“The denial of François Bayrou around the Betharram affair is worrying”

His name had come back regularly since the affair had broken out in the open, a year ago. Was François Bayrou aware of the pedophile scandal of Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a religious institute located about thirty kilometers from Pau, whose Prime Minister has been mayor since 2014? Between the 1950s and 2010s, cases of physical and sexual violence, as well as rape, were regularly committed on many children aged 8 to 13.

Mediapart publishes this Wednesday an investigation, in which the media affirms that the former president of the General Council of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques and former Minister of National Education, who himself has educated several of his children within the institution, could not not know. Asked on the case several times, François Bayrou assured that he did not know everything. “It is true that the rumor twenty-five years ago, suggested that there had been slaps at the boarding school. But of sexual risk, I had never heard of, “he explained to Parisian One March 2024.

“Impossible” that he was not aware

According to Mediapartparents of students and a teacher would have alerted it at least three times in the late 1990s. During the first judicial case of Betharram, when a general supervisor was sentenced in June 1996 for having violently struck a A 14 -year -old pupil, leaving him for life for lifetime, the one who was then Minister of National Education ensures today that he has missed this affair. Which is “impossible” according to the victim’s father, who explains that his son was … in the same class as one of the children of François Bayrou. “At the time, I was furious against his lack of reaction” fummine the father with Mediapart.

A month after the filing of complaints for this physical violence and that the case makes a big noise in the region, the Minister of Education had even gone to Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram to support the establishment , as attest to the daily archives South West.

In 1998, a second Betharram case exploded, when the former director of the establishment, Father Carricart, was accused of having raped a student and was indicted. After a short -term pre -trial detention, he is “exfiltrated” to the Vatican, where he committed suicide in 2000. Here again, François Bayrou swears that he was unaware everything even as his wife, Élisabeth Bayrou, who taught catechism in Betharram , went to Father Carricart’s funeral, which François Bayrou himself would have intervened with the investigating judge in charge of the investigation, to question him.

“Betharram is a taboo subject for him”

Questioned this Wednesday by 20 MinutesAlain Esquerre, the whistleblower having made it possible that the Betharram affair – which is to date at 112 complaints – bursts in broad daylight, says it is “sad that François Bayrou does not take a position on this file, all the more More than the priests of the Betharram congregation no longer deny the facts and compensate victims of sexual violence. »»

“François Bayrou obviously condemns all sexual violence,” continues Alain Esquerre, but Betharram is a taboo subject for him because it touches him deeply in his faith, his values. He is stunned, he does not believe it. He has been alerted several times, but says he didn’t see … or he didn’t want to see. His denial, today, is worrying, and his attitude is untenable. »»

However, “there is no more room for suspicion” in this case, continues Alain Esquerre. “It took place over fifty years, the safeguards that should have been implemented were not, everyone dysfunctioned in this case. This must serve us as a lesson, and we should do a national cause, look at if the staff are properly trained, if the children are made aware … We must put things in place, both at the level of the Catholic Church and policy. Because in this case, politics does nothing while it is a national scandal. »»