Stuart Jeffries

How Foucault was shielded from scandal by French reverence for intellectuals

The French philosopher king continued to write extensively on chastity while allegations about his paedophilia were covered up

Michel Foucault in 1979. [Getty Images]

Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus, was thought to possess both male and female sexes and swapped their roles from year to year. As for the hyena, it was believed to acquire an extra anus annually and ‘to make the worst use of these added orifices’, as Michel Foucault puts it in the newly translated fourth volume of his History of Sexuality.

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