French petition against age of consent laws

The late 1970s saw a concerted effort on the part of Gay Rights activists, the French feminist organization Choisir, and Leftist Intellectuals to not only equalize the age of consent but rethink or discard the concept altogether.[1][2]

A number of French intellectuals—including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret and various prominent doctors and psychologists—signed the initial petition.[3] The primary argument, for most of the signatories, was that there was a homophobic disparity in age of consent created by recent legislation. This law made heterosexual sex legal at the age of 15, but prohibited sodomy and similar acts until age 18.

Many of the signatories - including but not limited to - Foucault, Danet and Hocquenghem - later argued in favor of legalizing sex with children, claiming a child can consent - "listen to what the child says and give it a certain credence. This notion of consent is a trap, in any case. What is sure is that the legal form of an intersexual consent is nonsense. No one signs a contract before making love."[4] The same year, Michel Foucault presented to the Commission for the Revision of the Penal Code to equalize and lower the age of consent to 13.[1] In 1977[5] and 1979[6] two open letters were published in French newspapers defending individuals arrested under charges of statutory rape. In 1977, another petition was addressed to the French parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age of consent law. The laws were considered an infringement on the sexual autonomy of children.[2]

Background

In 1945, an ordinance was enacted by the French government that established an age of consent in France of 15. However, an article within this ordinance forbade sodomy and similar "sexual relations against nature" with any person under the age of 21. In 1974, this was lowered to 18.[7] This was perceived by activists, including Michel Foucault and Guy Hocquenghem, as being discriminatory against gay men.[4]

Michel Foucault argued that it is intolerable to assume that a minor is incapable of giving meaningful consent to sexual relations.[8] Foucault also believed consent, as a concept, was a "contractual notion", and that it was not a sufficient measure of whether harm was being conducted [4] Foucault, Sartre, and newspapers such as Libération and Le Monde each defended the idea of sexual relationships with minors.[9]

The petition

Michel Foucault stated that the petition was signed by himself, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions.[10]

The main body of the text calls for the end of discrimination against homosexual men encoded in the 1945 ordinance. It then calls for a commission called the Commission de Révision du Code Pénal (Penal Code Revision Commission) to review the age of consent and recommend changes to parliament.[11] The petition also explicitly addresses the 'Affaire de Versailles', where three adult men, Dejager (age 45), Gallien (age 43), and Burckhardt (age 39) had sexual intercourse with minors from both genders aged 12–13.[12][13]

On April 4, 1978, a conversation detailing the reasons for their positions was broadcast by radio France Culture in the program "Dialogues". The participants, Michel Foucault, Jean Danet and Guy Hocquenghem, had all signed the 1977 petition, along with other intellectuals.[10] They argued the idea of legal consent is a contractual notion and a "trap", saying that "no one makes a contract before making love".[10] The conversation has been published as "Sexual Morality and the Law" and later reprinted as "The Danger of Child Sexuality".[14]

Publication of open letters

An open letter signed by 69 people, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and Louis Aragon[2] was published in Le Monde in 1977, on the eve of the trial of three Frenchmen (Bernard Dejager, Jean-Claude Gallien, and Jean Burckardt) all accused of having sex with 12- and 13-year-old girls and boys. Two of them had then been in temporary custody since 1973 and the letter referred to this fact as scandalous.[5] The letter claimed there was a disproportion between the qualification of their acts as a crime and the nature of the reproached acts, and also a contradiction since adolescents in France were fully responsible for their acts from the age of 13. The text also opined that if 13-year-old girls in France had the right to receive the pill, then they also should be able to consent,[5] arguing for the right of "13- and 12-year-olds" "to have relations with whomever they choose."[2]

A similar letter was published in the paper Libération in 1979, supporting Gérard R., an accused child sex criminal awaiting his trial for eighteen months, signed by 63 persons, stating that Gérard R. lived with young girls aged 6 to 12 and that they were happy with the situation. The letter was later reproduced in the paper L'Express, in the issue of March 7, 2001.[6]

Legacy

In 1982, the French government removed its clauses regarding sodomy and similar acts "against nature" from the 1945 ordinance.[15]

See also

References
  1. Percy, Noah, and Camille Robcis. "The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law." (2022). Senior Thesis, Columbia University Department of History
  2. Henley, Jon (2001-02-23). "Calls for legal child sex rebound on luminaries of May 68". The Guardian. Paris. Archived from the original on 2019-11-05. Retrieved 2019-10-20. French law recognises in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish," said a second petition signed by Sartre and De Beauvoir, along with fellow intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida; a leading child psychologist, Françoise Dolto; and writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Louis Aragon. "But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned. It should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose.
  3. "Lettre ouverte à la Commission de révision du code pénal pour la révision de certains textes régissant les rapports entre adultes et mineurs" [An open letter to the Penal Code Revision Commission regarding the revision of texts governing relations between adults and minors]. Archives Françoise Dolto (in French). Paris: Association des Archives et Documentation Françoise Dolto. Archived from the original on 2020-01-25. Retrieved 2020-01-06.
  4. "The Danger of Child Sexuality" (PDF). Semiotext(e).
  5. "Le Monde of January 26, 1977". Archived from the original on August 30, 2012. Retrieved 2011-01-30.
  6. "Quelques pétitions ou lettres ouvertes pas sans équivoque". L'Express (in French). March 1979. Archived from the original on 4 April 2005. Retrieved 22 August 2015.
  7. Bérard, Jean; Sallée, Nicolas (July 2015). "The Age(s) of Consent: Gay Activism and the Sexuality of Minors in France and Quebec (1970-1980)". Clio. Women, Gender, History. 42 (2): 99–124. doi:10.4000/clio.12778. Retrieved August 8, 2022.
  8. Doezema, Marie (10 March 2018). "France, Where Age of Consent Is Up for Debate". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 10 March 2018. Retrieved 8 September 2022. Under this interpretation of liberté, young children were empowered to find happiness in sexual relationships; their ability to consent was a foregone conclusion. Any effort to suggest otherwise would be a condescension, a disrespect to them as fully realized human beings. In a radio interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said of sex with minors that assuming 'that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.'
  9. Onishi, Norimitsu (7 January 2020). "A Victim's Account Fuels a Reckoning Over Abuse of Children in France". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 9 January 2020. Retrieved 10 January 2020. But the publication, last Thursday, of an account by one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, has suddenly fueled an intense debate in France over its historically lax attitude toward sex with minors. It has also shone a particularly harsh light on a period during which some of France's leading literary figures and newspapers — names as big as Foucault, Sartre, Libération and Le Monde — aggressively promoted the practice as a form of human liberation, or at least defended it.
  10. Sexual Morality and the Law, Chapter 16 of Politics, Philosophy, Culture –Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Krizman. New York/London: 1990, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-90149-9, p.275
  11. "Françoise Dolto et la révision du code pénal sur la sexualité des grands mineurs".
  12. "À Propos d'un Procès". Le Monde. 26 January 1977.
  13. "Matzneff: Les signataires d'une pétition pro-pédophilie de 1977 ont-ils émis des regrets?" [Did the signers of a 1977 pro-pedophilia petition express any regrets?] (in French).
  14. "The Danger of Child Sexuality – an interview with Michel Foucault" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 February 2017. Retrieved 31 October 2015.
  15. "The Black Masses of Michel Foucault, the Bullshit of Guy Sorman". Lundi matin (fr). April 16, 2021. Retrieved August 30, 2022.
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