 by 26 adults – priests, headmasters, and lay monitors," Esquerre stated.
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Calls to resign
But the left-wing opposition are not satisfied with the prime minister's response.
Olivier Faure, head of the Socialist Party, said that if Bayrou had participated in any way to a law of silence in order to protect Notre-Dame de Bétharram "then in all conscience he must resign".
He insisted Bayrou's explanations before parliament had been confused at best and that he had lied on several occasions.
"He says he was not aware and [yet] he himself asked for a report in 1996, which suggests a doubt about what he knew or didn’t know," Faure told FranceInfo.
Bayrou's wife used to give Bible classes at the school. Faure questioned whether the PM had tried to protect the institution to the detriment of pupils due perhaps to the "closeness he and his wife shared with the institution".
Faure called for a parliamentary or judicial enquiry.
The hard-left France Unbowed and the Greens have also called for Bayrou's resignation.
The government is in a fragile position since last July's snap elections failed to deliver a clear majority. Bayrou's government has to rely heavily on a constitutional tool to pass legislation without a vote in parliament.
In February last year Bayrou's centrist MoDem party was found guilty of misusing European Parliament funds to pay for party work in France in 2017. But the court found insufficient evidence showing that Bayrou was aware of the scheme, which he has always denied was in place.
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