Catherine Deneuve joined 99 other prominent French women in a letter last week accusing the Hollywood anti-abuse campaign of censorship and intolerance. Agnès Poirier explains how the debate is viewed in Paris
French women made headlines all over the world last week. And not because they never get fat or their children never throw food, as a series of American bestsellers put it, but because 100 of them signed an open letter published in Le Monde offering an alternative view of the #MeToo campaign and drawing attention to what they regard as rampant censorship in feminist ranks. In signing the letter, the French film star Catherine Deneuve set the feminist world ablaze.
They spoke their mind in a Gallic manner: straightforwardly, to the point of appearing blunt. The letter was also strikingly badly edited, with clumsy chunks unworthy of their authors. But, in short, they think the campaign by the #MeToo movement to tackle sexual harassment represents a “puritanical … wave of purification”; that “rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cackhandedly, is not, nor is being gentlemanly a macho attack”.