French publisher Gallimard on Tuesday said that it is halting the sale of books by a writer accused of raping children.
France’s most prestigious publishing house said that it was the first time in its 140-year history that it had taken such a radical step.
Award-winning essayist Gabriel Matzneff is under investigation after a leading French editor detailed in print how he abused her when she was 14.
Gallimard said it would recall all the works the 83-year-old had written under its imprint since 1990.
The author dismissed Gallimard’s move, saying it would “calm the excited ones” and denounced a “wave of neo-puritanism.”
“I find it stupid, extravagant that in 2020 I am facing grief for books I wrote more than 40 years ago,” Matzneff said.
French Minister of Culture Franck Riester waded into the debate this week, saying that the writer should lose his special state pension.
Riester told reporters Matzneff could also be stripped of his two major state honors — Officer of Arts and Letters, and Knight of the Order of National Merit.
Weekly magazine Le Point has dropped him as a columnist.
Matzneff has never made any secret of his sexual preference for adolescent girls and boys, and it did not stop him winning the Renaudot prize in 2013.
In Les Moins de Seize Ans, which was published in 1974 and reissued in 2005, he was frank about indulging his obsession for underage partners and sex tourism.
Police opened a formal investigation into Matzneff last week after publisher Vanessa Springora described her tortured relationship with the writer in a book titled Consent.
In it she described how Matzneff, then in his 50s, would wait for her outside school and then take her to his home for sex.
“At 14 you are not supposed to be picked up from school by a man of 50 and find yourself in his bed with his penis in your mouth [instead of a biscuit] at teatime,” Springora wrote.
Matzneff denies any wrongdoing, insisting there was an “exceptional love” between him and Springora.
He claimed she tried to portray him as “a pervert, a manipulator and a predator.”
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