From Revolution to Ethics, Second Edition by Julian Bourg;

Author:Julian Bourg; [Bourg;, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773552470
Publisher: McGillQueensUP
Published: 2017-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

19

Desire Has Its Limits

The 1970s French discourse on pedophilia continued to move forward after the 1979 formation of the Groupe de recherche pour une enfance différente but hit a major setback in the Coral Affair of 1982–84.1 Personalities such as Foucault, Guattari, and Jack Lang were accused of having sex with boys at a group home, Le Coral, outside Montpellier. Fake photographs and documents were circulated as alleged proof. Schérer, who called the controversy “an important moment in the modern legal system’s general mobilization against pedophilia,” was himself charged for “corrupting youth,” but the charges were dropped. The early 1980s saw a marked decline in the public legitimacy of arguments for intergenerational relations. Newspapers on the Left, such as Libération, which had legitimated eccentric sexual debates in the 1970s, became less willing to do so. In the gay male community, the arrival of AIDS forced a reconsideration of sexual ethics. More broadly, a new rhetoric of “abuse” emerged in Europe and North America, abetted in part by the reassertion of cultural conservatism associated with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and, in a slightly different way, François Mitterrand.

The last point should be softened in light of specific circumstances: the years on either side of Mitterrand’s 1981 election saw the passage of a series of progressive laws that took a liberalizing and equalizing stance toward sexuality.2 The right to choose was reaffirmed in 1979, making a probationary five-year law permanent. In December 1980 the penal code’s statutes on rape were updated for the first time since 1810. In August 1982 homosexuality was decriminalized and the minimum age of consent for all orientations lowered to fifteen. Legal liberalization with an eye toward equalization represented the institutionalizing of sexual mores that had evolved since 1968. Feminists and gay activists had played inestimable roles in changing the cultural and legal status of abortion, rape, and homosexuality in France.

French pedophiliac discourse in the 1970s was thoroughly masculine. That discourse fit into a more extensive pattern on the French intellectual-political Left. With a few exceptions, in that decade masculine power and masculinity were seldom the objects of self-critical analysis by French men, a fact that explains in part the delayed emergence of critical masculinity in France.3 At the time, one more frequently saw hysterical and paranoid reactions to feminist criticisms of male power, violence, and desire. On another hand, limits to the liberation of child desires were to some extent drawn by feminists in terms of power and violence. The utter absence of these themes in 1970s French pedophiliac discourse speaks volumes. The writings of Schérer, Matzneff, and company appeared at the same time and within the same political field as feminist mobilizations around sexual violence. In fact, the overlapping of intergenerational discourse with sexual violence discourse was only one case of a series of conflicts between men and women on the French Left between 1968 and the early 1980s. Many male French leftists in the 1970s were slow to become self-critical about violence in general, often for “revolutionary” reasons.

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