Even by the standards of Emmanuel Macron, a president accustomed to going off script, he misplaced what he said in the midst of the wave of women’s accusations against Gérard Depardieu, and the images that showed him uttering obscenities. “He is an immense actor,” he said in a television interview in December, “he has recited beautiful texts, he is a genius in his art, he has made France known to the entire world, our great authors, our great characters. . “As president of the Republic and as a citizen, I say that he is a source of pride for France.”
Depardieu spent a good part of the day in police custody this Monday to be interrogated for two new complaints of sexual assault during separate filmings in 2014 and 2021. At the end of the interrogation, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that he will be tried for the second case, the first trial in a star who has sometimes been compared to producer Harvey Weinstein in the United States, but who due to his celebrity and cultural influence—as demonstrated by Macron’s departure—means much more in his country, and in the world.
He has already been charged since 2020 for a similar case. Some cases go back further; the complaint by the actress Hélène Darras for sexual assault in 2007, filed due to statute of limitations, and another also for rape and filed in Spain by the Spanish journalist Ruth Baza.+
“The last sacred monster of cinema”, They described a group of artists, writers and producers who last December published a forum in defense of the actor’s presumption of innocence and his right to continue working. “Loved, loved too much, beyond reason” throughout his career, the protagonist of Cyrano and other blockbuster films and classics of contemporary cinema, “sees how posterity crumbles under his feet, at the moment of leaving the scene amidst opprobrium and ridicule.” This is how journalists Raphaëlle Bacqué and Samuel Blumenfeld summarize it in a book that has just been published in French with an eloquent title: A three-French affair (A very French case).
Because, as Macron expressed with his criticized statement, Depardieu is almost a national monument in his country. He projects abroad the image of a certain type of French, bon vivant, hedonistic and excessive. And for the French it is a mirror that reflects a brilliant and excessive art of living. He is Cyrano de Bergerac and he is Obélix, and he is the tradition not of rationality but of excess: that is why he is sometimes called “Rabelaisian”, after François Rabelais, the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
It was a “very French case,” the authors write, because it embodies “the story of the little provincial scoundrel who goes up to Paris, the genius of cult replicas, the success that goes to his head, the women loved and abused, politics are never far away, obviously the legendary banquets to which we must add wine, a lot of wine.”
But Depardieu’s case is also “a very French case” for other reasons. This is the country, after all, in which historical feminists and veteran feminists like Catherine Deneuve defended in 2018, when Me Too broke out in the United States, the “freedom to bother, essential for sexual freedom.” It is the country in which the Me Too native arrived, before in the cinema, in the literary or intellectual world and with cases of abuse of minors or incest, such as books like The consent either The big family. And the country in which the figure of the writer and the artist, of the genius and the national glory, has enjoyed for centuries a unique status, which allowed the actor to “arrogate to himself all the rights, the right to arrive drunk at filming and play with their hands the buttocks”, according to Bacqué and Blumenfeld. In recent months, and in the wake of Depardieu, cult directors such as Jacques Doillon and Benoît Jacquot have also been accused by actress Juliette Godrèche of having raped her as a teenager.
It was known for a long time how he behaved on film sets or during professional tours. In 1991, when he released Cyrano and Green Card in the United States and aspired to the Oscar, his ambition to conquer America already suffered a severe setback when some of his statements came to light in which he said he had participated in several rapes as a child. He himself wrote a few months ago in an article: “I have often done what no one dares to do: put limits to the test, shake certainties, customs and, on the set between two takes, between two tensions… laugh, it makes you laugh.”
Depardieu cultivated this character, but the world of the 2020s is not that of the 80s or 90s. In April 2023, an investigation by the newspaper Mediapart collected 13 testimonies from women who denounced “inappropriate sexual gestures or statements.” The statue, already damaged by its admiration for Vladimir Putin or its problems with the treasury, cracked with each new accusation.
And, when this fall public television aired a documentary with images of a trip to North Korea, and his voice was heard, although those were only words and will hardly have judicial relevance, the statue ended up breaking. While he was observing some women in an equestrian center, he commented to the camera: “Women love to ride horses, their clitoris rubs on the saddle, these bitches.” At one point, a girl of about ten years old is seen on horseback and is heard saying, “If she gallops, she enjoys it.”
The documentary precipitated the fall. “For years,” Bacqué and Blumenfeld write, “he had been forgiven for his tax exile, for his commitments to a good dozen dictators, and for his statements bordering on conspiracism. “A few months have been enough to annihilate 50 years of career.”
The Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, opened a procedure to evaluate whether Depardieu could maintain the Legion of Honor, the highest recognition of the Republic. Macron corrected her: the accusations and obscenities were not sufficient reason to take away her medal. “There’s one thing you’ll never see me participate in: manhunts,” he said. “I hate them.” The minister, a few weeks later, was replaced. In a press conference, asked about his defense of the actor, he corrected himself: “If I regret anything, it is not having said clearly enough how important the word of the victims is.”
Telephone 016 assists victims of sexist violence in Spain, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not registered on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. You can also contact via email [email protected] and by WhatsApp at the number 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency situation, you can call 112 or the National Police telephone numbers (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you cannot call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
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