Hélène Perlant speaks in a gentle voice, but what the daughter of the French Prime Minister tells is brutal. “Children were beaten ten meters away from us, sexually abused every day, in the cold and tormented at night,” she told the radio station France Inter on Thursday. More than three decades have passed since Perlant visited the Catholic private school in Notre-Dame de Bétharram near the pilgrimage city of Lourdes. For the first time, the oldest daughter of François Bayrou now breaks her silence and speaks about the violence experienced on your own body in the most heard morning. What was going on in Bétharram, “we all break all of us, regardless of whether we were victims directly or not,” says the 53-year-old woman. The teacher and mother of three children working in Bordeaux wanted to avoid the public for a long time, but now she was photographed for the high-gloss magazine “Paris Match” in front of the sublime light school building of Béharram on the Gave River. A narrow, fragile figure, with curly, reddish hair in front of the high walls of the educational institution, she speaks for the first time about how a clergyman abused it at a summer camp of the Catholic school. She was 14 years old at the time. “One evening, when we unpacked our sleeping bags, the 120 -kilo man suddenly pulled me on my hair, dragged me several meters over the floor and put me on the whole body, especially in the stomach, and kicked me,” she says. Prime Minister Bayrou is “a victim’s father, which he didn’t know until Tuesday,” she says on the radio. And she was only “a victim among many”. Three children of the Bayrous went on a private head of the 73 years old for the Prime Minister for May 14th by a parliamentary investigation commission in the National Assembly. He is accused of knowing the brutal punishment of the students and the sexual attacks in Bétharram, without having done a bit in his constituency and in his time as Minister of Education from 1993 to 1997.Bayrou dates from the area between Pau and Lourdes, he grew up on a farm in the Pyrenees foothills. Bayrou is proud of his rural-Catholic roots, he always campaigned in his political career that he has a real political home. He has been the mayor of the city of Pau for more than eleven years. He did not put the office down, even if this is actually the rule for heads of government. So far, it has also been part of his self -image that the school in Bétharam strictly but outstanding education stands. Not only from the Béarn, but also well -off parents sent their sons to the boarding school led by spiritual. Three of their six children wrote the Bayrous in Bétharram, wife Elisabeth Bayrou gave the students catechism lessons. This is also why many today ask the question of what Bayrou knew. 2200 pupils hired a display February. The public prosecutor’s office in Pau initiated criminal proceedings after one -year investigation and more than 200 ads. A former supervisor was charged with rape and sexual coercion. Two other suspects benefited from the statute of limitations for the acts. The scandal shakes France, since it lines up in a whole series of repressed or covered up processes in church institutions.2021 the Commission Ciase used by the French Bishops’ Conference published a report on “massive and systemic sexual violence”. At least 216,000 children and minor adolescents had become victims of sexual attacks by priests, religious and church employees between 1950 and 2020. Add attacks by volunteers without a church office, the number of victims amounts to 330,000. In July 2024, the Emmaus Foundation revealed that the Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007, has long committed an icon in France, for decades. “Bétharram stands for the greatest case of pedophilia in France,” says Whistleblower Alain Esquerre. In his book “The Silence of Béharram” published on Thursday, Esquerre not only traces his own history of suffering at school, but also describes the mechanisms of looking away and negating, many victims have their say. Perlant also worked with Esquerre. She warns not to politically overload the educational process: “Society can only approach these acts of violence with feelings of guilt or to paralyze.” Perlant demands learning from the mistakes of the past. But the affair has long been political. Only with the prospect of a convicted man was it possible to get help from outside. Marc almost escaped an amputation, and the emergency room was dismayed. A short time later, an overseer hit the boy so much that he lost his hearing. Then it was enough for the father, he showed school in 1996 and went to the press. Bayrou was the French Minister of Education at the time. His son Calixte was in the same class as Marc.bayrou took up a teaching institution in Schutzal Minister, Bayrou could have ordered an investigation, after all, Bétharam like most Catholic private schools had a contract with the state. But he did nothing. In the regional newspaper “Sud Ouest” he even protected the Catholic institution from the allegations in 1996: “Many citizens of Béarn feel these attacks with pain and a feeling of injustice.” Several famous graduates of Bétharram such as the fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and the general director of the world currency fund, Michel Camdessus, came to Pau to express their solidarity with their former school. The violent supervisor, who hit Marc deafly, got away with a fine of 5000 francs. The school went without punishment. François Bayrou alongside victim representatives Alain Esquerre (right) at a press conference in mid -February in Pauafp1998, a student filed a complaint against the director for the first time – due to rape. He was also a clergyman. The investigator Christian Mirande, who was responsible at the time, recently spoke out of retirement and described that Bayrou asked him for a conversation at the time. Bayrou was concerned as the father of a student and did not want to believe what was accused of the director. The clergyman committed suicide after further students had filed a complaint for sexual abuse. The former judge Mirande said that Bayrou was informed. In 1996 she stood together in the hallway with Elisabeth Bayrou when loud screams of a student paused from a classroom who borrowed the teacher with blows. According to the mathematics teacher, Madame Bayrou did not react, she seemed to find the process normally. Gullung confronted the management and then became the victim of attempts to intimidate. Sometimes her car was damaged, she received threatening calls every day. The math teacher did not give up and wrote letters to the Minister of Education. She never got an answer. Finally, she asked for her transfer. Author Esquerre writes: “Everyone knew how to do the notes like the proletarians, the politicians”. There is a saying in the Béarn for naughty children: “If you continue like this, you will come to Bétharamm”. Esquerre says: “Everyone failed at the time, and François Bayrou was no better than the others.”
Abuse to boarding school: Bayrous daughter affected
