The violence continues, it is not new. It has long been known that children who are victims of physical or sexual violence tend to repeat it as adults. Today, the case of a person infamous throughout the world illustrates this: Abbé Pierre.
The accusations against Abbé Pierre
Died in 2007, Since July 2024, Abbé Pierre has been the target of a series of testimonies from women accusing him of sexual violence committed between the 1950s and the 2000s. Forced kisses, forced blowjobs, comments of a sexual nature… These revelations had the effect of a shock wave during the summer. And yet, as is often the case, we discovered that during all these years, everyone knew. We told you in this article how his own son declared that he was “not shocked” to learn of his father’s actions.
Also read: #MeToo: the Abbé Pierre Foundation will change its name, after the discovery of 17 damning new testimonies
The tortured youth of Abbé Pierre
However, it remained to be discovered how Abbé Pierre had become such a sexual predator. The newspaper Le Monde provided numerous answers in an article published on December 13. In the archives of the Capuchin order, the newspaper had access to the correspondence of Henri Grouès, future Abbot Pierre. Interviewed by Mohamed Bouhafsi for the program C à Vous, Marie-Béatrice Baudet, the journalist who had access to this correspondence, recounts one of the letters that the abbot sent to his master of novices, Louis-Antoine de Clermont -Ferrand.
“The first confidence he made to her concerns this possible mutilation of his penisshe says. He’s going to get this table knife and he’s going to try to get rid of this thing he hates and which he will subsequently hate, as he says later.” A mutilation which would have occurred when the future abbot was only 5 years old. And that’s not all.
“He talks about this sexual assault that he had perhaps at 7 or 9 years old by adultswhen he was a boarder at the Collège des Minimes in Lyon, who made him their prey, continues the journalist from Le Monde. So he makes himself suffer, his body disgusts him and his impulses disgust him.” As Marie-Béatrice Baudet summarizes, Abbé Pierre’s correspondence reveals “a broken, nervous, tortured man.”
Sexual violence, a societal illness
Other letters also reveal the crazy passion he would have had towards a young man named Yveswhen he was 14, after hearing him sing at a midnight mass.
This insight into Abbé Pierre’s youth is not intended to excuse the sexual violence he subsequently perpetrated on other people. However, it gives one more argument in favor of the urgent need to heal our ailing society where patriarchal values largely allow sexist and sexual violence to be perpetrated.
