French Prime Minister François Bayrou has spoken out in great distress after his older daughter announced she was one of the victims of abuse at a Roman Catholic boarding school, Notre Dame de Bétharram, in the Pyrenees. Hélène Perlant, aged 53, revealed in an emotional interview that she was assaulted by a priest at the school when she was 14 years old.
“I remained silent for 30 years. Other than this, I’ve never mentioned it to anyone,” Hélène Perlant told weekly Paris Match. Her allegations come amid a wider national reckoning in France over decades of abuse at the school, which has implicated members of the clergy and raised serious questions about state complicity and oversight during Bayrou’s political career.
Testimony of Hélène Perlant and the Years of Silence
During her interview, Perlant recounted a terrifying ordeal. “The priest grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several metres, then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach,” she said. “I wet myself and stayed like that all night, damp and rolled up in a ball in my sleeping bag.”
She further stated that psychological control and fear prevented her from speaking out. “Bétharram was organised like a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on pupils and teachers, so they stayed silent.”
Even after the painful ordeal, Hélène Perlant stood up for her father, justifying that she never informed him of the abuse. “I place him on the same level as all the parents. The more involved you are, the less you see and the less you understand,” she said.
Bayrou’s Reaction and Political Fallout on Hélène Perlant
Bayrou was visibly shaken by the revelations. He reacted when he visited a prison in south-eastern France. “That we didn’t know and the fact that such abuses took place are almost unbearable for me,” he said. He denied he had any earlier knowledge of abuse at the school, even though he had served as France’s education minister through the 1990s when the first complaints started emerging.
The Prime Minister labelled his daughter’s confession as “stabbed him to the heart as a father” and claimed not to know anything about the supposed incidents, which allegedly existed between the 1950s and as recent as 2010.
A School with a Dark History
Notre Dame de Bétharram, which was redesignated Le Beau Rameau in 2009, has long been suspected. In south-west France, near the city of Pau—Bayrou’s political base and the municipality he has represented as mayor since 2014—the school taught three of Bayrou’s six children. His wife taught religious studies at the school.
In the 1990s, several former pupils made abuse allegations, some of which involved sexual assault. Even though they, however, no investigation by the French education ministry in 1996 found that “Notre-Dame de Bétharram is not a school where pupils are brutalised.” This came after a former headteacher who was accused of raping a 10-year-old pupil was released without charge.
However, the scandal resurfaced in 2023 when a former student created a Facebook group for victims, leading to nearly 200 complaints. Around half of those included claims of sexual violence, including rape by two priests. The scale of abuse and the apparent cover-up have triggered a new national outcry.
Parliamentary Inquiry and Mounting Pressure
Responding to the deepening controversy, a parliamentary investigation has been announced, and Bayrou will appear before it next month. Political stakes are high. The Prime Minister leads a tenuous minority government that risks losing power if left-wing and extreme right parties ally in a vote of no-confidence.
The news has reopened sores and subjected Bayrou’s political record to renewed scrutiny. Critics suggest that, as a previous education minister and veteran MP in the constituency in which the school is based, he should have moved more decisively when warnings of abuse had first surfaced.
